By the end of 2011 is it likely that there will only be three HDD companies (Seagate Technology, Western Digital and Toshiba) and a handful of independent companies making major HDD components (such as TDK, SDK and Fuji Electric).
The Thai floods that have cut the production of HDD makers like Seagate could cause fewer PCs to be manufactured, and that would create an oversupply for all the devices in the PC that are not manufactured in Thailand.
The HDD companies, Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba are participating in better management of storage device energy use, as are flash manufacturers such as SanDisk, Samsung and Toshiba and many flash based storage equipment suppliers such as Skyera, Smart Storage Systems and Virident.
Seagate Technology is a leader in HDD enterprise storage solutions and it makes a lot of sense for them to leverage their HDD and SAS SSD storage offerings with developing PCIe products.
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.
On the face of this evidence it could be argued that after the merger WD and Seagate could control about 89% of the HDD unit shipments.
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Component shortages caused by the 2011 Thailand floods kept shipments of HDDs to be less than the market wanted through the first half of 2012, leading to higher HDD prices and also much greater gross margins to the HDD companies (Western Digital, Seagate Technology and Toshiba).
Thus flash memory in ultra thin notebook computers will be most popular ether incorporated into a hybrid HDD (such as those offered by Seagate Technology, Western Digital and Toshiba) or as a dual storage device configuration where the OS and applications are stored on a small SSD and user data is stored on a HDD.
Seagate also says that the new drive supports 4k sector sizes (Advanced Format HDD).
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These numbers are composite numbers from Seagate and Western Digital and include Hitachi GST (and IBM before that companies HDD business became part of Hitachi GST) until 2009 when HGST quit publically reporting their ASPs.
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So far Seagate is the only company making hybrid HDDs today that combine flash memory and a HDD.
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Seagate Technology recently announced a higher flash capacity hybrid drive with twice the flash storage capacity inside the HDD compared to their prior generation product.
Considering that Toshiba, Seagate and Western Digital are all in the SSD business I expect to see more interaction and joint development of HDD and flash products in future industry offerings.
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