At the DiskCon conference, I sat down with IDEMA president - also the show's organiser-, Joel Weiss (pictured) to discuss some of the changes his 22 years old trade organisation had to confront in the face of a consolidating disk drive industry that went from 60 to now only 6 disk drive companies!

To survive, IDEMA had to widen its scope from just being the association of disk drive companies and their suppliers (heads, substrate, platters...) to now include solid state/Flash drive companies like Sandisk and work on a common nomenclature. Weiss expects the DiskCon show to draw 1,600 to 1,700 attendees this week.

Although the IDEMA president does not see hard disk drives to disappear anytime soon, he does point to the industry's greatest challenge to stay relevant with the rise of SSDs.

"HDD companies need to continue to increase the capacity of their drives by 40% annually if they want to keep the SSD makers at bay. That means HDD companies will have to invest heavily in semiconductor technologies like lithography, the same than the ones used by SSD makers. But that will carry an initial cost of $2.5 per drive. And that's a lot in this industry", says Weiss.

Inspite of the huge costs, the IDEMA president thinks the hard drive companies have no other choice. Weiss expects the HDD makers to pay high dollars for the new equipments in order to keep up the rapid pace of innovation, while the SSD camp has the luxury to wait a little bit longer for the semiconductor industry to amortise the costs before adopting these new advanced technologies like lithography.

Here's a video where Weiss explains the role of Idema and DiskCon:



And another video, where Weiss looks at future technologies for the hard disk drive industry: