Seagate's south UK factory hasn't a future but HDDs do (it hopes) Seagate is closing down its factory in Havant on the south coast of the UK and axing 327 jobs. The redundancies are part of a renewed focus by the Californian giant on its disk drive technology roadmap to boost revenues and profitability. The Havant closure is part of the restructuring announced earlier this month, along with …
I love hard drives. They are little mechanical miracles. The problem as I see it though is these capacity gains are minimal, they are way off in the future, and they are not even coming close to keeping up with SSD sizes. Sure, there is a price gap right now, but what is the cost to the HDD manufacturers to retro-fit their assembly lines to build HAMR drives? Is it worth it to invest in that, or should they continue to beef up R&D and investment into NAND and other emerging storage tech?
"I love hard drives. They are little mechanical miracles."
It's not just the fact they can squeeze such masses of information at such an unbelievably small scale onto something that is still mechanically-based (and basically just "spinning rust"). Nor the fact that capacities have increased by orders of magnitude since the early 90s (when the scale and capacity already seemed pretty impressive.)
It's also the fact they can do it consistently and reliably (#) at what- by historical standards- are incredibly low prices.
But, yeah. Capacities are still increasing over time, but nowhere near as fast as their incredible growth during the 90s and early-2000s. Whereas SSDs are growing larger and cheaper at a much steeper exponential rate and likely to- if not catch up- then at least get close enough that people will choose them anyway. (##)
(#) Yeah, I know someone's going to complain about the reliability of modern hard drives, but in the scheme of things, I'm talking about reliability on a works-at-all basis, and they're still miles better than that.
(##) Even if HDDs remain much larger and cheaper, most people don't necessarily require that much capacity and the price differential will likely be acceptable for the faster speed, and size and reliability on the move. They're already at this stage for some people.
Just remember, SSD's are great at speed, but mechanical hard drives are far better long term storage, if you only run them at back-up time and leave them off, mostly.
SSD's start loosing data if you don't power them up for more than a few months.
I have mechanical hard drives I used just for backups, that are still good since the 90's.
As long as you do a read-rewrite every ~5 years, data loss will be minimal.
The site in Havant was originally IBM Havant. Then when IBM spun off the storage business in the 90's, it became Xyratex, then Seagate bought them in 2014.
Going west along the A27 you pass IBM North Harbour. The site was exclusively IBM, with 6 buildings - Looks like it may well be just 2 occupied by IBM - the rest is now a business park.
http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/business/ibm-declares-that-portsmouth-is-still-its-hq-despite-job-cuts-1-5984819
http://www.lakesidenorthharbour.com/
What do they actually make there? I'd have thought that these days the basic hard drive mechanisms were made in China, South East Asia, etc. and that an operation like this would be too far from the rest of the industry and small scale (presumably, since I wasn't aware of it) for HDD manufacture.
So I'm guessing they make something else, possibly higher-level, with the basic building blocks?
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You can't blame this on Brexit, it's a dying technology.
Although if the EU was more concerned about technology than agriculture, we could have been enjoying paying £2000 a family per year to subsidise the Common Storage Policy, allowing French peasant engineers to still make magnetic core store to add to the European data mountain.
@AC; "I just hope that those who voted to get out of the EU also lose their jobs."
From yesterday's Brexit story:-
"Comtek Network Systems who we also spoke to before June 23, decided that Leave would win after talking to people near the firm’s base in Flintshire in north-east Wales – an area where 56 per cent voted to get out of the EU. [..] Comtek – whom we spoke to here before the vote - canned the move of a research team of 25 people from Northern Ireland to north-east Wales and may instead shift them to the Republic of Ireland."
"There is no intent to compete with SSDs on the speed front, but every intention of competing from the capacity point of view."
The market has shifted towards SSD and will continue to shift that way.
It seems like they aren't looking forward, they are just putting their fingers in their ears and shouting I can't hear you.
Seems a strange way to go in my opinion.
