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Articles: Editorial

X-bit labs CeBIT 2005 Coverage: Day 7 (page 5)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/24/2005 | 04:56 PM ]

WD: Serial ATA Will Take Over Serial Attached SCSI

Western Digital, who is currently the world’s No. 2 maker of consumer hard disk drives did not make any serious announcements during CeBIT 2005, but still revealed some details about the market of data storage components in an interview with X-bit labs.

WD Caviar SE: what’s inside?

Currently the bulk of the company’s business is represented by desktop components. It is interesting to note that only 20% - 25% of WD’s HDDs are Serial ATA, whereas the majority of hard disk drives are still intended for Parallel ATA applications. Quite naturally, but the most popular HDDs among the company’s shipments are currently 80GB products, whereas customers seeking for larger size buy 160GB hard drives (HDs).

Consumer electronics with WD inside

The company said that fastest growing hard disk drives markets are consumer electronics and handheld applications. Citing estimations from Gartner, WD said year-over-year market growth rate for CE is 30%, whereas the growth in supplies of HDs for mobile apps is 94%.

Tiny HDDs from WD

Commenting on the performance of its workstation business and Raptor HDD acceptance Western Digital says that Raptors are very successful products at the moment. Still, despite of their triumph WD does not have plans to introduce either 15 000 rpm Raptor models as well as Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or SCSI products.

Alienware’s Aurora 7500 SLI – WD Raptor serves gamers

The firm claims SCSI market is declining, while SAS products have not yet come to the market. As times goes, and Serial ATA II evolves, SAS will be less and less attractive to potential customers and Serial ATA II will not only be widely adopted in servers and workstations, but also in storage systems. While the high-end of the external data storage market is expected to be occupied by Fiber Channel solutions, Serial ATA II will have enough maturity, cost-efficiency and support to compete for entry-level and mid-range enterprise data storage, unlike SAS, which will have to build up infrastructure and reassure clients in its reliability, WD believes.

WD Caviar family uncovered