back to article Western Digital cuts revenue forecast, cites 'muted demand'

Storage megacorp Western Digital dropped a bomb on its investors – and the entire computer industry – by announcing that it was lowering its revenue projections for its first fiscal quarter, which will end on September 28. That quarter, the company said in a press release on Thursday, will now see revenues of between $3.9 …

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  1. MacRat

    Prices too High

    Prices still haven't gotten down to pre-flood levels.

    People who can afford to, are waiting.

    1. kb
      Thumb Up

      Re: Prices too High

      Bimbo Newton Crosby. Pre-Flood I was buying Samsung EcoGreens at $35 for 1Tb, $65 for 2Tb, now they are wanting close to $80 for 1Tb and $120 for 2Tb? No thank you, I'm sitting on 3Tb in my current machine and a 1Tb backup drive, I can wait

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @MacRat Indeed. I want 4x2TB disks for a home server and I've got no intention of buying until the price is below what they were before the flood. I'm not going to pay for the fact that WD et al were stupid enough to build their factory in a flood plain.

    WD: the first time I see 2TB disks for £50, I'll buy but not before then. That is a big hint.

  3. Raz
    Thumb Up

    +3

    Plus the fact that now the SSD are actually pretty affordable. A 128 GB drive for less than $90 is not bad.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: +3

      "Plus the fact that now the SSD are actually pretty affordable. A 128 GB drive for less than $90 is not bad."

      While it's true prices are coming down on SSD, does it really matter?

      (I spotted 240GB @ $138 US @ frys right now, the PNY 120G @ $84)

      I say .this isn't even a solution for most people. Toss in the failure rate of SSD drives, and this option can be a nightmare. When these drives go out, there's nothing left to recover. You would need a stack of them, and a 128GB image (hmm keep this on a regular disk?) to load/feed them when they fail which means you need a real disk drive anyway. I consider these novelty speed improvement items, I mean why not just go with SCSI if your after the speed?

      If it is an actual industrial use, I believe in using Industrial Grade Compact Flash, but even then you need to try to limit the read/writes, which means modifying the underlying OS, which may be beyond most, or impossible altogether.

      That same $90 USD can grab a 2TB drive.

      If Ya REALLY want trouble, hit Staples in an emergency looking to buy a DVD Burner. I'll save you the trouble, They don't even HAVE them anymore! I couldn't believe it. I'm thinking why is this store even here? Row after Row of printers, and one small section for parts. Expect few choices, you'd be better off getting a 6-pack of beer and just screaming at the screen

      1. kb
        Happy

        Re: +3

        The trick with SSD is have a 1Tb or better USB HDD and use good imaging software like Paragon to make an image of the drive. I have a sweet little E350 EEE netbook I'm gonna drop one in about 6 months from now, waiting on the prices to drop a little farther, but I've already done the same drop for customers and they are quite happy with it.

        Would I trust my work machine with my important data to an SSD? Not a chance, but in portables they really do make a lot of sense. in the desktop? meh, sleep wakes in under 6 seconds now, how much faster can it go?

  4. RachelG
    Thumb Up

    +4

    again. i'm running out of drive space, i could use more, and i've usually bought from WD... but waiting for prices to fall. actually can't *afford* the prices for the amount of storage i need right now...

  5. Infernoz Bronze badge
    Holmes

    Karma is a beach ROTFL

    WD need to provide 4TB drives NOW, halve all their current prices, and stop the P take with the extortionate Red drives; so 2TB around £40, 3TB no more than £70, 4TB no more than £100. The Green drives are also not that good compared to the lower power competition, possibly being crippled to make the extortionate Red family look better.

    I was not happy to have to pay £100 to replace a faulty WD drive in a RAID, when that drive cost £58 over a year earlier; ...rip-off!

    WD still greedy pricing makes a Hitachi 4TB drive look quite attractively priced, as part of a redundant raid array; however I'll still delay building my next RAID as long as I can, and avoid WD if they don't see sense.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Karma is a beach ROTFL

      Sounds like a solid strategy similar to my own. I hate rohs compliant greentard crap. Almost every rohs compliant piece of electronics I have purchased I've had to replace the Capacitors on, or one day it just up an turns off. And as you well know, there's not a whole lot to repair on a rohs compliant hard disks. With more an more electronics going to surface mount and my old human eyes getting older and older, there will come a point in time where I won't bother. I haven't reached it yet. It makes me mad as hell that I got into electronics and now I can barely see. I was so adept in my early days.. when we actually had chips to solder, Now I can barely even find a part anymore, I'm like an old dog, waiting for that bullet.

