IT Scan

December 27, 2004
Seagate delivers innovative CE storage solutions

Geetanjali Wadhwa & Pradeep Chakraborty

MUMBAI AND NEW DELHI -- Seagate recently highlighted the growing importance of hard disk drives in the consumer electronics (CE) applications space. It displayed a host of hard-drive based CE applications in Mumbai, such as a personal video recorder (PVR), MP3 player, digital camera, and external storage solutions. All these were displayed along with its range of consumer electronics and retail products such as ST1 series, DB35 series, CompactFlash photo hard drive, USB-2 pocket hard drive, 2.5-inch portable external hard drive, 3.5-inch portable external hard drive and the Barracuda 7200.8 hard drive. All products are slated for an early 2005 release in India.

Explaining the home media pipeline and how the increasing use of hard disk drives in consumer electronics products was beginning to play an important role in development and support of new drive technology, and the demand for smaller and quieter drives, Rob Pait, Seagate's director for Global Consumer Electronics Marketing, said people were already paying a reasonable price for downloading music. Currently, there were over 150 global legal music-downloading services. Next, countries were moving away from analog to digital TV. "Australia, the United Kingdom and even the United States had made the move. Now, people are using DVRs (digital video recorders) to archive shows," he said. Pait added that there would be a major increase in DVR sales from now on to 2008, besides portable jukebox music players. Converged mobile devices would also begin to make a significant dent on the market by 2008.

Further, people were starting to use hard drives in cars for entertainment, GPS, etc. By 2007, Pait estimated that there would be 5 million HDDs in automobiles alone. Gaming, PVRs (personal video recorders) and handhelds were fast emerging as the new consumer platforms that demanded hard drives. He said: "More growth is now beginning to happen in new places such as consumer electronics. This segment is likely to witness 12 percent growth in 2005. As per analysts, it will account for 10 percent of all HDD growth."

Seagate's ST-1 series has been designed for the demanding needs of digital music players. The 1-inch HDD has comes with 5GB memory. Its RunOn technology improved performance in high-motion environments, while G-Force Protection protected the drive from accidental mishandling. It has a motion sensor inside as well. Seagate is selling the ST-1 series to OEMs such as Creative, Rio, etc., for music players, and Virgin Records for MP3 players. Pait added that Seagate took 23 percent of the 1-inch HDD market within one quarter of shipping it. It can store nearly 2,500 songs in the compressed MP3 format.

Seagate's DB-35 series is meant for DVRs. It allows upto 400 hours of standard TV storage. It is suitable for applications such as personal TV archive, HD DVR, home media centers and security. Pait added that it did not deliver choppy, Internet video, while playing back recorded videos. Best of all, it would enable users to use a 'pause' button even with live TV footage like serials, and view it later, as the DVR would have recorded it all.

The vendors' 5GB, one-inch external Flash drive would allow digital camera users to store thousands of photographs without switching memory devices. Its 2.5GB CompactFlash photo hard drive is targeted at professional and enthusiat photographers. Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8, a PC or server drive, can store upto half a terabyte (500GB), which translated into storing up to 50 DVD-quality movies or 200,000 MP3 songs, that is equivalent to 9,600 hours of music. The device currently leads the market in terms of capacity and performance. Seagate also demonstrated a home media server powered by two Barracuda 7200.8 drives. According to Sharad Shrivastava, country manager, Seagate India, the vendor is already talking to Indian assemblers for bringing out home storage entertainment devices tailored to our needs.

If this was not enough, Seagate recently announced the creation of disc drive integration support labs in Taiwan and Japan, as a local extension of Seagate Design Service Centers (DSC), providing product design and technology expertise for the growing number of OEMs in the region who are designing hard drives into their products. These labs are the local, first-line set of services that co-ordinate with Seagate DSC to offer customers' comprehensive HDD integration services that help them produce best-in-class storage-driven solutions. The local integration support labs are a subset of DSC and are equipped with test stations and technologies to assist Seagate's customers through design and development for their storage-based solutions, providing technical expertise and support during product qualification and integration to optimize system performance, quality and reliability.

The integration support lab in Taiwan will have a test capacity for about 50 systems and will be equipped with hard drive bus analysers, signal integrity and thermal analysis, among other testing equipment, to support system integration and help Seagate customers bring their products to market faster. Seagate expects the integration support lab in Japan to be ready by January 2005.

Earlier, Seagate increased its market share in India to 72.4 percent in the September quarter of 2004, compared to 61 percent in the previous quarter, according to ACNielsen's report. The jump follows its unprecedented announcement of a five-year warranty on all its internal hard drives shipped in the distribution and retail channels.

An interesting feature revealed by ACNielsen's finding was that while assemblers/system integrators (SIs) continue to dominate the market, accounting for 55 percent of all hard drives sold, local OEMs have overtaken global OEMs in second place. Local OEMs now account for 26 percent of the market compared to 19 percent for global OEMs. In HDDs, the market share of Seagate's nearest competitor fell to 17.1 percent from 26 percent in the previous quarter, significantly widening the gulf and differentiating Seagate from the rest of the competition.

Srivastava added: "This latest report confirms that Seagate is providing the quality products and services that have made it the brand of choice throughout India. It is rewarding to see the strong positive customer response to our recent five-year warranty initiative, and our move to provide increased support to our 700+ channel partners in India with 32 SeaCare centers in cities countrywide. I am confident that Seagate will continue to remain the preferred brand for enterprise and end-user customers in India."

Contact:
Seagate
www.seagate.com