Disk Drives move beyond PCs, Servers

Duncan Martell

SAN FRANCISCO: Hard disk drives, best-known as the collection of whirring, spinning platters that store data in personal computers, are smaller and store more data than ever. And it's a business that's becoming bigger than ever.

Innovation by disk drive makers -- such as Toshiba Corp., Hitachi Ltd., Seagate Technology others -- has pushed technology advances roughly twice as fast as the pace set by the chip industry. According to Moore's Law, the semiconductor industry is able to put twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit every 18 months to two years.

Hard drives have ventured far beyond their original use in server computers, PCs and notebook computers. New hard drives are finding their way into everything from MP3 players, such as Apple Computer Inc.'s No 1 digital music player the iPod, to personal video recorders, such as TiVo, that store television programming, and more.

"Not that the PC is a boring thing, but we're now getting to the point where some of these fun, consumer electronics devices are using these hard drives," said Dave Reinsel, worldwide research manager for market research firm IDC.

Market research firm Trend Focus expects hard drive shipments to consumer electronics makers such as Sony Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and others to more than triple to 55 million units in 2006 from an estimated 17 million last year.

Drives have come a long way since International Business Machines Corp. introduced the first one, the IBM 305 RAMAC in 1956, which used 50 24-inch disks to store five megabytes of data -- the equivalent of about 2,500 pages of double-spaced typed information. It cost about $35,000 a year to lease at the time.

The biggest-capacity hard drive now available is one that packs a whopping 320 gigabytes, or about 320 billion bytes, onto four 3.50-inch platters.

The success, for example, of the iPod, which has sold more than 2 million units since its introduction, owes much to Toshiba's tiny drives, which is the major component of the player besides the battery, industry sources said.

OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO!

As more and more media becomes digitized, translated into the computer language of ones and zeros from their analog counterparts, hard drives can go almost anywhere.

There is, of course, a potential rivalry with solid-state flash memory chips, which don't have moving parts, at the low end. But flash memory can't store as much data as hard drives and is costlier to produce, analysts said.

Once you put a hard drive in something, it completely changes what a device can do and how easy it is to use," said Amy Dalphy, marketing manager for hard disk drives for Toshiba America.

"Cars, televisions, those are great places for hard drives to be," Reinsel said, noting that more work needs to be done to develop drives that can stand up to temperature variations. "I live in Minnesota -- you're talking 20 below zero -- is that hard drive going to function?"

Another application that has drive makers salivating is putting so-called microdrives, which store four gigabytes or less, into cellular telephones.

"Absolutely," Scott Maccabe, general manager of the storage device unit of Toshiba America said, raising his eyes to the sky and clasping his hands in prayer.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, Toshiba rolled out the smallest hard drive so far, with the platter measuring 0.85-inches across, ideal for phones.

And if a camera cell phone can play MP3 songs off a disk drive, there's also no need then to upload photos to a Web site for storage, and large music collections can be stored on it. Moreover, if it also works as a personal digital assistant, then even more addresses and PowerPoint presentations can be toted around in a consumer's pocket.

But there is a downside with a super-smart cellphone-camera-MP3 player-PDA-type device.

"There comes a pressure point where the customer says this is just too confusing," Reinsel said

 © Reuters