Maxtor gives hard drives the hard sell

Storage vendor Maxtor has told system builders to stop regarding storage as solely a capacity product if they want to cash in.

Speaking at the European Integrators Forum in Monte Carlo last week, Jon Toor, director of product marketing at Maxtor, said storage value was no longer measured in price per gigabyte. Instead, assemblers needed to start thinking about what storage can enable the PC system to do.

'Storage plays an equally key role in PC performance,' he said. 'In turn, we need to be aware of how this system performance affects customers.'

Fast drives in general could have a real impact on computer performance and may be a cheaper way of boosting this than through the microprocessor, according to Toor.

He added that the IT industry was guilty of thinking about storage as capacity only.

'With hard drives it's a matter of the extra value that resellers can add by thinking about performance,' Toor said.

COMMENT

The only problem with Maxtor's argument is that hard drives, especially on the PC front, have become a commodity item.

As such, hard drives are products whose position in the market is dictated by price wars and, with increasing competition, there is little point in hoping that PC assemblers will suddenly start to value storage as more than a differentiator.