Hitachi changes the Fabrik of its consumer HDD strategy

The fastest growing sector of the storage industry these days is personal external storage, where consumer demand is being triggered by the growing availability of multimedia and the increasing need to procrastinate before deciding how to keep track of it all. It's what's helping keep Western Digital and Seagate afloat in a time when business orders for equipment have plummeted; and it's making competitors with lesser market share like Hitachi GST have to play catch-up very quickly.

This morning, Hitachi announced its solution to that little problem: It's acquiring Fabrik, a (re-) manufacturer of fashionable external hard drives and backup systems. The move will probably immediately ensure that Fabrik's good-looking, environmentally-friendly models use Hitachi GST internals; but it also means that a key former Maxtor veteran -- a refugee following its acquisition by Seagate -- will join Hitachi's executive team, in a thus-far unnamed capacity: Mike Cordano, Fabrik's founder and CEO, will be in charge of helping Hitachi assemble a more consumer-oriented brand for storage, frankly for the first time. Hitachi has suffered in this department in the past, trying in previous years to be the first to unveil high-capacity storage for the system builders market, but failing to match Seagate's and WD's performance numbers.