Mark,
I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the possibility of a single platter drive with one head. The current price of MR heads - about $7.50 each -- represents a significant chunk (~11%) of the bill of materials of a low cost disk drive ($67). The disk drive, in turn, represents about 24% of the typical sub-$500 PC (see data below extracted from EE Times article). I am not familiar with the kind of technical problems that kind of asymmetrical drive design poses, but I think the economics behind removing one head (and associated costs) are quite compelling and actually become critical as the PC mutates into an applicance with sub-$300 and eventually $100 price points.
With numbers like those above, I believe it becomes harder to escape the conclusion that the ability to bring most of the manufacturing profits of HSAs in-house will ultimately determine the players that will survive and thrive after this down cycle.
Media is glutted like hell but the materials science expertise required to be viable in this space means that niche players like Dow Chemicals (10+k rpm platters), Corning (glass platters), and Asahi (glass platters) will always find the technology headroom to operate. The way I look at it, media is a bunt and singles game.
There is even a worse glut in semiconductors. As you know, semiconductor capacity is the most difficult to eliminate from the pipeline because a DRAM fab can easily be converted to make other kinds of chips, including the kind of mixed-signal chipsets required for disk drives. There is no shortage of players in this space.
The advantages that SEG sees in moving to fluid-bearing motors across the board may yield some short-term advantages, but scale economics dictate that that kind of technology be made available to more players so that is bound not to last.
IBM and SEG are the two largest manufacturers of heads in that order, but Fujitsu is coming on strong relative to its share of the market. I also believe that it is prudent to assume that all the head supply coming out of Japan will have a practical caste system whereby all the cutting edge heads from the Japan indie supply line will go to support the laptop and server drive businesses of the other Japanese players before those are made available to all comers.
As for the others -- WDC, QNTM, Maxtor, Samsung, Conner -- a decline even more rapid than WDC's fall is the fate that awaits the virtuals who fall behind or who get squeezed by any untimely bottleneck in the supply of heads. Unlike the verticals, they do not have the luxury of an additional-head-and-platter strategy.
Regards,
Gus
Elements Of A Low-Cost Disk Drive
Manufacturing costs for a 2- to 4-Gbyte 3.5-in. drive
Message 6526479
Head-stack assembly: $25.00 (~37%)
Disk-spindle assembly: $20.00 (~30%)
Electronics: $9.00 (~13%)
Mechanics/castings: $4.50 (~7%)
Positioning system: $5.50 (~8%)
Testing: $3.00 (~4%)
Total Cost of Materials: $67.00 (100%)
Typical Bill of Materials of the sub-$500 PC
(Bill of Materials includes a 5.7% profit)
eetimes.com
Montior 15-inch: $130.00 (~26%)
Hard disk drive Seagate 3.2 GB: $120.00 (~24%)
Cyrix CPU 233 Mhz: $52.00 (~10%)
DRAM 32 MB SDRAM: $37.00 (~7%)
Case with power supply 250W: $37.00 (~7%)
CDROM 32X: $34.00 (~7%)
Socket 7 Intel 430TX Motherboard: $28.00 (~6%)
VGA Card S3 Virge: $22.00 (~4%)
Floppy disk drive 1.44 MB: $14.00 (~3%)
Sound Card ESS: $11.00 (~2%)
Keyboard: $5.00 (~1%)
Speakers: $5.00 (~1%)
Mouse: $4.00 (~1%)
Total Bill of Materials: $499.00 (100%) |
