Where have all the Hard Disc Drive manufacturers gone?

As the major Hard Disc Drive (HDD) manufacturers move towards even further consolidation, two – Seagate and Western Digital  – have announced with very short notice that they will be reducing the warranties on a number of their HDD’s; in some cases from five years to one year!

The new warranty periods offered will come into force at the turn of the year and whilst ‘Enterprise’ designated HDD’s will keep most of their exiting warranty levels, it is likely that many of the new computing devices that the average buyer (you and me) purchase in 2012 will contain the reduced warranty HDD’s.

Some reports suspect that the recent flooding has caused this move, but Seagate – one of the big players – has said that they want to reduce the cash tied up in their 5 year warranty plans for new internal development funding.

Should we as consumers be worried about this move? On the price front, perhaps. Prices had already marginally increased due to the flooding in Thailand and one would think that reducing the warranty on HDD’s by 80% in some cases that this might have been reflected in a drop in the price of the affected HDD’s. However, there is unlikely to be any reduction in prices any time soon.

From a technical point of view, should we be worried that HDD’s will be of lesser quality? One hopes not and in fact all of the HDD’s will continue to be manufactured in the same controlled environment that they have always been made in. In my many years of using, installing, and sometimes recovering data from them, I have only ever experienced one complete mechanical failure of an HDD. They seem to be one of the most reliable moving pieces of computing technology in use today.

Another aspect these announcements have thrown up, is just how few HDD manufacturers there now are. This diagram shows how much consolidation has happened over the past 20 years with just three major players (Seagate, Western Digital & Toshiba) now left in the market. Perhaps Toshiba will be making similar announcements soon?

Slowly consumer choice is without doubt being eroded in this area and regulators need to keep a watchful eye on this market otherwise we could all soon be paying much more for our HDD’s with perhaps even less warranty.

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XML Editors – Another poll result

Back in the middle of 2011 and as part of an ongoing survey of XML Editing tools, we thought it would be interesting to run a poll to find out if people would tell us which XML editing tool they were using.

The results of this first poll showed us that out of 231 page views only 14 votes were cast with Oxygen coming out top with 7 votes followed by Altova XMLSpy & XML Mind’s XML-Editor getting 2 votes each and Arbortext Editor, FrameMaker & XMetaL receiving 1 vote each.

As we thought this was a pretty low response we decided to run a second poll which ends tomorrow (30th November). So far from another 228 views we have seen 3 more votes for Oxygen, 1 vote for the Pollo’s XML Editor, 1 vote for Notepad++ and 1 vote for Vim.

Bringing those two results together we see totals of…

  • Oxygen – 10
  • Altova XMLSpy – 2
  • XML Mind’s XML-Editor – 2
  • Arbortext Editor – 1
  • FrameMaker – 1
  • Notepad++ – 1
  • Pollo’s XML Editor – 1
  • Vim – 1
  • XMetaL – 1

Clearly Oxygen is the winner in this poll out of 20 votes cast from over 400 page views. But what else does this poll tell us about the use of XML tools in Publishing?

Initial tweeting & posting about the poll seems not to have brought out the sorts of voting results that we thought there would be. So who is using the estimated 500,000 plus installed XML editing tools? This number is from an aggregation of figures from direct conversations we’ve had with some of the 70 plus XML editing tool vendors & developers that we discovered during our current survey.

We also know from our own direct conversations with various publishers about XML workflows & production environments that many more than 20 XML editing tools are in use today. Of course many publishers are somewhat reticent to discuss their own production environments openly, therefore we thought a ‘blind’ poll would have drawn out many more examples of the use and variety of XML editing Tools. That said, these are the results so far.

With regards to the XML Editing Tools survey, we have unearthed a wide variety of tools available (70 plus as mentioned above), ranging from the very well-known commercial products through various ‘Freeware’ offerings that are available to a number of very interesting Open-Source products. We expect to be able to begin publishing some of the findings of our survey soon and will post another update in due course.

In the meantime, if you have any comments about the XML Editing tool that you are using, then feel free to add your comments to this post to join the conversation.

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Website update for Araman Consulting

Welcome to the Araman Consulting updated website.

I have now moved the Araman Consulting website over to a WordPress based environment, which has been interesting. I’ve used Blogger.com in the past for personal usage, but felt that a WordPress based platform offered a few more advantages that suited what I wanted to do for the Araman Consulting website.

Learning a new application is always challenging and there have been a few new areas to dig into. I am sure that there is much more to learn about using WordPress, but there does seem to be a vast amount of good documentation around that covers almost every question that I needed answering, so far! I have also had some good assistance from my website hosting company, UK2.Net.

So there we have it. The updated site is now up and running, more tweaking will be needed, I am sure. Now it’s time to move on to other items including a review of XML Editing Software that I seem to have been working for some time. I hope to release some preliminary information at the end of November. As they say, ‘watch this space’.

Please send any feedback/comments that you have about the updated site. I am happy to hear all.

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