More HDD Consolidations
Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 7:06 am
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Yeah. Samsung has some of the best bang for buck HDDs. Something tells me Seagate might change that for the worse.Manabu wrote:I don't see any imediate competition for HDD as storage medium. A duopoly maybe good for their profits, but I'm doubtfull that it will be good for costumers...
Depends on what you call big capacity (how big) or what you mean by nowhere to be seen (is available good enough or does it also have to compete on $/GB?).ermi wrote:Yeah. Samsung has some of the best bang for buck HDDs. Something tells me Seagate might change that for the worse.Manabu wrote:I don't see any immediate competition for HDD as storage medium. A duopoly maybe good for their profits, but I'm doubtful that it will be good for costumers...
Big capacity SSDs are still nowhere to be seen.
Code: Select all
Crucial C300 256GB ~$440 ~$1.72/GB
Samsung 470 256GB ~$448 ~$1.75/GB
Crucial M4/C400 256GB ~$460 ~$1.80/GB
Intel 320 Series 300GB ~$565 ~$1.88/GB
Crucial M4/C400 512GB ~$930 ~$1.82/GB
Intel 320 Series 600GB ~$1041 ~$1.74/GB
That's what Kodak said about their film business not too many years ago.Manabu wrote:I don't see any imediate competition for HDD as storage medium.
+1m0002a wrote:That's what Kodak said about their film business not too many years ago.Manabu wrote:I don't see any imediate competition for HDD as storage medium.
Even if HDD's are around for awhile, it is a very low margin business. The future of the Desktop PC is already in jeopardy, and and even laptops are loosing market share to tablets. The hardware infrastructure is changing fast.
So, name a technology that in less than 10 years can be no more than 2 times the cost/GB of HDDs for storage, and be better than it. Don't forget to put in your calculations that the price/GB for HDDs is falling.m0002a wrote:That's what Kodak said about their film business not too many years ago.Manabu wrote:I don't see any imediate competition for HDD as storage medium.
Even if HDD's are around for awhile, it is a very low margin business. The future of the Desktop PC is already in jeopardy, and and even laptops are loosing market share to tablets. The hardware infrastructure is changing fast.
It seems like the SSDs are overtaking electromechanical.Manabu wrote:So, name a technology that in less than 10 years can be no more than 2 times the cost/GB of HDDs for storage, and be better than it. Don't forget to put in your calculations that the price/GB for HDDs is falling.
Yes Kodak is still in business, but it had 86,000 employees in 1998, and only 18,800 employees in 2010 (that includes employees of some companies it recently acquired). It is nowhere near the giant it once was.dhanson865 wrote:But I'd add that Kodak stayed in business (still a multibillion dollar company looking at the 2010 earnings). Look at Polaroid if you want a company that died making film (don't be confused by the continued use of the Polaroid brand after the original company went bankrupt).
Dwindle? your serious? hardly SSDs are still far to expensive and small to even become close to replacing the HD. I refuse pay out double, tripple the price for SSD with half the capacity of HD. The HD will be around for years until SSD is refind to better price/preformance ratio until then it will only be used by the well off gaming enthusiast.BillyBuerger wrote:That sucks. But I guess it's expected as the HDD market begins to dwindle. Hopefully if Seagate does buy them, they use them to make a better line of drives. Maybe continue the series for a while at least.
Memristors, perhaps?ces wrote: Seems like it will require a new solid state memory technology than the ones the SSDs are using now (something that is not to big a jump away from current techniques).
I find it hard to believe that it is getting more expensive to manufacture hard drives, since I just purchased a 1.5T drive for about $65. I remember purchasing a Seagate 1 GB drive for my home PC in 1995 at a cost of $600 (that was the 1995 price, which would probably be at least $1000 today).NeilBlanchard wrote:I think another factor is the tightening market of rare earth magnetic materials? Production in China is more restricted, and with more electric cars coming into production, (though some are "pure" AC motors with no permanent magnets), are all going to make it harder / more expensive to make hard drives.
Mark at PCMagSeagate and Samsung are calling it a "Broad Strategic Alignment" but it more common terms, Samsung has more or less sold off their hard drive storage division to Seagate. The deal was rumored over the weekend by the Wall Street Journal, now it's official. As part of the deal Samsung will combine its hard drive operations with Seagate and will supply Seagate with NAND for Seagate's enterprise SSDs and hybrid hard drives and other products. Interestingly, the deal comes barely a month after Western Digital agreed to purchase Hitachi.