    2. kb
      Gimp

      Re: Karma is a beach ROTFL

      If you want a low power drive? Grab a Samsung ecoGreen if you can find one. I have put those drives in some truly hellish places, we're talking warehouses and construction trailers, really grimy places, and those things purr like kittens. Also their large 32Mb cache had them beating a 400gb 7200 RPM Seagate I used to bench them, really great drives. i was impressed enough I replaced both the OS and data drives with Ecogreens (Got in before the flood Woo Hoo!) and not only did I see a speed boost over the Seagate but the drives rarely get above 89f even when under heavy load, truly great drives.

      But if WD wants to know why they aren't selling? Their PRICES STINK! They and Seagate are trying to keep the post flood prices and it just ain't gonna fly, not with SSDs dropping like a stone. Lower the prices already WD!!!

  6. Joerg
    Thumb Down

    These thieves keep their products prices sky-high

    It's a huge fraud. Going on since 1 year ago.

    All the flood lies. They didn't stop production for many weeks if they ever did.

    And even Seagate/Hitachi that didn't have any damage at all raised prices anyway.

    1. MacRat

      Re: These thieves keep their products prices sky-high

      "And even Seagate/Hitachi that didn't have any damage at all raised prices anyway."

      WD owns Hitachi.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe WD *is* going to cut disk prices to pre-flood levels

    The 'muted demand' forecast is just an excuse to not overly upset investors.

    I hope WD (and Seagate) also go back to 3-year/5-year warranties.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Maybe WD *is* going to cut disk prices to pre-flood levels

      Oh, for a decent warranty!

      WD did this to themselves by selling remanufactured drives as 'new' and cranking the price handle too far.

      Hopefully this earnings call is a sign that they have finally realised their mistakes and will take the short profit hit required to regain long-term growth and customer confidence.

      Namely, selling good drives with pre-flood warranties at pre-flood prices.

      Like most above, I'm waiting for that before populating my home NAS, and any business that can afford to wait will do the same.

  8. Bill Neal
    Meh

    'murica

    Sorry about your floods, but most people here don't know or don't care. I would love to buy another home NAS and more drives, but my old WD products are still running great. Maybe when I run out of space next year we can do business again. Somehow, last year I found a 1TB WD MyBook Live for less than competitors prices (around $80). That gave me the stop-gap I need until prices go sane again.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I will chip in

    then can f*** off and die (ref. to their price hike).

    that said - if they die, all the better for the competitor(s). And their (rip-off) pricing :(

  10. fishman

    Mybook Live

    I'm waiting for the prices to drop on both the black drives and the mybook live units. BTW, the mybook live runs debian Linux and is fairly easy to jailbreak. I use rsync to keep my linux boxes at home backed up, and you can nfs mount the drives, too.

  11. John M. Drescher

    "Toss in the failure rate of SSD drives"

    That would be an advantage for SSDs since they have a lower failure rate than hard drives.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @John M. Drescher

      I don't think we can say either way that SSD's are more or less reliable than HDD's.

      There's certainly some consumer grade SSD's with higher failure rates than the average HDD, and others with low failure rates, but there's plenty of variation in the reliability of HDD's. Enterprise SSD's may be different and more durable than consumer devices, but with the rapidly evolving technology we just can't say what the reliability of an SSD bought today is, other than an educated guess based on what we know from now-superseded models. For my home machine I'm going SSD at the end of the month, but only now that I've got a cloud backup in place (on top of my not very methodical local backups).

      When all is said and done, SSD's probably are the future, but if you need 1TB plus of storage, then you'd need to be very rich to afford it, and for Channel solutions I can't see many customers wanting to pay for the likes of OCZ Revodrives (say $3000/£2,000 per terabyte). Not only is that fifteen times the cost of the fastest spinning rust solutions, but OCZ is one of the names associated with poor reliability in the consumer sector.

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