Yes I am getting this idea from here
I personally don't think hard drives are going anywhere for years to come and the prices look really attractive. The flood situation is over and there are less companies out there to keep the prices war of ultra cheap drives going.
STX is up over 90% on the year and still pays 25cents per quarter. Its trading only 7x earnings right now too.
Any opinions here?
Are you kidding me? Hard-drives are fast becoming dinosaurs. They'll soon be replaced by Solid State drivesOriginally Posted by killuminati
They're already standard on many new laptops. My desktop Win7 machine runs on one.
Do you store all your audio, video and high res images on that tiny SSD? SSD as a boot drive yes, but as a storage device?
Also who said Seagate and WD don't sell SSDs?
You can buy laptops with 550 gig SSDs, although they're awfully pricey.
But yes, Seagate and WD are in the SSD market too so it doesn't matter. Of the two, I think WD would be my choice, if only because they seem to understand their customers better; I find their products easier to set up and use. But maybe Seagate would be a leader when it comes to OEM and WD would be a leader in aftermarket.
With more and more people downloading movies and TV shows, and with digital cameras capable of taking very good video, I think demand for external/supplementary storage will continue to grow. Cloud storage doesn't really cut it for that stuff because of upload/download times and ISP bandwidth restrictions.
One day soon.
Newegg
This space is owned by Intel, Corsair, Sandisk, OCZ et. el.
WD, Seagate etc. are not chipmakers, it's an entirely different product.
Did CCM switch from making bicycles to cars back when the automobile was invented?
I bought WDC 2 days ago. They seem to have better fundamentals than STX, though STX pays a dividend. Not to mention WDC will have a higher ramp up in production since more of their factories were flooded.
HDD will be around for quite a while, since SSDs haven't reached the same levels of reliabilities. Guess what, the "cloud computing" "post-PC" paradigm everyone keeps harping about uses HDD to store data. WDC also makes hybrid SSDs, which are catching on.
My guess is that it'll be a ways yet until hard drives a dead.
Imagine how much a series of SSD drives would cost Google for their storage. It would be more money than there is in the whole World.
That being said, I've never looked into the two companies and where their revenues come from. If the majority of their money is made selling 1-2TB drives for mom and pop, then the companies are probably in trouble in the medium term.
This is from WDC 2011 annual report:
client compute: 151 147 109
client non-compute: 46 38 33
enterprise: 10 9 4
the slow growth in 2011 can be partially attributed to the floods, since WDC was hit much worse than STX. Client compute is generally OEM PC parts, non-compute parts are the external harddrives, enterprise are servers.
This is from STX 2011 annual report (note, their fiscal year ends in July, so the floods don't show in the report):
client compute: 132 135 114
client non-compute: 38 33 27
enterprise: 29 25 22
STX has a much better enterprise position, but WDC's acquisition of Hitachi's HDD division should help pad its lineup of SAS drives, and even the market shares.
Many feel the Cloud will negate the need for external drives for storage.
As noted above, cloud storage uses HDD, so someone's still going to be buying them.
Also as noted above, as long as ISPs continue to impose monthly bandwidth limits, many people are not going to keep their large media files in the cloud (video, audio, movies, TV, etc.). And those are exactly the kind of files that tend to be stored on external drives.
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