It's not all one way - the deal also includes a provision for Seagate to provide drives for Samsung PCs, notebooks and consumer electronics. There are also several other smaller cross-license agreements as part of the deal.
The combined value of these transactions and agreements is approximately $1.375 billion, which will be paid by Seagate to Samsung in the form of 50% stock (45.2 million shares, 9.6% ownership of Seagate) and 50% cash.
...Samsung will also add a director to Seagate's board. ...
... Toshiba will remain as the third-largest disk drive vendor in what suddenly might be seen as an imperiled market, one which faces significant pressure from SSDs in portable devices, tablets, and even some notebooks. That company remains the only major vendor of the 1.8-inch form factor drive, the main target of SSDs.
The Seagate-Samsung arrangement benefits Seagate, however, in that it assures Seagate a steady supply of flash memory for use as the company expands its SSD and hybrid drives ...
Hopefully they will get on the stick and move into the future instead of hanging on to their past.The Seagate-Samsung arrangement benefits Seagate, however, in that it assures Seagate a steady supply of flash memory for use as the company expands its SSD and hybrid drives ...
I'd rather they backtrack to before the 7200.11 series.ces wrote:Hopefully they will get on the stick and move into the future instead of hanging on to their past.The Seagate-Samsung arrangement benefits Seagate, however, in that it assures Seagate a steady supply of flash memory for use as the company expands its SSD and hybrid drives ...
Is the HDD-market dwindeling though? i thought need for storage (perhaps somewhat surprisingly), is increasing at a steady rate, and that HDDs are selling more and more?BillyBuerger wrote:That sucks. But I guess it's expected as the HDD market begins to dwindle. Hopefully if Seagate does buy them, they use them to make a better line of drives. Maybe continue the series for a while at least.
The need for server storage is increasing, but probably not the need for personal computing storage. This is partly due to tablets and laptops taking over from desktops. For tablets and laptops, the move to SSD will be picking up steam very fast. I heard that desktop machine sales are down 20% this year, and even laptop sales are slow, due mainly to tablet sales (mostly iPad).ATWindsor wrote:Is the HDD-market dwindeling though? i thought need for storage (perhaps somewhat surprisingly), is increasing at a steady rate, and that HDDs are selling more and more?
And this is bad news, not as bad as the best supplier in the business being bought by WD, but not good nevertheless.
Really small devices like phones, media players, hand held game machines, cameras use embedded flash and/or slot based removable storage (think SD cards and such). Remember when the Ipod had a hard drive in it? (IPod Classic was a 1.8" Toshiba HD, Ipod Mini was a 1" HD made by Hitachi or Seagate)ATWindsor wrote:Is the HDD-market dwindeling though? i thought need for storage (perhaps somewhat surprisingly), is increasing at a steady rate, and that HDDs are selling more and more?
That quote is from April 2010 so it's a year old. Lets see if I can find a new quote."For all of 2010, global HDD unit shipments are expected to rise to 674.6 million units up 22.8 percent from 549.5 million in 2009. This contrasts markedly with 2009, when shipments declined by 2 percent."
"However, it was also a year of significant missed opportunity as the industry's supply/demand dynamic deteriorated as the year progressed, resulting in sharply declining ASPs, with the final quarter demonstrating a year-over-year decline in industry revenue of 7 percent on a unit increase of 4 percent, and an even sharper decline in profitability,"
So the full on decline of traditional hard drives hasn't started yet. But we are close enough to the peak that the companies are looking ahead and two players are bowing out. The two remaining big dogs Seagate and WD are both seriously looking at Hybrid drives with flash memory, SRAM, rotating disks, and a controller smart enough to mix and match as needed as the next step volume wise. That'll muddy the waters a bit as a quality hybrid drive will extend the life of rotating disks but price wise it isn't the same product that they've been shipping."Seagate also took a negative view, explaining in executive commentary that the quarter represented a "less than normal seasonal increase in demand for hard disk drives", and that margins had been hurt by intense price competition."
WD chief operating officer Timothy Leyden implied that hard-drive prices should continue to decline in the near term.
"While inventories in the HDD supply chain exiting the quarter were well controlled in each segment, we still believe that despite a reduction of approximately 2 million to 3 million HDDs in the PC supply chain, there is still an inventory excess of some 6 million to 8 million HDD units in the PC manufacturers' pipeline, and this will place additional downward pressure on the HDD TAM in the March quarter," he said.