Cash slump a Seagate problem, or a hard disk industry problem? Seagate revenues and profits have slumped in its third fiscal 2014 quarter, reflecting ongoing difficulties in the disk drive market and product transitions. Revenues of $3.4bn were reported in the quarter ending 28 March, and these were 4 per cent down year-on-year. Net profits were $395m, 5 per cent lower than a year ago. …
1. Replacement interval for PCs is getting longer. Once 3 years to obsolescence, now 5 years, will probably soon be 7+ years, and determined by hardware becoming unreliable rather than obsolescent.
2. Many new systems use SSDs not HDs. SSDs are getting larger and cheaper. I expect that soon the default system device on a new corporate desktop PC will be an SSD, not a HD. The domestic PC market is in obvious decline. Consumers prefer tablets (with SSDs)
Which leaves cloud storage and enterprise storage on multi-Terabyte drives, but for how long?
IBM sold its disk drive business to HGST quite a few years back. I think IBM worked out what was coming on the SSD front long before the crowd did.
Speaking personally as someone who has just upgraded his PC at home last week.
I had all the HDD space I needed already, I did not need a new rust drive. I kept one Rust HDD in my new build and put the other in the recycled old PC.
I brought a new better SSD for my new Machine. They are coming down in price and getting larger.
Rust is on the way out.
I suspect industry wide long term things are bad in the retail space at least.
I used to buy drives at a pretty regular pace, but I stopped during the Thailand Flood Crisis. I'm very disappointed at how long it is taking for prices to come back down. Yes, "is taking," present continuous, because I bought my 3TB hard drive for $90 pre-flood, and I haven't found any 3TB (or bigger) drives even reach that price since.
So, I'm just getting used to having a fixed amount of space, and using SSDs whenever I can. SSDs have dramatic speed advantages over HDD.
Seagate is also not attractive because their drives have strangely glitchy performance, and Backblaze found their drives to be the least reliable (but cheapest on a per-TB basis), and their SSHD hybrid drives have too small and too slow SSD caching to be worth the expense.
This is how things are supposed to work. Every player in a market adds features, reduces prices, some manner of 'bigger, better, stronger, and eventually you hit a big wall. Nothing can move so some bright spark comes up with a novel way to get the system rolling again. Repeat until wealthy, insane or dead.
Without that gridlock there would be no justification for new technologies to be developed. You can't throw something wholly new into the market randomly you know. When you hear people say 'that was an idea that came before its time' that means the idea was a solution with no problem. The opposite of how you make money.
This is all a good thing.
Surprisingly, desktop sales are actually UP from last year, countering the general down-trend.
I think it may have something to do with their new SSHD line ($2GB medium/fast model, $125)
I happen to be one happy customer of this particular new model. I couldn't switch to pure SSD yet because I need the much larger space at a reasonable price. Also, I used to buy from WD (longer half-life and reliability), but in the last upgrade I switched because the new SSHD was exactly what I was looking for, and no other company had anything similar (hybrid) with similar storage capacity.
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