3.5in drives: we're not interested
At
a press event held in central London last night, Toshiba rolled out
heavyweight executives from its Digital Network Media (DNM) division to
evangelise on the necessity for spindle-based storage for years to come.
Solid-state drives (SSDs), the show ponies of the storage world, get
many of the attention-grabbing headlines but mechanical hard drives
continue to make up the bulk of storage sales, according to Martin
Larsson, vice president of Toshiba's storage divsion for EMEA.
Toshiba increased its storage presence and portfolio by purchasing an
80 per cent stake in Fujitsu earlier this year, with the deal finalised
on October 1. As Fujitsu has been traditionally strong in the
enterprise market and Toshiba omnipotent in the client space, the deal
gives the 'new Toshiba' easy access to the high-margin enterprise
sector.
3.5in
drives are old hat
Think of mechanical storage
and attention usually gravitates to
huge-capacity 3.5in drives. As an example, a 1TB SATA drives costs
around £50. Interestingly, Toshiba sees the form factor as a
dying breed and puts its focus on 2.5in, or smaller, drives. Indeed,
the company has laid out a four-year storage roadmap where 3.5in models
are conspicuous by their absence, and it sees notebook-fuelled growth
as a given for smaller-form-factor models.
Speaking to Martin Larsson and Philip Walsh, sales director for EMEA,
we got the impression that Toshiba's DNM division is really putting all
its eggs in the 2.5in (spindle-based) basket, especially in the
server/workstation environment, where the drives' speed, form factor,
and value proposition - 10K SAS, for example - is now eclipsing
3.5in's, they said.
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