Carl Alexander observed: > Since roughly when the first bubble burst, the hard-drive > market has been too competitive and fluid ... [if one has] > seen enough recent drives to discern a pattern among any one > manufacturer's products, that pattern will have played itself out.
No more, IMHO. The manufacturers that still exist now are basically the ones that existed at the time I exited years of data-center management (now that everything at work is AWS all day.) Ever since about 2010, the choices have narrowed to WD/HGST, Seagate and Toshiba. HGST merged into WD in March 2012, but remains quasi-independent (perhaps thanks to China's ministry of commerce?) Who am I leaving out? I miss the days when there was a "competitive and fluid" marketplace with 8-10 leading rivals plus another couple dozen niche competitors, but consolidation into precisely 3 companies has led us down the path of the 365-day warranty. Toshiba's in a niche of its own, so we have precisely two HDD choices, the same ones I used in 2007-2010 at work. The SSD market is separate and still semi-competitive but even there, we don't have a lot of choices. For the most part, the options boil down to Samsung, SanDisk, Crucial, or...who? OCZ, IBM? But yeah, there's a list of 20 of them here: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-top10-31.html -rich _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
