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Today’s Storage at a Glance Part II

Seagate - The Year in Storage
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Additionally, having so few players left in the market has narrowed the number of criteria differentiating drives. Vendors can still distinguish products according to interface, spin rates, areal density, power management, and so on, but as similarity across brands increases, there is more downward pressure placed on price as each vendor tries to undercut its competition. Ultimately, this is good for consumers.

This isn’t to say that the storage drive market has become static—far from it. The rise of SSDs has added a whole new layer of options into buyers’ strategies. Echoing the disk drive production cycle mentioned above, there are now over 100 SSD vendors in the market, which is far too many to be sustained at current volumes. On top of volume concerns, vendors face the shifting cost of NAND memory as well as the importance of courting the enterprise storage market. Only about 15 of those 100-some vendors target enterprise needs, in part because of the higher costs associated with enterprise-class components, quality control testing, and validation. The companies that rose to prominence in hard disks were the ones that focused on both enterprise and consumer storage. It seems likely that this pattern will repeat with SSDs.

Will today’s hard drive leaders eventually carry their influence into the SSD world? It seems increasingly likely. Enterprises depend on component integration based on tried and tested code and controllers. Newer SSD vendors don’t have the decades of experience found in working through enterprise storage systems that companies such as Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba can boast. Because the controller code persists and evolves across drive generations, the storage coding now employed in Seagate Pulsar drives has been under constant refinement since the days of Seagate Sabre SCSI drives back in the late 1980s. Many enterprises desire this sort of legacy and fire-tested compatibility into their complex storage solutions.

As we move into 2013, expect to see consolidation and escalating partnerships ramp up in the SSD market. The hard drive field seems to be set. Now the challenge will be for these titans of magnetic media to adapt in a world increasingly split in its adoption of high-capacity hard drives and lightning-fast flash storage.