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Drive makers say it’s
a Happy new year THERE'S a newly popular stocking stuffer around this new year—gadgets equipped with tiny hard disk drives. From video cameras to portable music players, consumer electronics manufacturers are increasingly incorporating high-capacity hard disks into their products to store video and music. That’s providing a windfall for the Asian companies that build drives and parts ranging from screws to base plates, and is offering investors a new trend to bet on. Bullish forecasts abound. Research firm Trend Focus sees hard drive shipments to consumer electronics makers soaring to 55 million units in 2006 from an estimated 17 million this year. Blazing a trail for the market is Japan’s Toshiba Corp, which provides small drives for Apple Computer Inc’s hugely popular iPod music player. Toshiba controls 98 per cent of the market for the 1.8 inch (4.6 cm) diameter drives used in the iPod, which can pack up to 10,000 songs in a device the size of a deck of cards, and its small drives are also appearing in a miniature video camera that can record up to two hours of high-definition video. It has developed an even
smaller drive that measures just 0.85 inch (2.2 cm). That compares with
the 3.5 inch (8.9 cm) drives used in personal computers and increasingly
in games consoles and the digital video recorders made popular by Tivo
Inc of the US. "Everyone is talking about smaller drives these days," says George Poh, chief executive of Singapore-based Unisteel Technology Ltd, which makes precision screws for hard drives. "The hard disk drive
is no longer used just in PC applications, but also in digital media
recorders and gaming consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox, (which) will
support the overall (industry) growth trend, he adds. |
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