Enterprise Disk Drives Category Profile

Fifty years ago this month, a team of sweaty, grunting technicians lugged a 2,000-pound crate the size of a refrigerator out of the bowels of IBM and into a waiting truck. Thus, the world's first hard-disk drive, a 50-disk, 5-MB unit with a not-so-sexy name--the RAMAC 650--was shipped. Retail price: $7,000.

Five decades hence, it's fitting that technological advances in shirt-pocket drives with blue lasers and perpendicular tracking are fueling the enterprise hard-disk-drive space.

Since Seagate's buyout of Maxtor earlier this year, two questions have loomed: Who would benefit most from top dogs merging? And would Maxtor's preacquisition equipment recalls and executive upheaval give Seagate a partner-program hangover?

As a result of the corporate takeover, Western Digital, a newcomer in the Enterprise Disk Drives category, eked out a 1-point win, with an overall score of 75, over last year's victor, Seagate, in the 2006 VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC).

And for the first time in recent years, the race came down to something other than loyalty, which traditionally has been the deciding factor in a market where price, performance and features often leave scant room for differentiation.

This year, it was all about the quality of vendors' partner-facing programs.

Not that the gear doesn't matter. Certainly, Western Digital wouldn't have been able to debut with a win if not for solid performance in Product Innovation, where the vendor nearly ran the table and earned a score of 77. Seagate and Fujitsu nipped at the winner's, heels, though, each scoring a 76.

"Solution providers' preference for Western Digital in [this] category underscores the tremendous value that [our] Serial ATA WD Raptor and WD RE and RE2 drives offer them with high reliability and high performance or capacity," says Stacy Hand, senior director of Western Digital's worldwide channel marketing. "[We] are committed to providing resellers with the right SATA products to meet their needs."

In Loyalty, an expanded survey bumped up the scores significantly from last year. In 2005, the group average in Loyalty was 60, and the category winner, Seagate, earned a mere 70 on a scale of 1 to 100. This year, the group average was 78, and Western Digital tied with Seagate, scoring an 82.

With the loyalty issue a jump ball, this year's disk-drive race came down to wafer-thin differences in Product Innovation, Support and Partnership. Both Seagate and third-place finisher Fujitsu finished within 1 point of Western Digital in Product Innovation and Support.

The deciding factor came down to Partnership, where Western Digital scored a 71, Seagate scored a 67, and Fujitsu a 65.

Making a less auspicious appearance in the category this year was Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which managed fourth-place finishes across the board in the four-horse race. The company trailed the pack in technical prowess, and lagged far behind the field in Support and Loyalty.

And with the days of the RAMAC 650 well behind us--IBM sold some 2,000 units before retiring the drive in 1969--analysts say a robust disk-drive market should keep the pressure on vendors to deliver both technology and service.

"This industry has matured enough to see another 50 years of survival, one hopes," says Krishna Chander, a storage analyst at market-research firm iSuppli. "The next 50 years will bring further revolutions and transformations to the size, shape and technologies in the market. If the last 50 years were full of surprises, even more shocking developments are yet to come."