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Hard drive market is getting exciting

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DQW Bureau
New Update



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Traditionally, the hard disk drive market has never been considered very
glamorous or even remotely exciting. This perception is mainly due to two
reasons. Firstly, HDD is something which nobody sees as it goes inside the
machine. Secondly, HDD vendors have also on their part refrained from creating
any hype. This has resulted in hard drives being mostly on the periphery all
these years. However, all that should now be a matter of past. Things are
changing and have changed quiet rapidly in the last couple of months-primarily
due to manpower changes.

It started with Samsung, which saw a new person at the helm. Then Maxtor set
up its office in India with Yogesh Kamat being moved from Singapore. After that,
Sharad Khurana took over as the Country head of Seagate, consequent to the
departure of Sharad Srivastava to Singapore. And finally, Srivastava in turn
joined Western Digital as Sales Director for India and South Asia. All these
movements happened within a span of four months. And between these four-Samsung,
Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital-they practically control the entire hard
drive market.

As a result, for a change these vendors have been getting wide media
coverage, which was not there all these years. Whatever media coverage was there
was mainly in the channel publications, not even in the traditional IT journals.
Which itself is sad, as hard drive is the nerve center of a machine without
which a PC is useless, unless one uses it as a thin client.

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Then consider the fact that the PC market this year would be almost five
million strong. Add another 20 percent to that, which constitutes the
replacement market for HDDs, and you come to a figure of six million. Now, this
number is pretty huge by any standards. In addition, this huge market has
basically four major players-as mentioned above-which in itself is quiet
strange.

Considering the market size and the relatively low number of players, the
media coverage has been totally inadequate. Hopefully, this would change now as
all these four players are locked in intense battle to capture a large slice of
the Indian market. Till date, the Indian market has been basically a two horse
race-between Samsung and Seagate-with the other two not very significant
players, which was largely due to the fact that they didn't have a strong
enough presence here. However, now that Maxtor and Western Digital have got
their acts together, things will become much more interesting. Which in turn
should lead to some exciting times ahead.

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