Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu, Hitachi owned the server market cause WD didn't have an entry....and it is a very profitable sector. Seagate Technology and Fujitsu, respectively command 45 and 20 percent of this profitable sector. Hitachi ranks third in this four-company market at 18 percent, followed by Maxtor at 14 percent....that's 97%....not a lot of room there for WD to be a player.
Servers and enthusiasts machines were SCSI partly because of HD speed and partly cause the I/O load was shifted off the CPU. That gave us more CPU for our programs. But as SATA reduced some of that performance difference, WD decided it would try and find a market niche between the two.....making a drive that would serve as a "bargain basement" server drive and at the same time a enthusiasts drive with not quite the price tag of SCSI. They succeeded to the point of you don't see SCSI marketed to enthusiasts much any more...I can't remember a MoBo w/ on board SCSI in ages.
Then SATA drive prices went in the toilet. Raptor started to lose market share because of the cost per GB and then the, perhaps because they tried to reduce manufacturing costs, the latest versions have had reliability issues garnering only a 12 percentile in reliability ratings.
The problem WD has is maintaining a 10k production line for a relatively small market. They haven't made server inroads, which leaves just the geek squad market to go to.....and why buy a Raptor when games take up 12 or more GB leaving you with room for just 10 games.
The Raptors problem is that to spin that fast they only have one or two 75 GB platters. The new Cheetah 15k.6 I believe has 1-3 platters at about 150 GB per platter. With SCSI and Raptors having a presumably longer time to market because of manufacturing tolerances and testing, the Raptor is left in a position by the time it comes out, the other vendors have yet again increased density and they can get these newer / better drives out faster. 10K is only 38% faster than 7200 whereas 15k is 208% faster.
SATA is $0.24 / GB
Raptors are $1.16 / GB
SCSI is $1.87 / GB
So you pay 500% for a marginal increase in performance but than only 50% more for a doubling of performance. That's why they are struggling, they lost their niche....most people willing to pay $1.16 would pay $1.87. So in order to regain it, they either have to lower their price, tough give manufacturing tolerances for higher speeds or get faster.
Now we see a lot of talk about 2.5" drives. Because of huge increases in density, these drives are attractive cause vendors can put out the size people need on a smaller platter. Smaller platters mean ya ca spin em faster with less power and less heat.
http://www.eetimes.com/issue/bus/OEG20040219S0022
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_savvio_15k.pdf
So the economics have to be considered with regard to maintaining both 2.5 and 3.5 inch production lines and the reliability issues as well......will we soon see desktops offered with HD SLI with matched RAID 0 2.5 drives ? Maybe the new Raptor will be a 2.5".