|
I think could that be a
really good business strategy to prolong the life of the HDD market beyond 2016. |
| by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - June 10, 2010 |
A reader recently asked
me for my views about prospects for the
external hard drive
market - typified by interfaces such as
USB and
FireWire - and more
recently - eSATA.
If
you've read any of my market forecasts you'll know that although I expect HDDs
to virtually disappear from the enterprise data center by
2016 - I expect
alternate uses for hard drives - mostly within the "consumer entertainment"
market to keep the rotating magnetic storage market going (although with
significantly reduced revenue.)
Backup doesn't offer a big
future market for consumer diskmakers - because most consumers don't do proper
backups.
That's now. And it could get worse - because for reasons of
convenience and economy consumers may start to differentiate between backing
up stuff which is unique to them (which they can do
online) and
deliberately
choose not to backup mass produced content (like movies and games)
which they have acquired from external sources.
Here's the good part
for HDD product marketers...
External hard drives could become a
convenient delivery media for libraries of entertainment - such as collections
of movies on selected themes, collections of music etc.
This is something I wrote about as a new market opportunity 8 years ago. It hasn't
happened yet - but is very close (Seagate recently started
preloading movies on its HDDs). The new market depends on the ability of a
new generation of product marketers to clear away obsolete impediments.
In
my 2002 market model - I expected that users would go to a website (like
iTunes) and select a whole library of content to be shipped on their new media
player - to save them the hassle of doing it themselves. But this concept also
works with external drives.
In that situation - if somebody wanted
to order the complete movies of Clint Eastward / or every tv episode of Star
Trek - for example - the delivery medium would be HDD. The HDD would be
bundled virtually free - as it will cost less than the licensed content.
Most consumer households would buy multiple collections (one for Dad, one for
Mum and about 10 for the kids) - which would create be a bigger market for HDD
unit shipments than all the consumer backup in a perfect world - in which
consumers became born-again SysAdmins. Which we know will never happen.
And this is an area in which SSD performance is irrelevant.
By the
close of this decade (2019) the multi terabyte hard drive might be regarded
almost the same way as a 4GB USB flash memory stick is today - a give-away
object whose cost is much less than the value of the data which it contains.
For
those detractors who might say - why wouldn't I just download and watch what I
want from online sources? - I say this.
When you go on vacation - a
great many desirable locations don't have internet access at all - and if they
do - only in inconvenient WiFi hot spots.
And - as many
holiday
makers have found recently in their European travels - even if you do have
an international roaming internet service in your cell phone - the cost of
watching movies using those services can run into hundreds or thousands of
dollars.
People like to collect stuff. - Having your own unique
collection of digital artifacts makes a statement about who you are.
A handful of HDD libraries could replace thousands of
optical drives which are
cluttering up our shelves at home - not to mention the even bigger shelves of 33
RPM vinyl records - which some of us - for sentimental reasons still find it
hard to let go.
The 1st LP I ever bought - was
Led Zeppelin 2.
For
me - the "hard to part with" concept also extends to thousands of
books. My not very ideal storage solution for this expanding inanimate
objects problem has been to live in a succession of increasingly larger
homes.
That's what you might call - a "legacy" storage
problem.
If I was restarting again from scratch now - I'd try to do
everything digitally.
It's
technically possible now - but not yet commercially viable to download
most new books and print magazines - due to more than 10 years of dithering
over content management and business models by the biggest print publishers.
I put my 1st book
online in 1996 - and now I wouldn't dream of going back to that old paper
based way of publishing the outputs from my keyboard and mouse.
Where
does the author's brain fit into this output driven digital scribing process?
On
some days it seems that the keyboard and mouse click away all by themselves
without burdening the higher echelons of the neuro linguistic ladder with
requests for input. |
 |
Aha! - This simply confirms
what you suspected all along. | | |
| . | |
... |
 |
The local gyms and diet clubs
had teamed
up on a new promotion.
Eat as many cakes as you like -
FREE! | |
| . |
|
|
| ... |
 |
| ... |
| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
| SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy and comprehending the
factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating
process... |
 |
...which is not made any
easier when market prices for apparently identical capacity SSDs can vary more
than 100x to 1!
Why is that? ...read the article to
find out | | | |
| . |
|
|
| . |
| the future
of enterprise data storage? |
Editor:-
the
future of data storage is the lofty sounding but aptly chosen title of a
new article published online in Broadcast Engineering
magazine.
It's written by Zsolt
Kerekes editor of StorageSearch.com
(that's me).
It's a completely new article which takes as its starting
point - storage market models and concepts from several futuristic
articles which have already appeared here on the mouse site - advances them
and integrates them into a single cohesive whole. |
|
It will give you a clear
idea of how all the incremental changes you read about in
storage news pages will
add up to a different future - and the business reasons why. Sit back and
...read
the article | | | |
| . |
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