A place for quality hardware news, reviews, and intelligent discussion.
Title translation:
WD is spinning off HDD business because it's low margin and holding back earnings/growth numbers which pissing off shareholders.
This is the reason for most spin offs these days, way to cut off underperforming business units to make the numbers look better and keep investors happy short term. A company will cut its overall revenue in half or more these days just to make a quick buck in the process, it's really pathetic honestly.
WD is spinning off HDD business because it's low margin and holding back earnings/growth numbers which pissing off shareholders.
Other way around, their HDDs have decent margins while their flash business is losing money.
So, Western Digital and Western Deprecated?
Wake me up when SSDs and spinning rust have price parity and I can fill my 100TB server with SSDs that doesn’t cost me as much as a car.
Damn! 100 tb? Your lotion bill must be astronomical!
Sorry, I know it's a bad joke, but what all do you have on there?
You will take away the 22TB drives from my cold dead hands
SSDs are just not good for cold storage from what I heard. So HDDs will have their nieche as long as an alternative comes that's better in this aspect too.
Ya this is a clear sign the intend to eventually kill the hard drive side. Might even pile all the debt and other bad investments on the hard drive side and run it through bankruptcy.
They still make tape drives for big data storage, so i can see HD business being around for another decade or two.
Hopefully, they will still have only one software Dashboard instead of two...
I wonder if this is to split the division assets and make a sale down the road easier to accomplish?
NVIDIA please take notes
Are HDDs still relevant? Have they made any advancements since SSDs/NVMEs took over?
Bro, tape is still being used, of course hard drives are still relevant
SSDs are still very unreliable compared to HDDs, any bulk or critical data storage is done on HDDs.
It might seem unthinkable to gamers, but speed isn't the only thing that matters when it comes to storage.
SSDs are still very unreliable compared to HDDs
That really isn't true. HDDs are used for cost, and occasionally cold storage.
HHDs have mechanical parts that make them far less reliable.
It looks like they've gotten better recently, but exactly how much isn't really clear.
Backblaze lifetime annual failure rates for:
HDDs: 1.45%
SSDs: 0.90%
The HDD AFR is +0.55%, but if you look at the drive count and drive day numbers, you can see why the SSD AFR varies pretty wildly, and why the confidence interval is way higher.
If you think this is enough to say SSDs reliability is definitively solved, that's fine, but
HHDs have mechanical parts that make them far less reliable.
is a bit much.
SSD's just need good power delivery and cooling, where as a HDD needs those plus a means of dampening vibration for good longevity.
HDD's are no longer a good choice for mobile devices like laptops as an SSD is more likely to survive a fall than a HDD.
SSD's however require periodic supply of power to maintain data integrity (power it on for an hour each year afaik), where as a HDD does not.
lol
HDDs are still useful for bulk storage. The HDD division is the profitable one here. WD lost money on every SSD sold last quarter at -10% gross margin.
Relevant? Yes, ideal for cold storage or archival stuff where capacity matters and speed doesn't
Not Western Digital, but Seagate has introduced HAMR HDDs
Thought the move was to buy up/merge the new SSD company with Kioxia and circumvent increased scrutiny over the deal. And I was right, but apparently that part fell through due to SK Hynix.
Don't worry, WD has been trying for years to buy up the remaining Toshiba/Kioxia flash memory assets, they won't stop.
