Reports are filtering in today that Western Digital has reached an agreement to purchase Fujitsu’s hard disk drive development and manufacturing assets. Already the world’s second-biggest drive manufacturer, Western Digital would edge closer to market-leader, Seagate, with the acquisition. The move would give WD even greater manufacturing capacity in Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand, and would potentially open up greater access to the laptop OEM market, where Fujitsu has performed well over the last few years.

Let’s take a look at the two company’s product lines and market positions as we determine the impact of this deal.

Update: Fujitsu is denying the deal, even though the market loves it, but it still makes sense for WDC to pick up either Fujitsu or Hitachi’s disk drive business to better compete with Seagate.
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Update: I have created another page for custom drive icons in Mac OS X

If you’re like most people, you have accumulated a large number of removable USB storage devices over the years, from flash-based thumb drives to external hard disks.  I have seven of these things sitting on my desk or in by laptop bag right now!  But Windows XP and Vista uses the same icon for all of them, adding a few seconds of examination every time I try to select one.  Icon confusion can cause problems too, like the time I accidentally saved a presentation to my big desktop backup drive instead of the thumb drive I headed out of the office with!

Before: Everything looks like a generic external book type thing.

But I’ve stumbled on a great method to create easy to locate the right drive using free software and the power of Google.  I create a custom drive icon that looks like the physical drive in Windows, so I can see which is which at a glance.  Here’s how!

After: Aah, now I can see which removable drive is which.  Shame about that iPhone icon, though…

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There has been lots of talk about the Data Robotics (aka Drobo) SOHO “storage robot”
- whoever they have doing their marketing deserves a raise! When I first heard about it, I was pretty puzzled - Why care about yet another storage enclosure, especially an overly expensive one that doesn’t even have NAS features? On closer examination, I have become a believer in the potential of the device and the company. Drobo offers some key ingredients that promise future success to me: a clear focus on usability, novel thinking to solve a real-world problem, and that great marketing I mentioned earlier. Click through for the full story… Continue Reading »