Wednesday, July 18th 2018
Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
With the advent of solid-state storage in pretty much every device you can think of, demand for mechanical HDDs has gone down, because users prefer fast and compact SSD storage over the mechanical dinosaurs. HDD manufacturers have been trying to stop the inevitable by coming out with new technologies to increase capacity - faster than SSD pricing can drop, but it seems they can't prevent the inevitable.
Now The Register UK reports that Western Digital will close its HDD factory near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This is one of the company's first factories, operating since 1973. After the shutdown of the Malaysia plant, WD will be left with only two factories in Thailand, and is now trying to gain more share in the SSD market.WD provided the following comment:
Source:
TheRegister
Now The Register UK reports that Western Digital will close its HDD factory near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This is one of the company's first factories, operating since 1973. After the shutdown of the Malaysia plant, WD will be left with only two factories in Thailand, and is now trying to gain more share in the SSD market.WD provided the following comment:
In response to declining long-term demand for client HDDs, Western Digital has taken steps to rationalize its HDD manufacturing operations globally. The company will decommission its HDD manufacturing facility in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, by the end of calendar 2019. This transition will be executed in close collaboration with employees, customers, supply partners and other critical stakeholders.
The data technology industry is undergoing substantial change. This market transformation is driving increased adoption of SSDs and NAND flash in traditional HDD applications. The change has contributed to growth in SSD/NAND flash and declining long-term demand for client HDDs. Consequently, Western Digital plans to expand SSD manufacturing in Penang. The company is in the final stages of commissioning its second SSD facility in Penang, which will go into production in the coming months.
61 Comments on Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
1. PC purchases are way down, folks keeping their machines longer due to a) lack of need to upgrade, b) small incremental performance increase generation to generation and c) cost of GFX cards
2. SSDs are sexy. Yes SSDs give great benchmarks but what do you call the IT Manager at the Fortiune 500 company who submits a proposal to switch all the comapny'ds PCs to SSD storage ? Easy answer ... unemployed. While extremely beneficial in rare niche usages, SSDs have no impact on personal productivity. No legal secretary every typed an extra legal brief. No CAD operator ever laid out an extra room in a building and no gamer ever reached a further save point because they had an SSD. It only can be financially justifies on rendering boxes, video editing and other small segment markets.
3. It really doesn't matter than I can backup 2 TB of files much faster from SSD to SSD than from SSHD to SSHD ... that happens at 3 am while Im sleeping. It really doesn't matter whether a MS Word benchmarkwith 1,134 actions can run much faster on an SSD cause a use has to type at least 1,134 keystrokes in between each one.
4. If you can switch the boot device in a box between SSD, SSHD and HD over 6 weeks and no one notices, you aren't benefitting from having one. In years gone by, we saw enthusiasts using RAID to get their most out of there machines but from a productivity or real life performance standpoint, neither has had an effect. Oh we could prove how much faster it was using benchmarks ... problem was , day to day, we never did any tasks representative of those benchmarks outside very small niche markets.
5. Over the last 7 years, we have had 3 storage device (SSDs + SSHDs) failures, all SSDs. Over the last 5 years we have had no failures. The baseline set up has (1) SSD (Samsung Pro 250 GB) and (1) SSHD (2 TB or more).
6. Reliability of SSDs is well past the shaky initial years, but costs for multi-TB systems is just not competitive yet. But regardless of what you are doing on the PC, again outside those niche markets, productivity is not being impacted by the storage subsystem. I expect that costs will be not worth thinking about within 5 years but I don't see the HD going the way of the floppy disk and zip drive before 2025.
As for "no impact on personal productivity"... you forget that giving people nice things makes them appreciate working for you. And yes, there is actually a productivity gain, because the old excuse of "oh I'm making coffee while waiting for my computer to boot" is no longer valid.
SSDs are also pretty much invaluable for tasks that touch a lot of files, such as software development. I have an SSD and HDD in my work PC - the HDD is used for backup purposes, but sometimes I run builds off there, and the difference to the SSD is night and day - it's almost impossible to imagine we used to spend our lives waiting for HDDs.
It’s a BUSINESS decision based on not selling quite enough to warrant 3 factories. They still have 2 more; HDD’s are still a big part of WD’s business and will be for years to come. As long as there is a demand they will build them.
You can see the clear wipeout of supply from the floods in Q4 2011, and then the sustained drop (to the tune of 30%) from 2014 to 2016. The market has spoken: only datahoarders, enterprise and cloud will accept HDD-based storage, and only because it's cheap. The moment NAND (of any sort, really.. QLC is fine...) reaches 1.5-2x the per bit price of HDDs (currently it's around 4x), expect the HDD industry to completely crash as demand evaporates basically overnight.
Of the 3 remaining, WD and Toshiba are the ones most likely to actually survive, both of em being fab owners. Meanwhile, Seagate doesn't even have an in-house NAND controller (they bought LSI.. then sold them off....), let alone a NAND fab, and I really doubt that Micron is interested in being acquired by Seagate, let alone acquiring Seagate.
And if I had the cash, even a RAM drive seems realistic to me now. My board can hold 128 gigs.. but I'd never use that all of that as just RAM.