Toshiba has not indicated a great interest in the past to make 3.5-inch HDDs as it has focused on 2.5-inch and smaller HDDs.
FORBES: Western Digital Acquisition of Hitachi GST Closer with EC Approval
Based upon WD and Seagate discussions in their quarterly conference calls last week calendar Q4 2011 will probably see a short fall of 20-40 million HDDs compared to demand of 170-175 million drives total.
FORBES: Capital Equipment Likely Needed for Thailand HDD Factory Repairs
HGST, part of Western Digital, has announced that it will make He-filled HDDs that can support a couple more disks in a 5 disk 3.5-inch HDD package.
Last week Hitachi GST said that it had shipped 25 million 7-mm thick 2.5-inch HDDs.
Seagate Technology announced that they are going to discontinue making 7, 200 RPM 2.5-inch HDDs later in 2013.
FORBES: Seagate Discontinuing 7,200 RPM Drives--A Focus on Capacity?
The HYVE is a 2XOpenU storage server with up to 15 e.5-inch HDDs in a 3X5 array.
Seagate has said that they are discontinuing their 7, 200 RPM 2.5-inch HDDs in favor of lower power 5, 400 and hybrid HDDs.
FORBES: Seagate Discontinuing 7,200 RPM Drives--A Focus on Capacity?
Hard disk drives have shown their own improvements. 4 TB 3.5-inch HDDs are ramping into production by all the remaining HDD companies.
Pricing has been flat to upward-biased in many parts of HDDs, and there have been no indications of over-supply.
On average, SSDs are at least twice as expensive as regular HDDs and this cost differential is still causing price-conscious customers and enterprises to prefer HDDs.
By 2013 this technology could result in about 7 TB HDDs being introduced for near-line storage applications.
Demand has soared for HDDs due to the ever-increasing amounts of digital content such as music, photographs, and videos.
The third generation increases storage capacity to 180 TB using 4 TB HDDs and allows multiple boot-drives, including SSD drives.
Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba are shipping hybrid HDDs targeted for the ultra-thin mobile computer market with up to 8 GB of flash memory and 1 TB hard disk storage.
Control of power utilization in these data centers will drive new tiered storage approaches with solid state storage combined with HDDs and with new non-volatile memory using either flash memory or new approaches such as MRAM.
As a consequence we expect that there will healthy demand for SATA-based enterprise HDDs for storing the vast amount of internet content and also continued demand for traditional high performance HDDs (although this is a market that is somewhat threatened by the growth of enterprise flash memory).
Seagate Technology and Hitachi GST have both announced 3.5-inch form factor HDDs with storage capacities up to 4 terabytes (TB) on five disks.
It is possible that we will see one of these major technology transitions for HDDs start to appear in the 2013-2014 time frame.
Back several months ago we looked at how a company called Backblaze was finding creative ways to get HDDs through retail channels for their on-line storage business during the depths of the Thailand flood HDD shortages.
There will likely be some fall-out for high performance HDDs in these markets and the HDD companies such as Seagate, HGST (part of Western Digital) and Toshiba are introducing their own enterprise SSD products to stay competitive in this high margin business.
Products for consumer electronics include various HDDs designed for digital video recorders, set-top boxes, karaoke machines, printers and gaming consoles.
This year laptop storage capacities will likely be as high as 1.5-2 TB and 4 TB desktop sized HDDs are likely.
FORBES: Is 64 GB Big Enough -- Why Tablet Computers May Need More Storage?
Likewise this technology is also expected to become more common on regular HDDs because of better data security and also rapid crypto-erase of data.
Dane-Elec's new USB 3.0 HDDs offer consumers several storage options ranging from 500 GB all the way up to 2 TB, and are available in 2.5" or 3.5" formats for either laptop or desktop computers.
ENGADGET: Dane-Elec comes clean with external USB 3.0 HDDs / SSDs
From this ad and from looking around a bit, the laptop looks like it will have a 2GHz Core Duo processor, dual 200GB HDDs, a TV tuner, 1920 x 1080 WUXGA 17-inch LCD, NVIDIA's GeForce Go GT 7600 256MB graphics, Bluetooth, WiFi, dual S-Video out, and Windows Media center.
In addition to their outstanding performance and reliability, these drives offer durability over the long haul - as contrasted with the possibility of mechanical failure with HDDs.
ENGADGET: Modbook Pro to launch with SSD storage, up for pre-order October 3rd
Weaker-than-expected off-peak season demand and a global supply crunch of HDDs coupled with low demand for PC DRAM chips and the oversupply of mobile DRAM impacted profit margins, in which the memory portion saw its revenue slip to 4.89 trillion won.
We hope to see HDD and SSD combinations or future hybrid HDDs that would support write caching, particularly for notebook and especially ultra-thin notebook computers.
FORBES: Will A Fusion Drive Approach Become Widespread in Computers?
The company expects that about half of all 2.5-inch storage products shipped into the notebook market to be hybrid HDDs by 2015.
Also, the Modbook Pro's SSDs are fine-tuned to not interfere with its high-resolution pen tablet interface (whereas the electromagnetic field emissions of HDDs are notoriously difficult to control).
ENGADGET: Modbook Pro to launch with SSD storage, up for pre-order October 3rd
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