Tag: Toshiba

Hard drive sales slow down

Posted on August 5, 2013 by - News

hdd-hugeShipments of mechanical hard drives are steadily declining, confirming what everyone in the industry knew already – the PC market is losing steam.

Seagate saw its Q2 shipments drop 3.2 percent over Q1, to 53.9 million drives. Toshiba lost some market share and shipped 19.6 million units. Western Digital shipped 59.9 million drives, 0.4 percent less than in Q1.

Shipments of mobile drives were also down 0.4 percent and the average drive size remained at 610GB. Hybrid drives are not taking off as expected by some punters.

Desktops fared even worse, with an 8.3 percent decline from the first quarter. The slump may cause some inventory concerns in Q3 and beyond. The average capacity of desktop drives shipped last quarter was 1TB, no changes there.

There is some good news to report as well. The enterprise hard drive market is recovering. It was up 12 percent last quarter. Shipments of hard drives for consumer electronics were also up, 0.8 percent according to IT Wire. 

Although there’s plenty of room for improvement, the hard drive market won’t recover anytime soon.

Cheaper SSDs and hybrid drives are also starting to make a mark, but HDDs are still the cheapest option and the darling of OEMs and consumers alike.

Hard drive prices to remain high despite slow demand

Posted on July 25, 2013 by - News

hdd-hugeThe hard drive market has sailed through a lot of turbulence over the last two years, and when we say sail we are obviously referring to the 2011 floods in Thailand.

The floods wreaked  havoc on a number of component fabs catering to leading HDD producers. As a result hard drive prices skyrocketed and did not stabilize for almost two years.

In fact, hard drive prices remain stubbornly high, despite the fact that the floods hit in October 2011. According to IT Wire, prices of desktop 3.5-inch drives are still up 12 to 14 percent, which is also indicative of soft demand for desktops. Although notebook sales remain slow, prices of 2.5-inch drives are going down.

However, prices of solid state drives have tumbled over the past two years, although they seem to be stabilizing. Demand for NAND remains strong, propped up by tablets and smartphones, hence SSDs are experiencing massive price drops, which were expected by some observers a few years ago.

hard-drive-prices

Although SSDs are a lot cheaper than two years ago, they are still too expensive for many applications. Small solid state drives are starting to squeeze out small hard drives, but this is a painfully slow process. Due to their size and power efficiency, SSDs are doing particularly well in notebooks. Hybrid drives are also becoming a very interesting choice for desktops, cheap notebooks and even enterprise applications.

The consolidation of the hard drive industry, which is now practically a WD – Seagate duopoly, also has the potential to drive up prices. Luckily, SSDs should keep hard drive prices in check, as their increasingly competitive pricing will leave very little wiggle room for hard drive makers.

Sales of slim HDDs are soaring

Posted on July 23, 2013 by - News, Products

seagate-hddEarlier this year Seagate and Western Digital introduced a range of 5-millimetre and 7-millimetre HDDs/SSHDs and it appears they will have no shortage of customers. According to IHS, sales of 5- and 7-millimetre drives will soar to 133 million units by 2017, up from just five million last year.

Ultra thin hard drives and hybrid drives are used in Ultrabooks and other thin devices, which are expected to slowly squeeze more traditional form factors out of the consumer market in coming years.

IHS reckons shipments of 9.5mm drives will drop to 79 million units by 2017, down from 245 million in 2012, reports Electronicsfeed.

However, it won’t all be smooth sailing for hard drive makers. Shipments of SSDs are still growing at a fast pace. SSD shipments are projected to climb some 90 percent this year, hitting 64.6 million units, whereas hard drives shipments are slowing down. They are expected to drop five percent to 545.8 million units. Ultra thin hard drives and hybrids will help in the short term, but SSDs will continue to find new markets as prices of NAND drop.

The big hope for hard drive makers is that they will manage to score more design wins with their new thin drives, as they are still a lot cheaper than SSDs. This is where they can expect some help from Microsoft, as Windows 8.x is a lot more bloated than iOS or Android, so there is a chance that cheap Windows hybrids and tablets will have to use mechanical drives, or hybrid drives.

