3.5in drives: we're not interested
At a press event held in central London last night, Toshiba rolled out heavyweight executives from its Digital Network Media (DNM) division to evangelise on the necessity for spindle-based storage for years to come.Solid-state drives (SSDs), the show ponies of the storage world, get many of the attention-grabbing headlines but mechanical hard drives continue to make up the bulk of storage sales, according to Martin Larsson, vice president of Toshiba's storage divsion for EMEA.
Toshiba increased its storage presence and portfolio by purchasing an 80 per cent stake in Fujitsu earlier this year, with the deal finalised on October 1. As Fujitsu has been traditionally strong in the enterprise market and Toshiba omnipotent in the client space, the deal gives the 'new Toshiba' easy access to the high-margin enterprise sector.
3.5in drives are old hat
Think of mechanical storage and attention usually gravitates to huge-capacity 3.5in drives. As an example, a 1TB SATA drives costs around £50. Interestingly, Toshiba sees the form factor as a dying breed and puts its focus on 2.5in, or smaller, drives. Indeed, the company has laid out a four-year storage roadmap where 3.5in models are conspicuous by their absence, and it sees notebook-fuelled growth as a given for smaller-form-factor models.
Speaking to Martin Larsson and Philip Walsh, sales director for EMEA, we got the impression that Toshiba's DNM division is really putting all its eggs in the 2.5in (spindle-based) basket, especially in the server/workstation environment, where the drives' speed, form factor, and value proposition - 10K SAS, for example - is now eclipsing 3.5in's, they said.
