IBM Bails Out of the Hard Drive Market 351
DJ STORM writes: "IBM has decided to exit the hard drive market citing the market has become too competitive.They plan to sell 70% of the their HD business to Hitachi. The new company name is unknown.
One has to wonder if this has anything to do with IBM's troubled Deskstar GXP series." IBM will still have part ownership of the resulting venture, but it sounds like no more Deskstars. Update: 04/17 16:33 GMT by T : You may also find interesting some older posts about IBM's work on increasing hard drive storage (1, 2, 3); hopefully, the new company will continue that R&D effort.
Notebood Hard drives (Score:3, Interesting)
Price reduction? (Score:2, Interesting)
Price reduction? This guy must be crazy... memory, for example, is costing many times more they were costing last december. Same goes for LCD monitors and HD...
manufacture vs. research (Score:5, Interesting)
personally, i hope they keep their labs working on the research end of data storage, because i'm not sure that there's anyone else to pick up the slack. if there isn't, the pace of "bigger capacity, faster, smaller footprint, more, more, more ..." just might slow down a little.
Re:They were the real competitors (Score:4, Interesting)
It was like their PC lines. They were always $500 - $1000 more than anyone else. Who the hell would want to pay that?
I have an IBM Microdrive and I love it. But I wouldn't want to pay extra money for a regular HD when I could get something comparable for a shitload less.
Holographic drives (Score:5, Interesting)
A possible cause... (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, maybe that has something to do with the 'competetive' market.
Too competitive? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think what IBM meant to say is that they are less able or willing to compete.
Smart move (Score:2, Interesting)
I think IBM has seen the industry getting undercut by small co's who are focusing away from the desktop/server market and onto other devices for their storage needs. Given these are still small (but emerging) markets, it's really tough for a company to wait & see what happens and THEN innovate on top.
I think IBM learned their lesson in this scenario from the disk drive wars circa 20 years ago, and they don't want to waste more investments of time and money into an ever-decreasing-margin business.
Too competitive once your premium rep is gone (Score:3, Interesting)
Then, IBM's reputation got hurt; you all know that story by now. Of course, this happened after most of the IDE machines I run ended up with IBM drives in them. :-( I'm no longer willing to pay $50-100 extra for that IBM brand name. In fact, I don't know if discounting the IBM drives would convince me to buy them at this point.
I just wish IBM had fixed their quality problems, and without looking like they were covering something up. The "you are only allowed 333 hours of uptime per month" hack didn't help them at all.
I'd like to go back to the days when I could say "buy IBM brand drives or lose". Now I don't know what to buy or recommend. This sucks.
Re:manufacture vs. research (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They were the real competitors (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:manufacture vs. research (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM has done some wonderful research- they were the first to demostrate 10Gb/in^2 (yeah, dumb units) a few years back w/ a new Read Head. at the time it widely accepted that such densities couldn't be realized. today's products are shipping at these densities.
personally, i think IBM made the right choice. historically, areal densities have been increasing by over 100% each year. the past year, it's been reduced to 60% and i would expect it won't get better. we're running into hard limits in convential recording.
i just hope the people at IBM (some of the best in the field) either stay w/ the new venture or at least stay in the field (w/ Maxtor or Seagate).
oh, please, avoid Western Digital. the horror stories those drives made me go through...
Re:Notebood Hard drives (Score:3, Interesting)
At first, there may be spike in the prices, but market forces will adjust that. The hard drive market, as the story said, is very competitive. And where there is competition (unlike the desktop OS market), market forces generally work well.
Remember Micropolis? (Score:2, Interesting)
microdrive? (Score:2, Interesting)
so is IBM or hitachi going to keep good on their warranties for the umpteen billion deskstar drives on the market still under warranty?
why didn't WD or Maxtor buy this HD company spinoff? i'm sure IBM's hard drive tech research division is more than worth the money...
Response to the CBDTPA? (Score:4, Interesting)
Could this also be a preemptive response to the CBDTPA [eff.org]? IBM has indeed driven much of the innovation in hard drive technology, so maybe they figure they should get out now while the gettin' is good.
Re:Good! (Score:2, Interesting)
A: that I lost data
or
B: that after a mere six months IBM didn't offer to send a replacement, but told me to go to a seek out a recovery solution for several grand?
The answer is B.
And, they actually told me that if I opened the case all my data would be instantly lost and this was why I should never attempt to recover my own date. In fact, I did!
If you read my post, it said I couldn't back it up, not that I never recovered it. I did! I popped the fucker open and loosened the screws and it started turning again and I got my data out although the drive arms flipped out the fourth time I powered it up and that was the end of the story. And the moral of the story is, those drives sucked.
Flamebait --whatever. IBM support sucked in this case.
Molecular Storage Size = Obsolete Technology? (Score:2, Interesting)
In 1997 when I visited and spoke with a number of their people, we discussed how as a storage medium, disk drives use a relativly unprepared surface with a sophisticated head, unlike memory which uses a sophisticated surface preparation to store data. In drives the money is spent on the head.
As I recall it, the trend was then toward preparing the disk surface more and more in order to give the head a fighting chance to distinguish between bits.
The limit of size was near (at the time they were finilising their coin sized drive) to the point where information was being stored close to molecular size.
Perhaps they have now reached that limit and have decided that funds are better spent on other storage research.