Big disk makers spin up tiny drives
Rick Merritt
19 April 2004
Electronic Engineering Times
San Jose, Calif. - Hard-disk makers Seagate, Maxtor and Toshiba are expected to enter the market for 1-inch or smaller drives as MP3 players kick this once-sleepy sector into a higher gear. For many companies, the ultimate goal is finding the right form factor and interface to embed the drives into high-volume cellular phones, a job some say could take years.
Preparations by the established drive makers come as startup Cornice Inc. (Longmont, Colo.) plans its second generation of embedded 1-inch drives-its first product line with separate models optimized for capacity, price and size. The drives will appear in several high-end cell phones starting early next year, said Scott Holt, the startup's executive vice president of sales and marketing.
Cornice has carved out a low-cost niche by linking host CPU and memory to a simplified 8-bit, 20-pin interface instead of using an on-board drive controller. Its next-generation drives will go another step in that direction by handing off read-channel processing to the host and squeezing the drive interface down to nine or 10 pins and a narrower signaling range.
The drives will shave peak power consumption from 250 to 230 milliamps and nonoperating power consumption from 80 microamps to less than 10. Curt Bruner, chief technology officer of Cornice, said the latter figure is key because the drives, used primarily for archival storage, spend most of their time in a standby state.
At the top hard-disk maker, Seagate Technology Inc., president William Watkins has said the Scotts Valley, Calif., company later this year will announce drives smaller than the 2.5-inch models it rolled out for notebooks last June. A Seagate spokesman called digital cameras and MP3 players-not cell phones-the initial targets. But the company refused to give product details and declined requests for interviews.
Toshiba, by contrast, is vocal about its plans to pioneer an embedded drive in a new 0.85-inch form factor, which will sample late this summer at 2- and 4-Gbyte capacities. Its primary targets are cell phones and PDAs. The drives will cut a third off the volumetric size of current 1-inch drives and consume about 0.5 watt.
Toshiba sees a variety of drivers for the small disks, including the embrace by cell phones and PDAs of broadcast TV, global positioning satellite services, pictures, and downloaded MP3 files and applications software. "There are many things that will be drivers and cell phones themselves will change," said Amy Dalphy, a hard-disk business manager at Toshiba America Information Systems (Irvine, Calif.).
No other drive makers are supporting the 0.85-inch format, which many criticize as being too close in capacity and cost to flash cards. Dalphy said customers won't require a second source in the first stage of the market, but she declined to reveal prices for the drives.
According to Semico Research, flash is now under a dollar per megabyte, but hard-disk storage in desktop drives is dipping below a penny per megabyte. Cornice sells its 2-Gbyte drive for less than $70. By contrast, a 128-Mbyte flash card might retail for about $40.
Maxtor Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.) said it expects to participate in markets beyond the 3.5-inch drives it makes today but would not commit to any specific products or timetables. One chip maker familiar with the company said Maxtor is about six to 12 months behind Seagate, which has "really done its homework" on the small drives.
Nevertheless, Maxtor has closely studied the emerging markets for mobile consumer storage. The 0.85-inch drives will focus on cell phones, while the larger-capacity 1-inch drives are seen initially as aftermarket removables for digital still cameras and built-in drives for middle-market MP3 players, said David Barron, director of digital entertainment products at Maxtor. "I think we will see more and more embedded hard-disk storage, but it will take a while," Barron said.
IBM Corp. pioneered the 1-inch market in 1999 with its removable 340-Mbyte Microdrive, using the CompactFlash Type II interface and aiming at digital cameras, said John Osterhout, a Kodak executive who joined IBM to launch the product.
But digital cameras have mainly employed flash memory cards. Thus, the Microdrive ticked along with modest sales until Apple Computer Inc. designed the latest 2- and 4-Gbyte models into its iPod Mini MP3 player and other MP3 makers such as Creative Labs followed suit, using an embedded version of the drive with a modified interface.
"We found our first high-volume application, and I am sure it won't be our last," said Osterhout, now a director of business development at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which formed last year from the merger of Hitachi's and IBM's storage businesses. Sales of the Microdrive in 2004 could be as much as five times higher than last year, he said.
Now IBM is beginning to show variations of the embedded Microdrive to cell phone makers seeking even bigger markets. "There's not a commitment from cell phone makers to use hard drives yet," he said. "It's an area of intense study, and I don't know when we will get a clear picture, but we do think there will evolve a sizable market for hard drives in cell phones."
Apple announced it shipped 807,000 iPods in its latest quarter, a tenfold increase from a year ago. Most of the players use a Toshiba 1.8-inch hard disk. Apple has not been able to meet demand for newer models using the 1-inch Microdrive.
Another player in 1-inch drives, start-up GS Magicstor Inc. (Guiyang, China), is shipping 2- and 4-Gbyte drives using the CompactFlash II, ATA and USB interfaces.
"If Seagate, Toshiba and Maxtor jump in, that will make six companies in this market and that would be quite a crowd," said James Porter, principal of market watcher Disk/Trend (Mountain View, Calif.).
"People are trying to get into these consumer spaces because their investors are requiring it," said one semiconductor manager who works with the drive makers but asked not to be named. For a short time, companies will compete with unique form factors and interfaces until a standard shakes out, he predicted.
Indeed, hard-disk makers agree the next shift for small drives will be finding a new embedded interface and form factor suitable for cell phones and other emerging applications. Just what that will be is far from clear.
The CompactFlash II interface for removable drives is quickly on the wane due to its relatively large size and cost, while a handful of other removable flash card interfaces, including Secure Digital, Multimedia Card and Sony's MagicStick, gain traction. But none of the new flash interfaces are suitable for hard disks, said Bruner of Cornice.
Toshiba will announce in May that it will use an extension of an existing standard interface for its embedded 0.85-inch drive. "We are analyzing a number of different interfaces," said Dalphy. "This is very industry-driven and we are trying to work with industry committees."
Hitachi is "still in discussions with major customers about interfaces and there is no consensus yet," said Osterhout. "A year or two from now I think we'll still have CompactFlash and at least one embedded interface, but there are competing interests at this time."
"I don't think the cell phone industry has figured out what they want yet," said Barron of Maxtor. "Nokia is the only company that has put a lot of thought into this," but even it is divided, he said, with one group wanting a removable and another an embedded drive.
Meanwhile, cellular phones are expected to become the largest consumer of flash memory cards, thanks to the high unit volume of handsets. Market watcher iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.) estimates cell phones will be using 55 percent of all flash cards by 2008, up from about 10 percent in 2003. Over the same period, smaller-volume digital cameras will dip from using 60 percent of all flash cards to less than 10 percent, iSuppli projects.
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