Speaking as a 'Murican who grew up during the great offshoring-of-manufacturing -- wouldn't Brexit be something that could prevent things like this from happening? I thought a good portion of the argument was that having an economy less interconnected with the rest of the world would force the UK to become more vertically integrated, doing more jobs inside the country including manufacturing. Wasn't that basically what happened until Margaret Thatcher took over?
I guess I'm one of those people who looks around, sees no opportunity at all for people with a factory worker level intelligence and skillset, and wonders what we'll do with all of them. Once the only jobs producing reasonable incomes are Senior Cloud Engineer and Robotic Assembly Architect, you're going to have a lot of angry, less educated, less skilled people out there who have lots of time on their hands and an axe to grind. I'd rather keep some inefficiency in the system, just to give people something to do.
As much as Trump being President scares me, his proposal to remove the US from trade agreements and add tariffs on foreign-made goods would be a very interesting experiment. If every company, regardless of size or influence, woke up one morning and found the conditions favoring domestic work, wouldn't the work have to return? If nothing else, it would inject a little economic diversity back into the country and make it "OK" again to work in a factory.
Dear Erik4872,
I understand where you are coming from, but you make one mistake ... why are we offshoring the production of, say pants, to Bangladesh where they can be produced at $2 and sold here for $150 ? It is the same for electronics, yet not as big a margin ... except for inkjet printer ink, where ml's are sold for the price of a 100 liter barrel. Thing is, if we start having to pay factory workers, say, $1000 a month instead of $20, what will the price of the goods be ? Nobody would be able to afford a radio ... welcome back to the 50's. And, the investors are used to high returns, this is only possible on the back of the third world.
If you impose tariffs on others, others will impose tariffs on you, d'oh!!!! Now, this does not really hurt the UK, as they produce nothing of interest anyway ... but the US exports a lot of software, electronics, crops, cars etc ... not that good for them, methinks. So far, Trump has not made a single proposal that made any sense at all, imho, and he knows it ... it is a populist tactic, he makes ridiculous proposals that sound "great" because "he is after the masses, he will never get the intelligentsia anyway", he knows that ... others do the same, Farage, Le Pen in Europe, for example. I will stop here, cf Godwin's law ...
Best Regards,
Prof. Fcuking Obvious
For sure the added cost of producing anything in the UK and then exporting it to a world market can't have been beneficial for keeping the factory open. I think your peasants have made a cunning move voting for a Brexit as food imports will be too dear for the majority. Though without the nifty subsidies that were splashed around the whole EU including the UK, food production may becoming a bit more expensive as well. What seems to have been lost in the discussion is the fact that the EU first and foremost is a trade organisation. Not only setting standards on banana's and the amount of fish to catch but basically anything you've grown accustomed to the past 50 years. It for sure will have a beneficial effect on immigration levels though if the UK becomes less attractive with unemployment levels equal to Spain. So,.. hooray... it works!
I wonder though in how far the delay tactics being implemented by your elected representatives is a ploy to convince those people that voted for a leave it may not have been the greatest thing for the UK to happen after all. With that becoming more obvious with the slew of price hikes, having a new referendum may be an option after all. Not that I see it make the UK regain much of what it will have lost in the mean time, but it might become a net beneficiary for a while to patch it up a bit.
Let's just hope that the housing market that so many have spend their fortunes on doesn't completely collapse now the Chinese are avoiding the market. For the coming 5 years or so, the alleged negligible effects of the standing result will fester on whatever happens next. At least your political elite can't blame Brussels for all that's not well any more. Every cloud has a silver lining,.. right?
For the delusional idea that factory work will return to the UK to meet local demand,.. you do realise that you have to shed about 70% of your current living standards to make that happen, do you? To get to par with Vietnam and Pakistan? I certainly hope it will not be that grim. However, if a loon like Trump gets the vote of the gun toting zealot barbarians on the other side of the pond, we may well expect such things to happen. There is no limit to the stupidity of man, so who knows.
"Nearly 55% of voters in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight voted Leave"
As a Scot who (along with the significant majority of Scots) voted Remain, but looks like getting dragged out anyway by English and Welsh voters, I wish I could get more schadenfreude out of this than I'm able to muster.
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