Hard Drives Look To Land In Consumer Electronics
techweb.com
(07/30/99, 12:31 p.m. ET)
By Junko Yoshida, EE Times
A new class of consumer digital video
recorders that use hard-disk drives rather than
cassette tapes will spin into the market this
Christmas from the likes of consumer giants
such as Matsushita, Philips, and Sony. The
market, already ignited by Silicon Valley
start-ups such as TiVo and Replay Networks,
promises to breathe new life into a hard-disk
business battered by cratering prices for PC
components.
For the consumer electronics titans, the new systems are
not just digitally enhanced VCRs, but represent an
important beachhead in their plans to build a networked
home-entertainment environment independent of the PC.
For the drive makers, the audiovisual hard-disk drive
(AV-HDD) is pushing them toward new command sets
and interfaces, such as 1394, as well as generating
new demand for ultra-high-capacity platters.
Leading U.S. drive vendors, including Quantum, Western
Digital, and Seagate Technology, said consumer products
built around the technology will feature new functions
such as live-broadcast pause. The consumer can hit the
pause button, go to the fridge for a beer, then pick up the
broadcast where it left off, as the system simultaneously
records multiple streams of audio, video, and data.
But many consumer vendors see AV-HDD as more than
just a gimmick for delivering new features. By tucking a
storage device into all manner of digital appliances, from
satellite decoders to TV receivers, they hope to gradually
build a distributed repository for media streams at home,
if not offering a central home server outright, said an
executive at a leading consumer electronics company
who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In building that
infrastructure, vendors said they hope to control and
architect a comprehensive home network system that
doesn't rest on the shoulders of the PC.
Mixed Feelings About Market Success
However, analysts are divided about whether the
disk-driven recorders, which will be delivered in a variety
of set-top designs, will be a market success.
Stuck in no-growth markets such as TVs and VCRs,
consumer OEMs "are so hungry for new products and
desperate to restart the engine," said Jim Porter,
president of Disk/Trend, in Mountain View, Calif. Yet
Porter remained skeptical about AV-HDD's prospects.
"There are so many variables in this market," he said,
including "how couch potatoes might respond to
potentially interactive features."
Kevin Hause, analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based
International Data Corp. (IDC), said he predicted that
300,000 units of the AV-HDDs will ship in the United
States this year -- a drop in the buck next to the 100
million-unit PC market. However, Hause said he expects
the technology to become a mainstream consumer item
within a year, selling 1 million units in 2000 as consumers
catch on and HDD prices drop. IDC said it sees the
market growing to 13 million units in the United States
alone in 2005.
"The consumer market won't start to pick up until HDD
manufacturers begin to produce in volume drives with 10
gigabytes per platter," said Porter.
Hard drives used in desktop PCs today pack 6.8 GB per
platter. Quantum and Fujitsu only announced drives with
a little over 8 GB per platter earlier this month, Porter
said.
Charlie Leeson, vice president of sales and marketing for
AV products at Western Digital, acknowledged that the
emerging AV-HDD demand has "reinvigorated the push
for capacity."
Besides demanding beefy platters at an affordable price,
the AV-HDD thrust puts the onus on drive makers to
deliver the accompanying standards and interfaces to
make these systems perform as advertised. Among
solutions yet to be engineered are standard protocols and
command sets for AV-HDDs featuring the IEEE 1394
interface.
Another challenge lies in handling streaming media.
Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Seagate in August will
propose its solution, called SeaStream, at the upcoming
meeting of the T13 committee in Boulder, Colo. T13 is a
technical committee of the National Committee on
Information Technology Standards, accredited by the
American National Standards Institute.
SeaStream, documented in T13/D99123r0, consists of
new subcommands and modifications to Read and Write
DMA commands for audio and video streaming. Bob
Teal, vice president of consumer solutions at Seagate,
called the scheme "a superset of ATA interfaces" that
makes minimum changes to the existing standards.
"If pioneering work done by companies like Quantum
enabled AV streaming, our proposal has really optimized
it," Teal said.
Among the three leading HDD vendors, Quantum zeroed
in on HDD's role on the consumer front three years ago,
dedicating a small team to explore non-PC hard-drive
applications.
"We are the first to take HDD out of the PC and to turn
it into a recorder," said Bentley Nelson, manager of
strategic and technical marketing at Quantum, in Milpitas,
Calif.
The company's head start clearly helped it land two
major design wins. Quantum is now the sole supplier of
hard-disk drives to both TiVo, in Sunnyvale, Calif., and
Replay Networks, in Palo Alto, Calif., two start-ups
providing unique television services that let viewers
watch what they want, when they want.
Western Digital and Seagate, each armed with its own
set of consumer partners, said in recent interviews that
they have also completed the engineering work to tailor
their disk drives for entertainment applications.
Western Digital, which has forged strategic partnerships
with Sony, has mainly focused on developing mechanical
and electronic components and firmware for the
AV-HDD, leaving the interface, architecture, and
protocols for AV applications to Sony.
