back to article Seagate’s triple whammy: Disk numbers, costs, and flash

Peak disk has passed and Seagate has a triple problem set: disk build numbers; costs and pricing; and what to do about flash. Revenues for Seagate’s second fiscal 2016 quarter, ended Jan 1, were $2.98bn, down 19.4 per cent on $3.7bn a year ago. Net income was $165m, representing an 82.3 per cent fall on Q215's $933m. …

  1. Joerg

    They fake accounting!

    It is pretty clear. They claim to earn nothing. They kept raising prices and then they show to be so poor. All b*ll !

  2. SysFX

    What percentage of Seagates production went to warranty replacements?

    We now have a policy of no Seagate in anything after getting fed up with the click of death.

    1. DJV Silver badge

      Agreed. I wouldn't touch a Seagate HDD for any money nowadays. Reliability - we've heard of it.

      1. ADRM

        Seagate's click of death.

        As a home user with several PC's I made the serious mistake of still purchasing Seagate drives after having used them since 1998 and found them reliable and with a five year warranty. In the last 3 years I have had 4 2TB drives get to 3 years old and die rapidly. I use http://www.hdsentinel.com/ HD Sentinel to monitor my drives since I have good music and precious photographs on them like everyone else. I swear Seagate's are programmed to die at a week past the warranty expiring. I now use WD / Toshiba SSD, Kingston SSD and Crucial SSD. Seagate used to be good. Now I don't trust them at all as they are unreliable junk.

        1. ben_myers

          Re: Seagate's click of death.

          I, too, eschew Seagate drives because of poor reliability.

    2. ecofeco Silver badge

      Same here. This is probably thier root problem.

  3. Alan Brown Silver badge

    As with WD

    As soon as SSD is "cheap enough", spinning disks are doomed - and they're cheap enough already for a vast number of applications

    And as with WD, noone with any sense will buy Seagate SSD products after both manufacturers fucked over the market using the Thai floods as an excuse (drive prices are still higher than pre-flood, with warranties slashed to boot).

    I was willing to buy Hitachi and Toshiba products whilst they were restricted from being folded into WD and Seagate operations respectively, but now the chinese ministry of commerce has allowed that step they're as suspicious as the parent companies.

    Expect to see the WD and Seagate names being branding of a major existing SSD maker within 5 years.

    It's just not worth purchasing spinning rust below 500GB so we don't - lower support costs more than make up the small pricing difference over 5 years, 10% vs 1% failure rates and longer SSD warranties are enough to see to that.

    2TB consumer and 4TB enterprise SSDs already exist(*) - and those 4TB SSDs have lots of empty space than the 2.5" case they come in, so it's clear that suppliers can easily go bigger without higher density product (Samsung have famously already demonstrated a 15TB SATA drive).

    HAMR might have staved off the inevitable if it was deployed in 2012, but it's too late now. Unless mechanical drives can miraculously whizz 20TB drives consuming 7W out of a hat, I'd say the market will be dead by the end of 2017 if not sooner.

    (*) Edit: those are in conventional form factor. I see Seagate is flogging 3 and 6.4TB drives as PCIe HHHL cards

  4. joed

    milking the cow

    While inevitable (SSD popularity and lesser pressure on local data storage) HDD makers shot themselves in foot keeping drive prices artificially inflated following the spike caused by Thailand flooding (years ago). Also stagnant max capacities (and ridiculous prices) pushed consumers in other direction.

    And where are these Seagate SSD (didn't they purchase controller maker)?

    1. Aitor 1

      Re: milking the cow

      I don't think they were wrong.. they probably got more money than doing it otherwise..

      HDDs will stay in the long term, at least for backups.

  5. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Switcharoo

    Remember when hard disks were reliable and SSDs weren't?

    Whelp, shoe's on the other foot now. Seagate's profits will reflect this, if they insist on selling buggy whips to car owners.

    1. Captain Obvious

      Re: Switcharoo

      Except look at reviews and SSD drives still have high failure rates. Also, a 4 TB SSD will run 3K, and even a 2 TB is $550. I can pick up 4 TB drives for under $140 all day long. That is 20 hard drives vs 1 SSD so 4 TB vs 80 TB.

