X-bit labs

May 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 9)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 05/11/2004 | 11:21 AM ]

Optical and Hard Disk Drives

Although the market of classical drives has been a place of stagnation, there’s unusually much news here. Maxtor revealed external QuickView HDDs, claimed to be optimized for household electronic appliances. This was the only announcement in April, while two previously-announced drives made it into the market: the 400GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 ($480) and the 200GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA ($170, with Native Command Queuing, which makes this model much more interesting than the leviathan from Hitachi).

Other, full-size news articles don’t have anything to do with real products: the ratification of the 3Gb/s SerialATA II standard and Seagate’s promises to introduce hard disk drives with a kind of hybrid interface called FATA (SerialATA II + Fibre Channel adapter).

It has now become a tradition that there’s more activity going on in the sector of miniature devices. There are end-products like external 1.8” 40GB drives from Transcend with the USB 2.0 interface or 2.5” internal 100GB devices from Toshiba. There are perspectives for a high competition here: Seagate and Maxtor are preparing to enter the market of small (like 1” or thereabouts) HDDs to join Toshiba, Cornice and Hitachi.

  

Theoretically, they may meet competition from an unexpected direction: miniature optical discs. Yes, DataPlay didn’t justify our hopes, never really taking off in the market in spite of its obvious advantages (including modest pricing), but LG announced its intention to offer a similar miniature integrated drive for optical discs.

The same LG launched a more ordinary product in April, although it still belongs to novelties – a 12x DVD-burner with support of dual-layer DVD+R discs. If it had a SerialATA interface, like the announced Plextor PX-712SA, and it would be an ideal representative of the last generation of DVD drives. Well, there were no ideal devices among those we saw announced in April. Something was always missing: either 12x burn speed or support of dual-layer discs, or of SerialATA, or both. But if you are no perfectionist, you may get along with a Lite-On SOHW-832S, which understands dual-layer media and costs €160.

Regrettably, Lite-On was only getting ready for the launch of 12x burners in April and only for single-layer discs. After that, after a short pause, 16x burners will come out. From Lite-On, as well as from its main competitor, BenQ, whose DW1600 with support of dual-layer discs is promised for the beginning of June! The manufactures of media are going to speed up production of the discs, too.

As for corporative news, Samsung said it would take to the market of DVD-burners, which the company had neglected somehow. Their joint venture with Toshiba, Suwon, for making optical drives will help the Koreans to start up.

Once in the market, Samsung will have to decide in favor of one of the next-generation standards for optical drives and media. Like a majority of other companies, the Koreans will probably put their stake on Blu-Ray: HD-DVD keeps low, while Blu-Ray is developing actively.

For example, Sony announced a technology of making Blu-ray discs on a paper platter, thus solving the problem of recycling. Pioneer started shipping systems for industrial printing of read-only Blu-ray discs. The apathetic DVD-Forum will surely give this field to the pushing manufacturers, too.

I would usually wind up the review at that, but there was a cause for a P.S. in April. It seemed like the times of drives with removable magnetic media were long gone, but there appeared two such models in April, although based around new technologies! The IO-Data iVDR-20 and Iomega REV 35GB/90GB are in fact twin products, realizing the same idea: take a hard disk drive of one platter, put it into a special case and equip it with a contact pad for using as a cartridge with a special adapter. Unfortunately, the announced starting prices are too high to compete with DVD-burners, for example. We’ll watch for these devices in the future, though.