Storage: getting personal

Falling prices coupled with increased capacity have supercharged the market for personal storage products, says Venkatesh Ganesh

Personal storage for the enterprise desktop or notebook user largely means the hard disk drive. These drives are not only used in PCs and notebooks, but are also used in servers and consumer electronic equipment such as MP3 players and digital video recorders.

Hard drive capacities continue to go up. In 2001, 10 GB drives made the entry for PCs, which jumped to 40 GB by 2003 end. Today, 80 GB hard drives are commonplace. IDC India states that the hard drive market grew by 22.1 percent in 2004 as compared to 16.8 percent in 2003. In addition, IDC estimates that the market for hard disk drives will grow at a CAGR of 16.6 percent until 2007. The reason isn't hard to find, PC sales are exploding, making India one of the fastest growing storage markets in the world.

Comments Hari Krishna Pandey, Country Product Manager, Optical Media Solutions, Samsung India, "With the increased usage of the PC in daily life, there has been a marked change in personal storage requirements of the consumer. People are running data-intensive applications pushing up storage requirements and, in turn, capacities."

Maxtor announced a range of hard disk drives for the Indian market in early 2004. Says Yogesh Kamat, Country Manager, Indian subcontinent, "We launched Maxtor OneTouch in capacities ranging from 80 to 300 GB." Maxtor even added security features that let users protect their data from prying eyes.

Vendors are also looking at applications beyond the desktop PC by launching micro hard drives that go into devices such as digital video players. Explains Sharad Shrivastava, country manager, Seagate, "The adoption of storage in non-PC applications such as game-consoles, personal video recorders, set-top boxes and handheld devices is increasing. We continue to see hard disk drives (HDDs) being integrated with non-PC applications such as MP3 players." Seagate launched what it claims to be the world's first 5 GB 1-inch hard drive for handheld devices and a new 400 GB hard disk drive for DVR and home entertainment systems. The company also offers the latter as a customisable external DVR storage option. According to Rawcliffe of Western Digital, "We foresee non-PC applications as a big growth area."

Warranties to boost consumer confidence

In a move to boost consumer confidence, most disk vendors are offering extensive warranties. Last year, Seagate announced a five-year warranty on every internal PC, notebook and enterprise hard disk drive shipped through its distribution and retail channels. Maxtor Corporation and Western Digital soon followed by announcing a five-year warranty for their hard drives as well.

It's the technology

Technologies that were offered only in high-end hard drives are now available on the desktop front. Western Digital plans to offer drives that sport enterprise-class reliability for desktops through its Caviar RE (RAID Edition) Serial ATA drives. Explains David Rawcliffe, MD, Asia Pacific, Western Digital, "With the Caviar RE, we decided to put enterprise reliability on desktops for RAID systems. It is a drive engineered to be used in a RAID system, while still offering traditional low cost-per-capacity desktop value." These drives are available in 120, 160 and 250 GB capacities. Similarly, Seagate's Serial ATA interface technology with NCO (Native Command Queuing) enables the Barracuda 7200.8 to match the performance of 10,000-rpm SATA drives without sacrificing the capacity. It is available in 200, 250, 300 and 400 GB (for digital video recorders), along with the option of choosing a native SATA or Ultra ATA interface.

SATA writes a fresh chapter

Until 2003, parallel ATA was predominant. However, this is now changing as SATA makes inroads largely on account of its data transfer rates that begin at 150 Mbps. In the next couple of years, vendors say that it could hit the 600 Mbps mark. Compared to this, PATA has a transfer rate of 133 Mbps. Confirms Srivastava, "SATA is compatible with the current software and runs on any new architecture without modifications."

Comments Jim Simon, Director, Marketing, Asia-Pacific, Quantum Corporation, "It's simpler to configure SATA devices."

SATA seems to be the flavour of 2005. Says Rawcliffe, "We see SATA taking off in a big way in 2005. Its present 15 percent penetration in desktops is bound to increase."

SATA will help make disk-to-disk backup popular and is set to give tapes tough competition as far as data backup is concerned. SATA is a popular interface used on drives for disk backups. Explains Kamat of Maxtor, "SATA drives are designed to offer higher data transfer rates, simpler RAID integration and faster HDD installation than their parallel ATA predecessors. Some SATA drives are also hot-plug compatible and allow for smaller system designs."

When compared with SCSI (Small Computer System Interface), SATA comes at a lower price tag. SATA drives work well with single drive applications, while SCSI drives can work in a multi-drive or in a multi-user application environment.

For applications where SCSI-level performance is required, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) steps into the breach. SAS delivers better performance than SCSI. SCSI tops out at 320 Mbps, while SAS starts at 300 Mbps. The future generations will have transfer rates of 600 Mbps.

Hard disk vendors are not looking solely at consumer electronics. With specialised sectors such as the animation industry needing high speed drives, vendors such as Seagate are actively looking to tap this segment.

Explains Sharad Shrivastava, country manager, Seagate, "We were one of the first vendors to focus on educating the animation segment." The company is pitching its Cheetah and Barracuda drives to this segment as an alternative to the traditional tape-based systems. With the 7200.8, Seagate has managed to raise the data density of a single disc to 133 GB.

Apart from providing high-performance data throughput and the huge storage capacity needed for complex image processing, it also helps organisations to maintain a low cost of ownership. Seagate is also pushing its 2.5-inch SCSI drive, Savvio, at enterprise users.

Explains Srivastava, "The Savvio drive can be plugged into blade and 1U servers." The Seagate Savvio hard disk drives are currently incorporated in IBM eServer xSeries 1U servers. Seagate also claims that the Savvio family consumes less power and is less noisy than other SCSI drives. Similarly, Maxtor is aiming its Maxtor Atlas SCSI drive at enterprises. Seagate's storage application model (SAM) is an interactive tool that helps users to choose a hard disk drive as per their requirements.

Thumb drives

USB drives are popular with SMBs. Says Dushyant Mehta, CEO, Mediaman Infotech, "You can carry up to 8 GB of data on a USB drive." The popularity of USB drives can be attributed to their ease of use and affordability. These devices do not require battery, software or cables. Says Jyotin Shah, CEO, J S Equipments, "We see a major market coming up for portable hard disk drives and pen drives." Pocket hard disk drives are hot. Seagate has announced a 5-GB USB 2.0 pocket hard drive. The two-inch hard disk drive is aimed at folks who want to carry music, photos, video or business files in their pocket. It includes software for data security and is priced at Rs 10,000. For those with modest portable storage requirement, flash-based USB drives offer 128 MB to 1 GB of storage for as little as Rs 1,000.

venkatesh@expresscomputeronline.com