      Until SSD's can match the storage and price of spinning metal, they are still out of reach.

  6. Mikel

    The death of the PC

    As the sales of PC decline so will sales of the drives they use. Duh.

    The flash modules in these mobile thingies are soldered on. Maybe Seagate would be better invested in Android devices. Or IoT. They're not much different - storage and some attached electronics.

    1. Aitor 1

      Re: The death of the PC

      The problem is the same as with the pc: there is almost no money to be made on them.

      1. goldcd

        There is money to be made.

        Just not by Seagate.

        Pretty much any modern laptop has an SSD whether discrete or soldered onto the motherboard. Most people simply don't want those big, slow, spinny things (or need them).

        I'm an exception with the 4 spinny things I have as a media RAID, but even I "the exception" went with WD after one too many Seagate turkeys.

        On my next upgrade cycle that storage is going to be all punted into the cloud (although I said that last time and then chickened out).

        1. dajames

          Re: There is money to be made.

          Pretty much any modern laptop has an SSD whether discrete or soldered onto the motherboard. Most people simply don't want those big, slow, spinny things ...

          I'm not particularly fussed whether the storage in my laptop is HD or SSD -- the difference in speed doesn't bother me, and they probably use about the same amount of power on average (though SSDs typically use a little more than HDs at idle) -- the spinny things are not unacceptably slow, to me, though I agree SSDs are faster.

          However, I do require a large amount of storage -- I keep several VMs on my laptop, as well as digital photos in RAW format -- and SSDs are either too small or too expensive. They're getting cheaper, but they're not nearly cheap enough yet.

          I do also value the ability to take out and replace or upgrade the 'disk', both so that I will still be able to access the data in the event that the rest of the laptop fails or is damaged, and so that I can install a new OS version on a clean drive and keep the old drive as a backup should everything go pear-shaped. It takes a lot less time to swap drives than to back up or restore a few hundred GB over the network. The modern fad for SSDs soldered to the motherboard really doesn't work for me.

          1. Ammaross Danan

            Re: There is money to be made.

            If you think recovering a few hundred GB over the network is bad, just imagine how long the "go to the cloud!" punters will take to restore (not to mention if you're the unfortunate that has a data-cap or rate limit soft-cap). SSDs are markedly better for OS and applications, but for large, sequential storage like RAWs and vids, disk is still ideal (cost for size mainly, as speed is fairly moot). Those VMs would best benefit from an SSD though, just like an OS/app drive.

  7. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge
    FAIL

    Kodak moment

    Am I the only one who thought the CEO's snitty comment on spinning rust vs flash was similar to Kodak's dug in heels re: film vs digital?

    We all know where that ended.

  8. Unicornpiss
    Meh

    Mechanical drives..

    ..are an obsolete technology that is doomed to irrelevance in less than a decade IMHO. And if Seagate keeps downplaying the importance of flash drives, in a few years they will be mentioned in the same breath as Blackberry, ZIP drives, CRT televisions, and Free Love.

    If their "Momentus Thin" drives are any indication of what they can produce these days, they deserve exactly that too.

  9. kiwistorageguy

    Areal density

    The reality is that traditional mechanical HDDs are nearing their end of life due to physics. Manufacturers have done their level best to increase the density in drives. Denser drives means increased errors.

    The reality is NAND is now cheap and reliable enough and continuing to come down in cost.

    Newer TLC 3D NAND is proving to be fast and reliable and not the SATA of NAND.

    1. Ammaross Danan

      Re: Areal density

      "The reality is that traditional mechanical HDDs are nearing their end of life due to physics."

      You must have stopped reading about HDDs once you bought an SSD. HAMR alone will allow HDDs to hit 18TB by 2018 (see Toshiba's CEO discussion on the matter if you think I'm just personally speculating). Combine that with additional density advancements in HAMR and adding in SMR (for write-once-read-many situations [netflix, home media]) and you'll get a great density boost.

      So no, HDDs aren't EoL at 10TB (current size).

      That said, flash certainly has a greater potential to out-density (yay, new term!) HDDs, but likely at a significant price delta for a long time.

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