Staff WritersAccording to ABI Research, more than 50 per cent of US high-speed Internet subscribers have set up some kind of home broadband network- a figure that could be equally applied here in Australia.
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| courtesy:www.gizmodo.com |
Home networking has shifted from being an early adopter technology, to one that is now integral and a key driver to home entertainment as it is increasingly being used to connect PCs, laptops, game consoles, PVR’s and a plethora of other mobile devices over a single household broadband connection.
According to Mike Wolf, director at ABI Research, “Our research shows that more than a quarter of home network owners have a games console on their home network, while another eight per cent have connected their mobile phone
So as the market for home networks grows increasingly matures, hardware vendors are looking for new areas of revenue growth, beyond gateway and home router products.
Analysts Parks and Associates note that home networked storage in the US which has gone from 0.3 per cent of multiple-PC households in 2004, will by 2010, hit almost 10 per cent – a 33-fold increase.
And these new areas of focus include media adapters and network attached storage, which are showing initial signs of progress.
But the key to success, according to ABI, will be to create plug-and-play next-generation products that can be seamlessly integrated with existing home media networks.
And just looking at the hard drive sector, its not hard to see that some vendors have caught the prevailing wind and just keep offering more capacity at a lower price.
Seagate for example has just introduced the industry’s first 1.5-Tbyte PC hard drive and 500-Gbyte notebook PC drives, while Hitachi Global Storage Technologies unveiled the latest generation of its 1-Tbyte server drives.
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, which at 1.5 Tbytes of raw capacity is the largest hard drive in terms of capacity in the market, also made the largest jump in IT history from one size to another, with an instant 500 Gb jump from the previous model Seagate HD, which was 1 Tb.
With this big HD, Seagate is squarely targeting high-end and gaming PCs, workstations, desktop RAID appliances and also mainstream users who are just starting to do more with such new technologies as video making.
The Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive packs 1.5 Tbytes on four platters, and includes a 3-Gbit-per-second SATA interface for a sustained data rate of up to 120 Mbytes per second and is expected to ship in September in Australia and cost around $US500 – only 8 years ago, such a HD would have cost many thousands of dollars and taken up an entire rack in a server room- today 1 Tb is about the size of a house brick – as the price has fallen, so has the physical size of the drives.
Seagate, for its part says there has been an overall 80 per cent year-on-year increase in home/office HD usage from 2001 to the end of this year – in fact notes the company, since 2004, it has been the home market leading sales in storage over the professional sector and the gap increase between home and business is increasing all the time – in the favour of home.
Looking at the market through the eyes of the notebook HD sector shows this up as clear as day – the average price of a notebook hard drive at the end of 2007 was US$50 compared to US$85 in 2006, and this year, that price is set to fall to sub-US$40, according to some storage vendors such as Quantum.
Standard storage space for notebooks however over the same period went from an average of 40-80 Gb to now 160-250 Gb as a standard offering in most portable devices.
And over at enterprise storage vendor EMC, there are moves afoot to go head first into the consumer storage space, as the company wraps up its $US213 million acquisition of Iomega corporation, a well-known brand in the home/office market.
This purchase marks EMC’s first move into consumer hardware, one that will surely push other vendors to come up with newer, bigger and cheaper offerings in the not-so-distant future.
Just like gaming, it seems the explosion in home entertainment and all the new and extra media involved will mean that not only will home storage devices continue to fall in price, but at the same time, their storage capacity will grow at an ever-increasing rate.