Dubai: Airplanes and hard drives only have one thing in common, you don't want either to crash.
At least that's the connection Didier Trassaert, a senior director for California-based Western Digital, which manufactures hard drives, is trying to sell to consumers.
"You wouldn't just fly over the Atlantic in a single plane with just one engine, would you?" he asked during a recent interview.
While comparing airline and hard disk disasters may seem like a bit of a stretch, Trassaert, who is Western Digital's senior director of branded devices for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region, likes to point out that the information that consumers keep on their computers, while not on par with a human life, is often valuable personal data, including records, music and family photos and videos.
When such data end up on a troubled disk, he said, people don't ask how much it will cost to recover it. They just ask if it can be done. When the answer is "no", there is often "a lot of drama." Trassaert is hoping to use that fear to convince consumers to buy more of Western Digital products, especially the company's external hard drives, to back that data up. Branded devices bring in about 19 per cent of Western Digital's revenue, which was $4.34 billion in 2006.
Trassaert's sales pitch comes along a recent surge in the demand for storage devices, pushed mainly by the rise of digital video but also by the understanding of how valuable some personal information can be. Five years ago when Trassaert worked for Maxtor, a competitor of Western Digital, he said the company estimated that it produced about 6 million gigabytes, or more that 1.25 million DVDs worth of storage, a year.
These days, he says, no one knows how much is being produced, but just one hard drive today holds up to a 1,000 gigs.
"Demand for these devices is growing at a very outstanding rate," he says.
Trassaert said the growth in EMEA is about 15 per cent quarter on quarter, although the rate is probably "higher in the Middle East." He estimates that about 250,000 hard drives were sold in the region during the last quarter, which he expects to double in 2009.
