Re:Western Digital to Ship 20TB OptiNAND HDDs in November
by mceachen on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @06:36AM
(#29079311)
> it's a healthy market
Isn't it just Western Digital and Seagate at this point?
IBM, Hitachi, and Toshiba storage groups merged to HSGT and was then bought by Western Digital [1] followed by SanDisk [2].
Quantum was bought by Maxtor in 2000, which was subsequently bought by Seagate in 2006. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital#Acquisitions
But the reason you probably don't get storage superstars is because it's a healthy market. There are only a handful of cpu manufacturers/designers (amd, intel, Nvidia, apple, Marvell, ARM, Qualcomm) and because the instruction sets are not compatible it's a huge undertaking to move to a new architecture. All applications must migrate.
But with storage the application uses POSIX and you can out any hardware behind it. Or object API. Or a db. But mostly the application doesn't care except in very precise cases where performance matters a great deal. And even if one application needs object and another is ok with a posix API, it's ok because you can use both from the same machine. So the choices aren't as dramatic.