“Both the thinner HDDs along with hybrid HDDs could even start finding acceptance in ultrathin PCs and tablet PCs—two products that now mostly use solid-state drives as their storage element. Hard disks have lost market share to SSDs, which offer better performance and can be more easily used to achieve a thinner and lighter form factor crucial to tablets and ultrathin PCs,” said Fang Zhang, storage systems analyst at IHS.

In the long run, however, hard drives have no place in tablets or hybrids, or 2-in-1s as Intel likes to call them these days. In any case they are a cheap and proven interim alternative, as they will enable vendors to come up with cheaper ultrathin devices before SSD prices come down to acceptable levels.

Notebook shipments hit new low

Posted on June 28, 2013 by - News

ancient-laptopContract manufacturers of notebooks had one of their worst quarters on record in Q1. According to IHS, they suffered a worse than expected quarter, with shipments to Apple and HP tumbling to the lowest level in three years.

Global shipments from ODMs in the first quarter totalled 33.2 million units, down 17 percent from 40.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2012.

The downturn was four to five percentage points than what IHS had originally forecast, prompting more concerns about the beleaguered industry. Taiwan based ODMs build notebooks for Apple, HP, Dell, Samsung, Lenovo, Acer, Asus and Toshiba.

The knock on effect hit ODMs hard. Quanta got the worst of it, with a 27 percent plunge in shipments. It lost its spot as the world’s top ODM to Compal as a result. Furthermore, Quanta apparently received “conservative” orders from Acer, Asus, HP and Apple during the quarter. Compal saw a quarterly decline of 5 to 7 percent and it weathered the storm a bit better than other ODMs, thanks to stable shipments to Dell and Lenovo.

Wistron’s drop in shipments was 16 percent, but it still managed to rank third. Inventec saw a 9-percent drop and it ended in fourth spot, while Pegatron wasn’t as lucky. It saw its shipments plummet 21 percent, finishing the quarter in fifth spot.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel, though. ODM shipments are expected to improve in the second half of the year. The key drivers of growth will be cheap ultrathin PCs with touchscreens, along with new models based on Intel Haswell parts. In addition, Microsoft will lower the licencee fee for Windows for notebooks with a screen size of up to 11.6 inches, as we reported from Computex a few weeks back. Better late than never.

Toshiba rolls out a hybrid

Posted on June 21, 2013 by - News, Products

toshiba-sshdToshiba has introduced its first 2.5-inch hybrid drives aimed at the fledgling Ultrabook market. For a second it looked like Toshiba was about to be outdone by WD and Seagate, as they joined the SSHD club a bit earlier.

However, Tosh wasn’t taken by surprise and its 7mm hard drives should be on par with WD’s and Seagate’s similar offerings. The drives come in 320GB and 500GB capacities and both feature 8GB of NAND flash cache.

Although the spindle speed is 5400rpm, the hybrids perform better than plain 7200rpm drives, but the still fall short of SSD performance. However, they should end up four to five times cheaper than their solid state counterparts.

Toshiba did not reveal the exact pricing though, or availability date for that matter. However, both Seagate and WD are pricing their 7mm hybrids south of $100 and Toshiba’s SSHDs should probably have a similar price tag.

NAND prices continue surging

Posted on June 19, 2013 by - News, Products

nand-chipsPrices of NAND flash memory are set to continue rising this month and beyond, as a result of strong demand for mobile devices. According to a report from DRAMeXchange, NAND prices are showing signs of rising in the second half of June due to inventory restocking.

NAND contract prices rose two to four percent in the first half of June already, compare to May. DRAMeXchange says OEMs rushed to boost their inventories at lower prices, resulting in a shortage. The surge in demand is likely to push prices even further in the near future, despite the fact prices tend to go down seasonally over the summer, reports Focus Taiwan.

DRAMeXchange pointed out that no major manufacturers, aside from Toshiba, have any immediate plans to boost capacity in the third quarter. It concluded that NAND production between July and September is likely to rise slowly, at less than ten percent from the previous quarter.

However, demand for flash in the third quarter is expected to increase by more than 10 percent from the second quarter, resulting in a significant shortfall. Obviously, tight supply could push up NAND prices toward the end of the year.