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back to article Weak flash demand and disk sales leave Western Digital scrabbling to claw back $800m a year

Western Digital is about to go into cost cutting mode to carve out $800m in savings, after reporting shrinking revenues of $4.23bn for its second fiscal 2019 quarter, down by a fifth compared to the year ago period. Losses were almost halved from $823m to $487m for the three months ended 28 December 2018. Gross margin was 31.3 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What WD need to do is reduce SSD prices and increase the capacity to that of HDDs and dump the latter and retain their legendary reliability.

    First mover advantage, wipes the scene of the competition.

    1 1 Reply
    1. HamsterNet
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      Competition

      WDs Consumer M.2 drives double failed. They where just not as fast as Samsung’s 2 year old drives & Samsung matched them on pricing at ever my drop.

      If they wanted market share they needed to hit that 30% margin hard.

      0 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Repeat post

    They also need to overcome the bad rep caused by the HDD unreliability over the last 24 months; there are now more "refurb" WD drives on the market than Seagate.

    Anyone know why posts to this thread arent appearing, many days after being posted??

    2 0 Reply
    1. paulf
      Reply Icon
      Unhappy

      Re: Repeat post

      That's sad to hear that WD reliability has dropped so far. I have about 14 WD spinning rust drives between 5 and 8 years old - a mix of Green/Red/Black mechanisms across NAS and workstation uses. In that time (touches wood) only one drive failed - WD provided a refurb replacement as it was 2.5 years old and thankfully it was caught in time so no data loss.

      0 0 Reply
      1. paulf
        Reply Icon
        Go

        Re: Repeat post

        PS: No idea why earlier posts aren't appearing but mine above (posted 12.17 Mon 28 Jan) appeared immediately.

        0 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Repeat post

      I think the idea here that there are more refurbished wd spinning rust drives for sale means there are more of them failing are skewed greatly by the fact all seagate consumer drives have 1 year warranty and wd drives have 2, 3 and 5 year warranty (black drives). Most people will replace a drive rather than wait for the 20 - 30 day rma turn around. So all the dead seagate drives at 1 year plus were a bin job and depending on when it fails you might still be able to get your wd drive replaced. Honestly when seagate introduced shingling to drives i saw them start to fail in increasing numbers, when i understood how the technology works and why disks that had a lot of data writing activity were failing far quicker than they ever had been before, I swapped to using wd only for builds and servers and its very rare i see a drive go bad these days.

      0 0 Reply

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