Demand Brings High-Capacity Drives to SMBs

thumbnail Demand Brings High-Capacity Drives to SMBs

High capacity and backup once were the mark of enterprise storage. However, as seen on the floor of the International Consumer Electronics Show last week, several vendors aim drive mechanisms holding as much 500GB of data at small businesses and consumers. These 3.5-inch drives, which were still in the planning stages just a year or […]

Written By: Karen Schwartz
Jan 10, 2005
Channel Insider content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More

High capacity and backup once were the mark of enterprise storage. However, as seen on the floor of the International Consumer Electronics Show last week, several vendors aim drive mechanisms holding as much 500GB of data at small businesses and consumers.

These 3.5-inch drives, which were still in the planning stages just a year or two ago, are ideal for several types of applications, including the enterprise ATA storage market for relatively fixed content, for home networking and, in some cases, for external backup boxes and similar classes of applications.

All of the major vendors in this area—Seagate Technology, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Maxtor—have introduced high-capacity drives in the past few months, along with second-tier players such as Western Digital Corp. and Olixir Technologies.

This past week alone, Seagate, Maxtor and Olixir have introduced large-capacity drives.

Seagate’s 400 GB DB35 series hard drive is to enable home entertainment systems such as high-definition DVR (digital video recorder) recording and video on demand.

The hard drive provides performance tools that tune the drive for sequential streaming and content protection, useful in implementing DRM (digital rights management) technologies.

Click here to read about Seagate’s entry-level FATA drive.

Maxtor announced its Maxtor Shared Storage solution, which is available in 200 GB or 300 GB capacities and aims to allow home or SOHO (small office/home office) users to centralize, organize and share data, photos or music on a wired or wireless network.

Olixir introduced the Mobile DataVault 3DX, a 3.5-inch, 400 GB portable external hard drive aimed at tackling the backup and disaster-recovery market as well as storage and archiving for digital photos, videos, music and critical data.

Western Digital Corp. announced its latest offering on Dec. 20: a 320 GB hard drive in its WD Caviar family of hard drives the company says uses less power than other high-capacity, desktop-class hard drives and provides much less drive noise.

While Hitachi Global Storage Technologies focused on microdrive announcements at last week’s CES, it has publicly stated that it plans to introduce the Deskstar 7K500—a high-capacity, 3.5-inch 500 GB SATA (serial ATA) hard drive—by March.

The introduction of larger and larger capacity hard drives is particularly significant in two areas, said Thomas Coughlin, president of storage market analysis company Coughlin Associates of Atascadero, Calif.

The first is for low-cost ATA enterprise applications such as fixed-content storage used for archiving e-mail messages and image files. The second use for high-capacity drives is as part of a networked storage structure for home entertainment, such as a local area network-based NAS (network-attached storage) system for the home, or for high-capacity DVRs or set-top boxes.

Read more here about Maxtor entering the home NAS market.

The continued demand for higher-resolution video sharing and rich content sharing in the home are increasing demand for larger disk drives. On the enterprise side, storage growth is fueled by regulatory compliance with acts such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).

These factors and others led Coughlin to predict continued significant growth in disk drives this year over last. By 2008, Coughlin predicts that the market will offer single drives with 1 terabyte capacity.

“The trend over the next five years will be for increasing capacity for 3.5-inch drives for these applications, with some performance improvements and modifications in RAID redundancy to accommodate longer drive reconstruction times,” he said.

Check out eWEEK.com’s for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and small business storage hardware and software.

Recommended for you...

Trend Micro and Google Cloud Double Down on AI Security

The expanded alliance emphasizes AI-driven defenses, sovereign cloud capabilities, and new anti-scam protections for businesses worldwide.

Allison Francis
Jul 30, 2025
Arctera Updates Platform to Reduce AI Compliance Risks

Arctera updates Insight to help organizations capture, chronicle & contain AI data, easing compliance and unlocking insights from LLM interactions.

TA Wordpress
Jul 30, 2025
Channel Vet Frank Rauch Joining Morphisec in Advisory Role

Channel vet Frank Rauch joins Morphisec’s advisory board to boost MSSP strategy and partner growth with a prevention-first cybersecurity focus.

Jordan Smith
Jul 29, 2025
Azul Debuts Managed Services Program for Java-Focused Partners

Azul empowers MSPs with sublicensable Java insights, enabling code cleanup, vulnerability detection, and license compliance via Intelligence Cloud.

Jordan Smith
Jul 29, 2025
Channel Insider Logo

Channel Insider combines news and technology recommendations to keep channel partners, value-added resellers, IT solution providers, MSPs, and SaaS providers informed on the changing IT landscape. These resources provide product comparisons, in-depth analysis of vendors, and interviews with subject matter experts to provide vendors with critical information for their operations.

Property of TechnologyAdvice. © 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.