Staggering Storage in a Small Form Factor

Implications: * Hitachi announced a 2.5-inch form factor disk drive with single drive capacity of 500 GB—the highest so far in this form factor  * Hitachi added another disk (3 total) and heads to achieve this with a resulting drive thickness that is 3 mm thicker than the industry standard 2.5-inch for laptops * The drive is expected to initially sell for about $400 and includes bulk data encryption and is rated for higher usage conditions * Asus, a Taiwanese laptop manufacturer is offering a dual-drive laptop with 1 TB storage capacity * Hitachi also offers a 400 GB version of the drive

Analysis:  Hitachi Global Storage Technologies led the pack in the introduction of a Terabyte 3.5-inch hard disk drive in 2007.  In January 2008 they announced a record-breaking 500 GB 2.5-inch hard disk drive.  The prior record for 2.5-inch hard drives by Fujitsu and then Toshiba was 320 GB.  Shortly after the HGST announcement Samsung said that they would also introduce a 500 GB 2.5-inch drive.

Asus, a Taiwanese laptop manufacturer announced they would deliver a TB laptop using two of the new Hitachi drives.  In addition to traditional uses for 2.5-inch drives in notebooks such significant storage capacities in a small form factor makes smaller desktop computers possible as well as smaller consumer devices such as DVRs and set top boxes.  These products could also find application in smaller form factor ATA drive arrays in enterprise applications and in external mobile storage devices.

I expect that other HDD manufacturers including Toshiba, Fujitsu, Seagate and eventually WD will be introducing their own 500 GB 2.5-inch drives within the next few months.  There are also rumors of a 1.5 TB 3.5-inch drive and even a 2 TB 3.5-inch drive being introduced by one of the hard disk companies sometime this year. 

The disk drive areal density growth continues leading new product introductions at a rate of about 50% annually, especially for smaller form factor hard disk drives. Storage capacity increases, especially if done without adding disks and heads is an important way to create product differentiation and thus increase market share. 

Hitachi recently announced that they were dropping 1.8-inch disk drives but the new announcement shows that the company continues to develop advanced hard disk drives in the more focused and higher volume 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch HDD form factors.