Hitachi steers new drives toward corporate market
Published: 25 Feb 2004 09:45 GMT
Hitachi says things have gone smoothly since it took over IBM's disk-drive business about a year ago, and the company is hoping to continue its momentum with two new drive products for the corporate market.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the unit founded last January through the combination of Hitachi's and IBM's hard-drive businesses, plans on Wednesday to announce a roomy, 300GB drive designed to handle tasks such as online transaction processing. Hitachi also is expected to reveal a plan to demonstrate small drives similar to products unveiled by rivals Seagate Technology and Fujitsu.
John Monroe, analyst at market research firm Gartner, gave Hitachi high marks for the way it has handled the IBM takeover. "They've managed the merger in impressive ways during their first year," Monroe said. "They've done much better with the enterprise group than I expected them to."
Monroe said IBM's enterprise hard-drive division consistently lost market share for two years.
Hitachi GST said that in the fourth quarter of 2003, it earned $105m (£56m) in operating profit, and that it ended 2003 with $4.2bn in revenue.
Despite Hitachi's focus on Wednesday on the enterprise market, the company is making a strong push into the consumer-electronics realm. Hard drives are becoming a popular choice for data storage in a new generation of consumer devices such as digital video recorders and digital music players. Worldwide shipments of hard drives in emerging consumer applications should grow from about 20 million last year to somewhere in the range of 88 million to 100 million in 2007, Monroe said. Monroe expects total shipments of hard drives to be roughly 380 million in 2007.
Hitachi's small drives are appearing in consumer electronics products such as Apple Computer's new iPod mini. Hitachi also is working on a version of its 1-inch "Microdrive" that is not removable but could lead to consumer electronics devices that are smaller and cheaper. The hard-drive maker is currently selling a Microdrive that can be removed from devices similar to the way flash memory cards can slip into and out of digital cameras.
Hitachi's new 300GB enterprise drive is intended to go beyond the high-capacity enterprise drives of today, which hold 146GB. In building the new product, Hitachi also said it used upgraded manufacturing processes designed to improve reliability and performance. The drives have begun shipping and are in the process of being tested by major manufacturers worldwide, according to the company. Hitachi expects volume shipments of the drive, dubbed the Ultrastar 10K300, to begin in the second quarter of this year.
Hitachi said it will demonstrate its small enterprise drives at an industry event in early March. The 2.5-inch drives are designed to use an emerging interface known as Serial Attached SCSI (small computer system interface).
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