Storage: Cheaper, Smaller, Faster

The hard drive unit is unlike anything else in a computer or server. Although it is inseparably bound to the computing device, the hard drive is based less on solid-state circuits and silicon than it is on precision mechanics and chemistry. Programming languages, operating systems and applications,all the software that runs the computing experience,live on the hard disk. If the drive works, they work.

At one time, this part of the computer was among the most expensive of its components. In the past six years, drive prices have fallen, making storage capacity affordable and enabling applications to collect increasingly vast amounts of information. At the same time, advances in areal density and speed means that drives can hold more data, record and read it faster, and soon will diminish in size until they find their ways into devices few ever dreamed would house a hard drive.

Still, much of the technology world sees the hard disk as a generic component, an item to be bought in bulk.

"It is known as a commodity business," says Pat McGarrah, director of strategic and technical marketing at Milpitas, Calif.-based Quantum. "But it sure is different from wheat, corn or soybeans. Our pace of growth

is roughly 112 percent per year, and we now have to react quickly to technology advances in order to compete. We have six major manufacturers routinely one-upping each other,that sounds like a pretty exciting commodity market."

The six players McGarrah is referring to,Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor, Quantum, Seagate Technology and Western Digital,are engaged in an arms race of sorts. They're faced with the challenge of spending millions of dollars on research to boost speed, density and reliability, while still driving the price-per-unit down: two conflicting requirements they view as the key to gaining the lead in this raucous space.

"Our customers are tough. They want the latest-and-greatest technology, and at the same time we need to make sure they get an opportunity to make some money," McGarrah says. "To them, it's like a game of chess,they don't want any one of us to become more powerful."

Western Digital has taken the current lead in that game, at least as far as solution-provider customers are concerned. The Irvine, Calif.-based company finished first in this year's Annual Report Card, placing first or tied for first in six of the 11 criteria in the survey. It finished second or tied for second in four others. A long-time channel favorite, Western Digital gained its highest scores in product quality, tech support and product availability. Maxtor and Seagate tied for second, Fujitsu finished fourth, Quantum finished fifth and IBM trailed in sixth place.

Blinding Us With Science

Business considerations aside, research teams aim to take the lead in technology, and scientists are working feverishly behind the scenes to take their companies to the No. 1 spot,no matter how short that reign may be. One of the great crusades of the hard disk industry is the quest for greater areal density, or the ability to write bits smaller, stripe tracks closer together, and to cram as much data onto a magnetic disk as possible.

"There's always a lot of talk in the industry about the physical limitations of magnetic storage," says Richard van Dyke, senior product marketing manager for Milpitas, Calif.-based Maxtor. "But every time we say we've found a brick wall, someone jumps over it."

To achieve greater density and get more data-per-disk, manufacturers must more precisely build drives' seek-and-write heads. "We're building these devices to be more precise in their positions within the drive itself," van Dyke says.

During the next three to five months, "the method of moving components within the drive will have to be revised if we're going to continue to reduce the track-per-inch count," says Shawn Hook, manager of product marketing for Seagate's Enterprise Storage Group, Scotts Valley, Calif. "We'll need to make movements smaller and increasingly precise."

In the future, the disk itself may become the controlling factor of how much data can be stored on a drive. All six companies are researching the chemical makeup of the media itself, with the potential payoff of a new magnetic disk that allows existing write technology to more precisely put down the data.

"Right now, the substrate we use is aluminum, but in the future, it's likely to be glass or ceramic," Hook says. "This will give us a somewhat smoother surface and will allow us to fly the heads closer to the surface and to write with greater precision."

Similarly, ball bearings are losing their ability to keep up with the speed of new drives and are on the verge of being replaced by fluid bearings.

Adding greater precision is one goal; at the same time, drive makers are building their hard disks to be tougher. "We find they're more capable of sustaining a jolt without having a problem," says Quantum's McGarrah. "This is going to be really important as hard disks find their ways into things like set-top boxes."

Like the car industry's crash- test dummies, some vendors' products are sacrificed to ensure the rest of them are up to par. Each year, Quantum puts thousands of drives into reliability testing, McGarrah says. That involves beating on the poor devices until they finally give up the ghost, providing Quantum with a view of what the future holds for each batch of drives.

The value of this rigorous effort becomes apparent in light of the sheer quantity of drives affected.

"A drive today has a saleable shelf life of about nine months," McGarrah says. "Our plants turn out 10,000 units per day. If we don't test like crazy, we could very easily end up with an entire generation of drives that no one wants or can count on, and that would be a huge benefit for our competitors."

Testing has taken Maxtor engineers to the heights of mountaintops and to the depths of Death Valley. "We do tests in anabolic chambers, in heat and cold, and in every environment we can think of," van Dyke says. "These are places that we never thought drives would be needed."

These tests have very real payoffs for manufacturers' OEM and integration partners.

"As we push the curve on capacity and speed, we also have to push down the return rate of the drives," van Dyke says. As part of this focus, Maxtor hired Misha Rozenberg as vice president in charge of quality.

"If he's not comfortable, then the whole organization comes to a stop," van Dyke says. "Having been through a couple of stops, I can tell you those are not comfortable for anyone here, either."

One of the ways Maxtor may try to keep drives in service in the future is by using an internal system for self-fixing and self-diagnosis that could identify and repair problems in the media before they became concerns.

For its part, Seagate realized it could consolidate electronic components within the drive, reducing the number of parts inside the drive, and minimizing the number of failure points at the same time. Quantum instituted an automated service that helps users identify the real problems affecting their systems, which usually are not drive-related.

"We eliminated 70 percent of the drives that came back here and were 'no trouble found' when they were analyzed," McGarrah says.

In the future, new technologies and storage media promise greater densities and improved reliability. Those technologies, however, are still three to five years away, drive industry insiders say. Until then, drive makers will continue to make little leaps with magnetic-storage technology in an effort to gain ground in this cutthroat space.