Seagate, meanwhile, is the only company so far to
propose a set of audio-video extensions for drives based
on the ATA interface as a shared, open interface spec.
"While most disk-drive vendors don't have a lot of
interest in standards at the moment, the pressure is really
coming from CE [consumer electronics] OEMs looking
for multiple sources," said Seagate's Teal.
There are a number of somewhat trivial differences
between drives designed for computers and those for
consumer products. A primary one is that losing a single
bit is critical for, say, a spreadsheet, but inconsequential
in a large color display. That means some of the error
correction can be scaled back to make certain that a
constant video stream is supplied.
Files are stored sequentially so the heads do not have to
search around as they do in today's PCs, further aiding in
the continuous video stream. Handling two or three data
streams is not a major problem, because a drive's
relatively quick access time makes it possible to retrieve
data in the time available.
Each vendor has taken a slightly different design
approach to outfitting its disk drives to handle multiple
media streams uninterrupted, while also tweaking them
for use in a noise-sensitive living room. Most of the
alterations have focused on software and firmware,
rather than changes in basic hardware architecture.
A common goal was building a hard drive that can
function as an embedded file system without using a host
computer. The AV-HDD needs enough built-in
intelligence to open, share, delete, and attribute files,
while letting consumers play, record, pause, stop, and
rewind both streaming media and Internet-based content.
Although disk-drive manufacturers have gone ahead with
proprietary implementations of protocols and command
sets for ATA interfaces, consumer and drive vendors
alike see IEEE 1394 quickly moving to center stage as
the preferred solution for linking AV-HDDs with other
consumer devices.
Interface Support
A 1394 solution does not make sense just yet, when a
majority of consumer electronics systems on the market
-- be they DVD players, satellite decoders, or TVs -- do
not sport a 1394 link. But the AV-HDD will feature a
1394 interface "by midyear 2000," predicted Russell
Kraph, vice president of the AV products group at
Western Digital.
The final command sets necessary for 1394-based
AV-HDD are being thrashed out within the 1394 Trade
Association's AV Working Group. Among drive vendors,
Quantum is taking the lead as an editor and a contributor
to this standards effort. The work is expected to be
completed by October.
In inventing AV-HDDs, drive vendors agreed on three
major areas where they've focused most of their
engineering efforts: tuning acoustic features; managing
multiple streams simultaneously, uninterrupted; and
developing appropriate error/recovery algorithms for both
isochronous and asynchronous data.
"We've taken a system-level approach to improve the
acoustic performance of the AV-HDD," said Vipul
Mehta, marketing manager of Western Digital's AV
products. "A lot of noise is generated when a motor is
running in its seek mode," he said. "We optimized not
only mechanical design, but also the drive's firmware to
minimize that problem."
Timely Delivery
Managing multiple streams of isochronous and
asynchronous data was also an important design goal.
"How well you do error recovery to maintain the data
integrity is essential for most PC applications, such as
spreadsheets," said Quantum's Nelson, but "timely
delivery of data becomes the number one priority" in
streaming multimedia.
Quantum said it has developed internal algorithms that
separate audiovisual data from text as they come in,
coding them accordingly as they go into the hard drive
and applying different error/recovery methods on the fly.
In mixing streaming media and text data in the storage
device, Seagate's SeaStreams technology has the host
send "start" or "end" subcommands -- or both -- to
control AV partition-set features. (This is defined as a
sequential collection of sectors within a disk drive, for the
purpose of storing AV data.) When the drive is reading
the AV streams, it can quit numerous retries for error
correction, so it can promptly transfer data on time
without dropping frames.
Asked about Seagate's SeaStream proposal, Quantum's
Nelson declined to comment.
Consumer electronics companies said they hold high
hopes for expanding their product lines by exploiting
AV-HDDs.
They could, for example, architect a home networking
system by running a middleware layer such as HAVi on
top of a variety of 1394-based digital consumer
appliances. While the 1394 interface will allow each
device to execute basic command sets such as play,
record, pause, stop, and rewind, the HAVi architecture
could help tie together digital appliances by letting each
one register its presence, discover other devices, and
communicate with them.
A storage device incorporated in consumer appliances
could invoke a dramatic shift in the balance of power
between the service operators and system OEMs. In an
effort to subsidize the HDD cost, "We are beginning to
see some system operators setting aside a portion of the
HDD real estate for revenue-producing applications,"
rather than leaving the entire storage space under the
consumer's control, said Andy Fischer, director of
marketing at MbTV Networks, a division of Metabyte, in
Fremont, Calif., that develops software for interactive
TV products.
A case in point is a recent business arrangement
between TiVo and Philips. Philips is an equity investor in
TiVo and the first consumer OEM signed to license,
manufacture, and deliver video recorders for TiVo
service.
TiVo's filing with the Securities and Exchange
Commission earlier this month disclosed that Philips will
not only receive a manufacturing subsidy from TiVo, but
also a fixed payment per month for each Philips-branded
video recorder owned by an active TiVo service
subscriber.
-- Terry Costlow contributed to this report |
