Hard disk: Encyclopedia II - Hard disk - Manufacturers

Hard disk - Manufacturers

Most of the world's hard disks are now manufactured by just a handful of large firms: Seagate, Maxtor (now owned by Seagate), Western Digital, Samsung, and Hitachi, the former drive manufacturing division of IBM. Fujitsu continues to make specialist notebook and SCSI drives but exited the mass market in 2001. Toshiba is a major manufacturer of 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch notebook drives.

Hard disk - Firms that have come and gone

Dozens of former hard drive manufacturers have gone out of business, merged, or closed their hard drive divisions; as capacities and demand for products increased, profits became hard to find, and there were shakeouts in the late 1980s and late 1990s. The first notable casualty of the business in the PC era was Computer Memories International or CMI; after the 1985 incident with the faulty 20MB AT drives, CMI's reputation never recovered, and they exited the hard drive business in 1987. Another notable failure was MiniScribe, who went bankrupt in 1990 after it was found that they had "cooked the books" and inflated sales numbers for several years. Many other smaller companies (like Kalok, Microscience, LaPine, Areal, Priam and PrairieTek) also did not survive the shakeout, and had disappeared by 1993; Micropolis was able to hold on until 1997, and JTS, a relative latecomer to the scene, lasted only a few years and was gone by 1999. Rodime was also an important manufacturer during the 1980s, but stopped making drives in the early 1990s amid the shakeout and now concentrates on technology licensing; they hold a number of patents related to 3.5-inch form factor hard drives.

There have also been a number of notable mergers in the hard disk industry:

• Tandon sold its disk manufacturing division to Western Digital (which was then a controller maker and ASIC house) in 1988; by the early 1990s Western Digital disks were among the top sellers.
• In 1995, Conner Peripherals announced a merger with Seagate (who had earlier bought Imprimis from CDC), which was completed in early 1996.
• JTS infamously merged with Atari in 1996, giving it the capital it needed to bring its drive range into production.
• In 2003, following the controversy over the mass failures of its Deskstar 75GXP range, hard disk pioneer IBM sold the majority of its disk division to Hitachi, who renamed it Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
• Quantum bought DEC's storage division in 1994, and later (2000) sold the hard disk division to Maxtor to concentrate on tape drives. In December 2005, however, Maxtor itself was acquired by Seagate for USD1.9 billion.

In the United Kingdom, Cumana, a manufacturer of disk drives for Acorn computers, ceased manufacturing drives in 1995.

Hard disk - Marketing capacity versus true capacity

Hard drive manufacturers often use the metric definition of the prefixes "giga" and "mega", whilst nearly all operating system utilities report capacities using binary definitions for the prefixes. This is largely for historical reasons, since when storage capacities started to exceed thousands of bytes, there were no standard binary prefixes. The IEC only standardized binary prefixes in 1999, so 2¹⁰ (1024) bytes was called a kilobyte because 1024 is "close enough" to the metric prefix kilo, which is defined as 10³ or 1000. This trend became habit and continued to be applied to the prefixes "mega," "giga," and even "tera." Obviously the discrepancy becomes much more noticeable in reported capacities in the multiple gigabyte range, and users will often notice that the volume capacity reported by their OS is significantly less than that advertised by the hard drive manufacturer. For example, a drive advertised as 200 GB can be expected to store close to 200 x 10⁹, or 200 billion, bytes. This uses the proper SI definition of "giga," 10⁹ and can be considered as an approximation of a gibibyte. Since utilities provided by the operating system probably define a gigabyte as 2³⁰, or 1073741824, bytes, the reported capacity of the drive will be closer to 186.26 GB (actually, GiB), a difference of well over 7 percent. For this very reason, many utilities that report capacity have begun to use the aforementioned IEC standard binary prefixes (e.g. KiB, MiB, GiB) since their definitions are unambiguous.

Another side point is that many people mistakenly attribute the discrepancy in reported and advertised capacities to reserved space used for file system and partition accounting information. However, for large (several GiB) filesystems, this data rarely occupies more than several MiB, and therefore cannot possibly account for the apparent "loss" of tens of GBs.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Manufacturers", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki