August 23, 2006
Hard Drives
The hard drive market has
remained stable over the past weeks as we approach the busy holiday build
season. It has been speculated that there might be a surge in demand for larger
capacity components such as drives, memory, and CPU towards Q1, 2007 in response
to the release of Vista, Microsoft’s next generation operating system that will
require a minimum 15GB of free disk space and 1GB of memory. The question is;
with consumers having become much savvier, will they hold out buying new systems
until the mass release of Vista, in turn cannibalizing sales of existing
systems, resulting in lack luster holiday sales?
Notebook Market
2.5"
The 2.5” market has been uneventful in the past weeks with the
exception of 4200rpm drives which are slowly being phased out in favor of the
faster 5400rpm drive. The price difference between the two drives is narrowing
making the faster drive a better value. As a result, franchised distributors are
starting to stock more of the 5400rpm in anticipation to higher demand going
forward. Pricing seems to be declining across all capacities of 2.5” drives
excluding 30GB capacities.
Surprisingly, we have seen little impact from
Toshiba’s quality issues with Hewlett Packard resulting in a recall of Toshiba
drives. It appears that Seagate and Western Digital have enough excess capacity
to absorb the shortfall from Toshiba.
Desktop 3.5”
The
demand for small capacity, inexpensive 20-40GB drives remains healthy as the
budget PCs remain a major market mover. High capacity and SATA drives are still
the mainstream and continue to slide slightly downward in price as the market’s
perception of dollar per gigabyte gets lower.
There have been rumors
that aggressive pricing of 40GB and 80GB capacity recertified drives have been
cannibalizing sales of new product, resulting in built up inventories at
franchise distributors. If this is the case it will be interesting to see how
the manufactures respond as we move into the busy build season. SATA product has
been very slow to move. 160GB IDE and up are in high demand, specifically
300-400GB IDE remains short in the market. 8MB cache has been more much more in
demand than 2MB versions.
Enterprise (SCSI)
SCSI market
continues to be uninspired with the continued shift to SATA product, leaving
sufficient liquidity in the distribution channel. We have been seeing some
demand for 181GB capacities, mostly from the service sector. We continue to see
demand for EOL drives in the smaller capacities of 9GB and 18GB from the service
sector.
For availability and pricing contact: 949.595.8244 or visit www.horizontechnology.com
