History 2001: 40GB/Disk, Next Frontier Reached?

According to Mark Geenen, president of analyst firm Trendfocus, Inc., at the IDEMA dinner meeting on May 24, Seagate president Bill Watkins publicly stated that Seagate is shipping 40GB/disk desktop drives, well ahead of industry expectations and most competitors.

This could be a disruptive factor in the overall HDD market. The move to 40GB was initially scheduled to happen in 1CQ01, but difficulties in achieving a solid design pushed expectations back to 3CQ01.

This most recent proclamation, as well as the latest feedback from other HDD suppliers, suggests that the move to 40GB/disk will accelerate dramatically in the last month of 2002.

Will there be sufficient supply of heads, disks and chips?
The shift to 30GB/disk was challenging, with head manufacturers lagging behind demand due to low production yields. Even now, things are not smooth relative to the 30GB/disk programs. Seagate originally decided to bypass a 30GB/disk, scheduling 40GB/disk production for March, then it slipped the schedule, starting production in late May.

The company should able to “brute force” the move to 40GB/disk with internal head and media production.

But questions linger: have we solved the servo track writer issues? Do we really have a solid head/disk interface, or a solid product design, for that matter? With questionable supply of key components, how much risk are other HDD companies like Maxtor, Western Digital, Fujitsu, and Samsung willing to take to get 40GB/disk products to market quickly?

Initial shipments likely to go first to distribution channel
Our investigation into the PC OEM base suggests that evaluation of 40GB/drives is in the early stage, thus full volume shipments to the OEM segment should begin in the July/August timeframe.

Since there is little in the way of qualifications needed to ship into the channel, Seagate and others will sell to distributors until OEM qualifications are complete.

Rushing 40GB/disk to market is thus a lower-risk proposition, allowing HDD vendors to work out manufacturing and component issues prior to full-scale OEM sales.

New 3.5-inch enterprise HDDs
Initial shipments likely to be focused on single-disk and single-head versions. Early indications suggest that 20GB (single-surface, single-head) off this platform could be a huge portion of shipments in June and July, with 40GB gaining momentum throughout mid-3CQ. Importantly, PC demand patterns lead us to believe that single-disk versions at 40GB and 20GB will dominate shipments in this class of product for much of the balance of 2001.

30GB/disk products have a mosquito-like lifespan
The various programs in the marketplace fulfilling the 30GB/disk demand will undoubtedly see a directly proportional decline as 40GB/disk solutions come to market. In fact, 2 HDD vendors making 30GB/disk products expect to see volume shipments last less than 2 months. Component vendors BEWARE promises of huge orders for parts used in 30GB/disk HDDs will likely prove empty in June.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 161 on June 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.