Storage Effect

The world’s biggest drives just got 50% bigger

Though not near as sound-bytable as 1 TB, Seagate’s announcement of the world’s first 1.5 TB drive is big news.  The newest Barracuda  7200.11 adds 500 gigabytes to each drive in one fell swoop. It’s the biggest capacity jump in the history of disk drives. 

Expect to see 1.5 TB and 3 TB solutions start popping up in all those high-capacity hot spots: high end destop PCs, backup drives and home entertainment systems. 

UPDATE: What others are saying:Engadget, ZD Net, Daily Tech, Blocks and Files and PC World.

Next: the exabyte drive

(more…)

Vista needs your help to make it truly valuable to your customers 

Bill Gates made a case last month in Tokyo that Vista is “selling rapidly”, 140 million units and counting.  He compared Vista adoption favorably with XP at this point in its launch in 2003. 

Is Vista a success?

Kevin McLaughlin at ChannelWeb says the truth for solution providers is “somewhere between the hope and hysteria.” 

A friend of mine who is head of marketing for a national solution provider told me that he’s still waiting for Microsoft to spell out for his customers good reasons to switch from XP.  Vista’s a fine product, but his customers aren’t taking the time and risk to change over.

Security’s not it, because they’ve built security around their XP solutions that work just fine. 

Maybe storage can help my friend and others.  Vista with the right storage can do things XP can’t.  Automated backup, entertainment ‘command central’, etc.  With today big and cheap drives, solution providers can throw a terabyte into their desktops.  Even notebooks can be high capacity now.

It’s in your hands.  Translate Vista into new value for your customers, and it will deliver value for you.

Server SATA drives spice up desktop PCs without adding much cost 

Want your desktop PC to stand out in a crowd?  You probably wouldn’t think of using storage - at least not without adding a lot of cost.  

Think again. 

Good Gear Guide reviews the Seagate Barracuda ES, a 7200 RPM SATA drive with a difference.  It’s a server drive, but unlike 15K RPM and 10K RPM drives, it’s priced at a small premium to mainstream desktop drives.  Plus, it has the high capacity (up to a terabyte) desktops demand these days.

Seagate’s details on the Barracuda ES can be found here.

Seagate designed this drive for high capacity business applications, but as this review shows, it creates an opportunity for system builders and consumers to build a better desktop. 

Custom-built PCs are big in China

In China there are over 200 million internet users and the number is growing fast.  Those that can afford their own PC usually go to a PC mall to get it, or to build their own. 

There are 15 PC malls in Shanghai. I visited 2 sprawling malls last week and talked to Cheng Yue Fang, owner of seven “DIY” (Do It Yourself) PC shops in the Shanghai area.  Her customers usually take 10-20 minutes to select component options from a printed “menu” for their build-while-you-wait computers.  It takes about 30 minutes to build the PC. 

She says two thirds of customers pretty much know what they want.  They often come in requesting the lowest price disk drive.  She recommends Seagate drives for their 5-year warranty. About half choose price, half choose the warranty. 

Even in this price-sensitive market, reliability matters when it comes where people keep their content!

If you’re up to literally doing it yourself, there are scores of component shops shoulder to shoulder in these malls, ready to give you a deal.  As you can imagine, the competition is fierce!

Businesses still on XP, but consmers are overwhelmingly choosing Vista

Ed Bott at ZDNet dug deep into a Dell database to come up with surprising insight on Vista adoption.  While business are installing XP twice as often as Vista, consumers are adopting Vista at a 93% rate.

As I’ve posted before, I believe Vista is well on its way to widespread adoption.  And Vista is the poster child for storage consumption, leading to larger, more profitable disk drives for desktop and notebook.

Consider Barracuda 7200.11 for gaming - performance AND capacity.

I’m proud of our new monster drive!  Tom’s hardware rates Barracuda 11 as the fastest 1 TB drive on the market. More interesting to gamer system builders:

“With the exception of access time and I/O benchmarks, it also clearly beats Western Digital’s 10,000 RPM Raptor, and sets the new standard for desktop hard drives.”

Raptor has been the defacto gamer drive for a long time.  Consider offering your customers a new twist: performance with capacity for their data-heavy gaming systems.

Here’s a comparison of the new 1 TB drives for the Mac world from Barefeats.  Over 100MB/sec for sequential reads and writes!  I’m happy to see such strong performance from a Seagate drive.  It hasn’t always been our strength. 

Take a close look at the Barracuda 11 at any capacity vs. a WD Raptor.  The Raptor spins at 10K, but net system performance differences to the newest 7200 rpm drives may be in the noise at a system level, especially given the price difference.

Managed services, thin clients, and enterprise SATA as a PC differentiator

There’s a colorful group of small to medium-sized system builders here in Baltimore for the North American System Builder (NASBA) conference.  I love attending these events because they are informal and intimate - a chance to interact one-on-one and in a group setting with about 50 system builders. 

Tonight’s takeaways:

• Managed services is taking off, with about half of the attendees at least playing with it. 
• A minority of the ’system builders’ here build systems.  They are leading with support or service, then following up with hardware from wherever to fulfill. 
• Stan Williamson from The Blencoe Group says they are succeeding tremendously with thin client solutions in business accounts with 25 seats or less.
• Gordon Schroyer of MTPC in Laramie, Wyoming is using Barracuda ES drives in all of his custom PCs for $10 extra, and marketing his PCs as using “100% server-quality drives”, as one way to get to his profitable margin threshold.  Below that hurdle, he resells HP systems. 
• Lots of pain from the drive shortage in the market. Our customers are frustrated - so am I!  Hard to see loyal customers have to turn to other sources.  No sign of supply catching up with demand any time soon.