TheKnat said:
If there was more competition then they would make more money out of people because there are more people who would buy 10k sata drives than would purchase SCSI.
In an ideal world yes but I doubt this would happen. If another vendor released a 10KRPM SATA drive, they would almost certainly release it a couple of dollars below WD to compete. WD would follow and then Vendor X drops again creating a huge price war (look at the way 500GB drives are at the moment).
This is all good for the consumer as it makes things considerably cheaper but if the vendor is making less and less money, drive quality and design suffers.
Nullvoid said:
They therefore need to find a way to cripple the 10k rpm drives for server-related workloads so that they can release them and get a whole ream of extra sales in the enthusiast market, but not butcher their income from overpriced scsi-based gear.
You have to remember that the enthusiast market is tiny. Companies like ourselves by tens of thousands of drives per year. An industrial based customer (take Sky and their Sky+ box as an example) and system integrators such as HP, Toshiba, Sony, Apple etc buy hundreds of thousands if not more. If the hard drive manufacturers relied on enthusiasts, they would be bust tomorrow.
WD do not have that SCSI market in place and they would be quite unsucessful if they tried. Seagate rule this area and you can instantly see why Seagate are the biggest hard drive vendor in the world. SCSI drives are very high turnover and very profitable, SATA drives are nowhere near the same as the pricing is changing for the worse (as far as business goes) at a rapid rate.
snowdog said:
What about WD then, why don't they release a 15k drive?
If I could get a 15k rpm hdd for the price of a 10k rpm raptor now, I'd get one, for sata offcourse... While I'll never ever touch scsi because its overpriced imo...
You've just answered your own question. If WD were to bring out a 15KRPM Raptor then the cost would be substantially higher. Just look at the difference between the price of 10K & 15K SCSI drives. You say SCSI is overpriced but at the end of the day, so would a WD 15KRPM Raptor.
Another factor as to why WD don't make a faster drive is capacity. Storage demands are getting huge. Think about HD Content which will become a totally everyday thing eventually. This requires a huge amount of space so HD vendors need to spend money making the platters bigger and bigger.
helmutcheese said:
I think now esp if above story is true WD will make a 12k-15k SATA300 HDD with 16-32MB Cache, it wont be cheap but wont be as much as in past esp if there is another 10K on the market.
WD are definitely staying with 10KRPM drives for the next few years but at the moment they are deciding which way to go next. Choice is between a 300GB SATA-II 32MB Cache 10KRPM drive or a new 10KRPM SATA Notebook drive.
helmutcheese said:
To your last point, if manu's stop SCSI and made SATA they would make far less profit as business get screwed, they pay far more for stuff than we do esp licenses for software.
Correct.
Less profit = Bad quality drives and no new innovation.
