a week before Christmas is usually a quiet time when companies rev down for the end of the year, but also prepare for next year launches. earlier today in the world of storage, seagate announced they will acquire maxtor. over the last five years, the entire storage arena in the SCSI, SAS, SATA, and PATA has shrunk from many manufacturers to just three major players. in 2001 maxtor acquired the quantum hard drive division. in 2002 IBM hard disk drive division was sold to hitachi. so we have just three major manufacturers of drives: seagate, hitachi, and western digital, with a long shot samsung as a rouge drive maker.
storage has never been cheaper, with some mechanism approaching 25???°¬¨¬®¬¨¬¢ a GB, with normal prices around 50???°¬¨¬®¬¨¬¢ a GB. will pricing and innovation increase, or shunt? 2006 should see the introduction of 1 TB hard drives.