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Hitachi's 2007 HDD Outlook Includes 250GB |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Monday, 06 November 2006 |
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi) claims to have shipped a million
perpendicular hard disk drives, but next years plans should see that ramp significantly
with 4 million the target number for 2006. Next year the company plans to start
really increasing the capacity of its drives introducing a 250GB 2.5-inch disk drive in the second half of 2007.
Since the company ramped production of its perpendicular
magnetic recording (PMR) hard disk drives to high volume six months ago, the
company says it has now delivered its one
millionth PMR.
Although PMR production will represent roughly 35 percent of
Hitachi's
fourth quarter 2.5-inch hard drive output it still expects to manufcature
another 3 million drives by the end of the year. That's a drop in the ocean
really when you consider HGST plans to fully transition its 2.5-inch laptop
hard drive product line to PMR by the end of 2007.
Already the drive capacities are over 200GB on demonstration
models with this sort of capacity expected to become the norm in the New Year.
Its 2007
product strategy will see two new products in the plus 200GB range, but
looking further out it believes it can produce 750GB perpendicular drives by
2010.
The first half of 2007 will see 200GB+ drive operating at 7200
RPM, with a slower (but larger) 2.5 unit likely to reach around 250GB in the
second half of next year.
Other than the high density storage, Hitachi says these new drives will also
feature data encryption inside the unit similar to that recently announced by
Seagate. A dual flash memory/hard drive hybrid option for enhanced battery life
is also on the drawing board.
"The Travelstar products we have planned for 2007 give
insight to what Hitachi believes are important to end-users in a mobile storage
product: ample capacity for video and other rich content, superior performance
and reliability, and greater confidence in the safety of their data as users
are increasingly on the move," said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing
officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
"The 2.5-inch hard drive segment represents Hitachi's flagship product line, and we're working to
ensure that Hitachi
continues to set the pace of technology advancement for this category."
www.hitachigst.com.
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