Lost Interest In Small Hard Drives? Hitachi Has
Large-sized hard disk drives used in PCs and servers hold a cost advantage over NAND flash chips, but profitability was hit hard in the market for 1.0- and 1.8-inch drives as storage capacity has increased and prices have come down for NAND chips.
Hitachi's loss-making hard disk drive unit, which competes with larger rivals Seagate Technology and Western Digital Corp, shipped about 560,000 units of 1.8-inch drives in July-September, or 2.3 percent of its total hard drive shipments.
Hitachi shipped only 3,000 units of 1.0-inch drives in the three-month period.
Hitachi, which bought the hard drive unit from IBM for $2 billion in 2002, is in talks with U.S. private equity firm Silver Lake about the possibility of selling a stake in the division, sources familiar with the situation said in December.
2 billion five years ago. Ouch. Hitachi's competitor Fujitsu had big plans to offer a 120GB 1.8" drive by last year. They've abandoned that format as well. The only question for these manufacturers is: how long until no storage devices have moving parts?