Western Digital and Seagate awaiting bankruptcy.
As most of us computer users already know, Hard Disk Drives are getting retired because of the newcomer, Solid State Drive. This new technology has finally hit the market hard and by the end of 2010 to mid of 2011, prices will become affordable for all computer users. Right now, SSDs are very expensive but once this happens, there is no way for HDD manufactures to stop their inevitable future bankruptcy. If one may think that they will not go bankrupt just because they are big corporations, well take a look at General Motors and think again!
There are many HDD producers, such as Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, TDK and of course, the leaders of the HDD market: Seagate and Western Digital. Some say that SSDs are much more durable over time than HDDs and that they could last for years without failing, however others say that after 100,000 writes they will fail and that HDDs are still more reliable but who knows? Only time will tell. One thing is certain, until recently Seagate and Western Digital dominated the computer storage market for years with only little competition. The other HDD producers are in most cases just left out of the equation. Now with the arriaval of SSDs, there will be dozens, if not even hundreds of companies that will produce SSDs.
Both Seagate and Western Digital have sensed this threat and they have already started to produce their own lines of SSDs but this will certainly not save them from bankruptcy since there will be hundreds of SSD brands with years of experience in this area for people to chose from.
There is however a solution for HDDs to survive this massive attack… Seagate and Western Digital will have to make HDDs COEXIST with SSDs but in order to make this happen, they will always have to be with 10 steps ahead of SSDs.
For example, the largest 3.5 inch SDD on the market today is an OCZ at 1TB and the largest HDD is at 2TB. This is no big difference and most customers will choose a SSD instead of a HDD because SSDs are also 2 times faster than normal 7200rpm HDDs.
So in order for Seagate and Western Digital to survive the SSD attack, they will have to release a 4TB HDD in the next few months and by the end of the 2010 to release a 8TB one. Now since the largest SSD is only 1TB, people will continue to buy HDDs and will say “the hell with SSDs! HDDs are way ahead of SSDs so I will buy a 8TB HDD instead of a tiny 1TB SSD”. So like it was said, hard disk manufactures will always have to be with at least 10 steps ahead of solid state drive manufactures if they don’t want to get bankrupted.
When SSD producers will release a 8TB on the market (don’t know which year… probably 2015?), HDD producers will have to release a HDD of at least 60TB HDD and so on. If Seagate and Western Digital are to save themselves from bankruptcy, they will certainly have to release a 8TB HDD by the end of this year.
Now for Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, TDK HDD producers won’t be such a big loss since thats not the only thing they produce. Samsung will survive just fine with their huge sales in TVs, cell phones and their other products, Toshiba will survive just fine with its notebooks, TVs, etc. On the other hand for Seagate and Western Digital corporations will be a huge loss if they don’t do something quick because that’s the only thing they produce… Hard Disk Drives….
