2d ago

Western Digital exits SSD market, shifts focus to hard drives as SanDisk takes over NAND operations

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Western Digital, a titan in the storage industry long renowned for its hard disk drives and solid-state drives, has officially separated its NAND flash memory business, effectively ending the company's direct involvement in SSD production and sales. Western Digital's exit from the market leaves behind a legacy of innovation and quality that has significantly impacted the PC gaming community.

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I am surprised they decided to fully exit SSDs. One would think that in the next ~10 years $/TB prices for NAND will reach HDD prices.
In general, there are a lot of drawbacks to HDDs, they are relatively large, you having moving parts and of course sequential/random speed is attrocious even compared to the most bottom of the barrel QLC SSDs.
- Every CCTV system with playback uses HDDs. Can't use SSDs in that particular usecase because of the constant high volume writes.
- HDDs are great when you need a ton of cheap storage, but don't really need it to be super fast. Especially if you use an SSD as a cache. Hdd technology is continuing to advance too, so it might be longer than a decade before prices are comparable.
  
  I have an HDD base NAS for my movie collection, so I recognize that currently HDDs do have a use case. I was thinking more about the future.

Very interesting move, you really would think that a unified storage provider would scale very well, and hedges the business on both sides.
I've really liked WD, I exclusively use their enterprise HDDs and haven't had a single failure (bar one caused by incorrect shipping) and their SSDs been similarly good offerings.

Shame, they had a good reputation with SSDs.
- I've been happy with their HDDs as well. Have 3 for about 7-10 years.

I literally just bought 2 more WD NVME m.2 sticks. They’ve been solid for me and I needed to replace some older slower storage.

"As AI accelerates and impacts industries around the world, and as companies generate and store more data, HDD exabyte shipments are expected to increase," CEO Irving Tan said. He also points out that much of the data stored by cloud service providers, such as native cloud application data, AI data lakes, media, and machine learning data, runs on HDDs.

9 comments