Flash price-drop pops Western Digital's wallet: Surprise revenue fall with worse to come

Contradiction

When a market demand falls you can do one of two things.

Drop prices to maintain or grow market share.

Drop production to attempt to increase the price, but at the cost of your market share.

WD seems to say they are going to do both!

WD drives, even their latest and greatest m.2s are outclassed by Samsung drives in terms of performance and warranty at exactly the same price. Wish they would actually compleat rather than the cartel anticompetitive behaviour they keep being caught doing. That way we could have replaced spinnign rust long ago and actully have much larger drives than the 2TB(first 4TB has just been anounced) we seem to have ben stuck at in flash since 2015

I have 2 pcs literally sitting side by side. One running on a 4 year old i5 intel booting win 10 off of hard drive, another 7th gen i5 intel booting linux Ubuntu 18.04 off of WD ssd. Both have 8G of mem. Is the linux box incredibly, mind-blowingly faster? umm...no. I just installed Netbeans IDE on both, and I don't see a difference in the IDE startup times. If an application depends on internet speed the determining factor will be how fast you're getting data off the wire and there's nothing you can do about that. I was at Fry's yesterday and saw a 1TB WD ssd for $299. How much for 1TB of hard drive? Max $50.

As to the article - this really shows the retail pc market is still tanking. I can see how the consumer saying 'spend $800 on a smartphone or buy a new pc?' is almost a no-brainer if all they're doing is surfing the web and watching cat videos.

Have all the big guys (FANG) built out their storage silos, saying 'Nah, we're good for now'? I don't get that. We're storing more consumer activity from more (IoT, etc) sources than ever. How is business demand going down? The other reason FANG business storage demand should be rising is the use of cloud storage from the consumer smartphone. All those pictures of Uncle Fred's 80th birthday have to go somewhere.

<strike>Slightly</strike> off topic

The problem I'm having at the moment is in using a spinning disk via usb3 to a router with usb port. The disk takes tens of seconds to spin up, but the timeout for them spinning down is a minute or two.

When accessing via SMB, they take so long to spin up that sometimes the read times out. Add to that when reading a video file directly, the gaps between reads are sometimes long enough for the drive to spin down, resulting in whatever I'm using to play it sorting the bed. Defeats the point in having it if I can't use it.

Mines the one with the hdparam manual in the pocket.

Surely price decline in your materials (i.e. flash) should mean declining turnover but your margins should be fairly stable if you're operating a storage business?*

I suppose that reads better than "we dun fudged up".

* I've probably ready this wrong because it's Saturday and beer o'clock came at lunch time, blame the short days

Many uninformed types can't understand the storage<->IOPS economic continuum.

Here are the three clues they need.

1) Some data needs lowest cost/capacity -- that data will always live on spinning disks (or even tape).

2) Some data needs lowest cost/access, that data will always live in DRAM (or even in faster cache memories)

3) In between these two extremes, NAND Flash sometimes provides an alternative.

Whenever you hear someone complaining about the continued existence of magnetic media, you can be confident that you are hearing the voice of ignorance.