Comment Re:Oligopolies Suck (Score 1) 153
I'm not sure if you're making the claim that storage is now an oligopoly. Certainly, rotational media storage is, but that is a decreasing share of the overall storage market. Looking at the storage market as a whole and you should include all the SSD manufacturers like Intel, OCZ, and Crucial. I think you get to seven significant players pretty quickly, although I suspect there will be some consolidation with SSD's too sooner than later.
Over the past 10 years or so, HDD manufacturers have been on a race to the bottom in terms of $/GB. I think that's the exact reason you get batches of lousy consumer drives out on the market. Consolidation isn't going to be good for prices, but maybe in a less price sensitive market we can expect to see more consistent reliability from lot to lot for a given SKU.