back to article Yeah, keep buying those SSDs, grins Seagate: Your data will be on our disks eventually, muaha

Seagate made a canine evening meal of its third 2017 fiscal quarter – with flattish revenues on the annual compare greeted by a disappointed Wall Street expecting more and marking the shares down 15 per cent. The full year revenue is likely to show an annual decline as well. Chairman and CEO Steve Luczo’s company recorded $2. …

  1. Fazal Majid

    Delusional

    Sure, there is an argument to be made for disk replacing tape as the backup and archiving medium of choice, but that is not a path to riches, as can be seen by comparing the market cap of Seagate or WDC and Quantum.

  2. hellwig

    Capacity or Revenue?

    "It also did not provide disk unit ships per disk market sector, and stated it “will discontinue providing unit detail” in future, asserting that capacity shipped is more relevant."

    Well, they can think that, until you try to relate capacity to revenue. To keep your customers buying more hardware, the price/TB has to go DOWN. Why wouldn't you keep reporting the number of drives (which will probably go down) with revenue? Which, if it stays stagnant or increases, makes it look like you're doing BETTER with less.

    Instead, you've basically given people a number that will go up (capacity), and directly compared that to revenue (apparently stagnant). Doing more and making less/the same isn't indicative of a positive business strategy.

    1. Gerhard Mack

      Re: Capacity or Revenue?

      Exactly, In my case as flash goes down in price, I'm replacing drives with SSD since on my PC and Laptop, I just don't need more than a few hundred GB of space.

      The larger drives, seem even more expensive so as much as I'd like to replace my two spinning drives with something larger, I just can't justify the expense right now. My remaiing two drives are actually more expensive now than when I bought them 3 years ago.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Capacity or Revenue?

        "My remaiing two drives are actually more expensive now than when I bought them 3 years ago."

        It would be interesting to see a plot of disk pricing per MByte over time. Any increase in the price per MByte in recent times is almost certainly against the trend. However - the drop in value of UK Sterling since last summer would probably have put at least 15% on an otherwise stable price in USD.

        My reference point is always the PC 500MB disk in about 1990 that cost me GBP175 in the currency at that time. IIRC there was a 10MB Apple II compatible Winchester disk in about 1980 that cost somewhere between GBP1K-2K at that time.

        1. phuzz Silver badge

          Re: Capacity or Revenue?

          Sometimes the cheapest way to buy a harddrive is to buy an external one.

          EG, this external 4TB Seagate is £99, whereas the cheapest internal drive (also a Seagate) is £119. (plus you get a free USB enclosure with the external drive)

          Any guesses as to why this is? Perhaps there's more competition in the market for external drives?

          1. razorfishsl

            Re: Capacity or Revenue?

            Mass market.

            but USB is crap for transferring data.

            throw the case away and fit it internally directly to the SATA.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HAMR technology leading to 16TB and 16TB+ drives

    I can't wait until I can lose all that data in one go. Now it's the tedious, old-fashioned lose 4 disks one by one fashion.

    What backup? Don't they all blow at the same time, in sync, as it were?

    1. Robert Sneddon

      Backups, backups, backups

      One backup is no backup. Two backups is a start. Three backups is getting somewhere, with at least one of them offsite and I'm not talking about that cloudy-woudy thing.

      RAID or similar is not a backup, it is only a method of improving uptime locally.

  4. earl grey
    Paris Hilton

    mmmmm - muffins

    what? you know what i mean

  5. Mike Shepherd
    Meh

    "Seagate made a canine evening meal..."

    Midday, surely?

  6. Chris J. C.
    Go

    Systems Manager.

    Seagate Makes excellent Hybrid SSHD drives, combining Fast SSD as cache with huge TB of disc storage. Now NVM is the latest technology with GB/sec read write speeds.

    Seagate should make an NVM Hybrid Product, an NVM+HD.

    Imagine: 64 GB NVM stick as cache backed by 4/8/10 TB of Disk, linked by LPDDR4 16GB RAM cache and custom 3 level cache controller chip.

    Users could copy over a full BluRay disk in 2 seconds, and the drive would migrate it from it's RAM cache to NVM, and from NVM to disk as needed.

    Three Level Caching allows RAM disk speeds for huge 10 TB Seagate Drives. RAM speed, cached by SSD Flash memory, and long term storage provided by those Ultra reliable HAMR discs.

    I use PrimoCache Software with Seagate Drives, and get 9 Gigabyte / Sec Writes, 14 Gibabyte / Reads.

    That's correct: 9GB/Sec Write and 14GB/Sec Reads on all my Seagate 4TB & 8TB Hard Drives.

    Seagate could build an automatic NVM adapter exactly the same, at a reasonable cost.

    Imagine your 16 TB drives with GB/Sec reads and writes. Boot up times in fraction of a second.

    Your Drive will be waiting for the CPU to issue commands, not the other way around.

    Instead of a 16TB drive with SATA controller, it has a cable connected to NVM M.2 adapter.

    The M.2 Adapter houses the 4GB LPDDR4 Level 1, and 64GB NVM Flash Level 2.

    64GB is enough space to hold Windows 10 and plenty of data, with the bulk of low use data stored on the huge 16TB platters. M.2 NVM speeds with Warehouse size storage.

    Product Mix could be 2 levels: Pro and Ultra.

    Pro holding the 4GB RAM / 64GB Flash storage. 4TB 8TB 10TB drives.

    Ultra having 8GB faster RAM / 256GB Flash storage 10TB 12TB 16TB and larger drives.

    Mass production drives down the cost and the unbeatable performance locks in Seagate as Market leader. Seagate should buy Romex Software the company, or design similar 3 Level caching firmware / controllers. https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/index.html

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