Western Digital shuts down factory for hard drives, opens one for SSDs
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Loobyluggs
I am surprised.
Surely there is more than enough demand for mainframes/co-lo/DR/cloud and of course companies like Google to store data?
Hate to sound like someone who prefers vinyl over mp3s, but platter drives over silicon must be cheaper for datacentres around the world?
tap tap tap...Are we really at the point where the cost of running a datacentre is so high that more expensive silicon drives are better than platter?
k3vst3r
Probably just reducing supply, so prices of HDD climb, basically don't want make HDD's when price is just about breaking even. Not sure when it's forecast, but writing is on the wall for HDD as long term NAND flash chips going replace spinners for same price per GB of storage. Believe Samsung upto 96 layers now for their NAND chips? more layers per chip means price per chip is going down whilst storage per chip is climbing.
Fox2232
Kaarme
Ricepudding
nhlkoho
schmidtbag
Ricepudding
Fender178
Not surprised. Since they have many other plants they could still do HDDs. Plus they need to get the ball rolling since SSDs are becoming more popular.
schmidtbag
sammarbella
I am not going full SSD anytime soon; SSD prices are still too high for (poor) data hoarders like me.
It's perfect for my laptop but my desktop PC and specially the NAS/HTPC need a lot of storage.
NAS: 1 SSD for OS/apps and 1 SSD for recordings, 7 HDDs (+40 TB) for media.
EspHack
we will always need HDDs in some way, tape is still being used as long term storage because its super longevity or something, SSDs in my experience may seem indestructible but they just fail for no apparent reason with no warning and no way of recovering data, compare that to HDDs, I would never use an HDD again for anything but long term storage, things i absolutely dont want to lose, even though I have piles of "dead" HDDs, I could still add or pull data from them somehow, while the 2 SSDs that have failed me wont even show up on bios
RzrTrek
There's no future for mechanical storage devices and I will be happy to see them gone.
schmidtbag
waltc3
slyphnier
well most WD hdd come from thailand plant/factory anyway
do u guys getting wd hdd come malaysia often ?
malaysia factory more like producing 2/10 batch of wd hdd to me
then again WD also own HGST factory in china
also such as backblaze (based their publication) seems prefer hitachi / seagate over WD in their datacenter
Venix
Hdd's will stay with us for few more decades but their demand will decline more and more ... wd have to produce ssd's else they will become the 2020's blockbuster!
Fender178
RzrTrek
nhlkoho