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Western Digital to spin off flash business

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Re: Western Digital to spin off flash business

#31

Post by SoftTalker »

mbreese wrote: post #14
SSLy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spinning rust side is only living because of price collusion by the flash vendors. Price for 8TB of TLC generic is currently 170 USD. QLC is cheaper than that.

Spinning rust is still useful for many purposes and will probably live on for decades more. We generate a ton of data and most of it ends up as read rarely or never. But it can live with slower access times on longer duration storage. It’s honestly just like tape. There will be an HDD market for a long time that will be hidden in the whirl of data centers. Consumer HDD will slowly melt away, but the price/byte and du…

> Consumer HDD will slowly melt away

I’d say it already has. Does any consumer PC come with a spinning disk anymore?

Re: Western Digital to spin off flash business

#32

Post by kstrauser »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #19
kstrauser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nailed it. They’ve been spending goodwill like crazy with debacles like pushing out SMR junk under the Red name. In my experience, their overall quality control has plummeted over the last few years. I’ve bought 3 Red drives for my home Synology. After about a year with each, the drive utilization graph will start creeping up toward a steady 100% while the other drives in the RAID are mostly idle. All drives have the…

I also had two Reds showing bad sectors after around a year, with a Synology. What "colour" drive do you usually buy now? Or even which manufacturer?

I've had good luck with Seagate Iron Wolves. They're a little noisier than others, but I've never had one fail. The Toshiba I've had in there for 3 years has also been fine.

After years of seeing many brands of drives go through good and bad years, I'm hesitant to recommend any particular manufacturer. Seagate had a rough stretch, but they seem to be pretty good right now. WD used to be great, and now I don't want anything to do with them. Anytime I look for a new drive, I check out the latest Backblaze report and hope for the best.

Re: Western Digital to spin off flash business

#33

Post by adventured »

greatgib wrote: post #16

Usually stock investors don't like diversification within companies. It is harder to value. I think that they realized that there is not so much in common between the HDD and flash business. No added value to own the 2 business compared to separated entities. With that, the WD legacy HDD business can continue as a dividend stock dying slowly. And the flash business can now pretend to crazy valuations based on a shinn…

It might also free up the flash business to make aggressive acquisitions without worrying quite as much about anti-trust from having a larger position in the overall storage market due to the old HDD business (which is dominated by just three firms).

The stand-alone HDD business will end up as an acquisition in the not-distant future (Toshiba, Seagate, etc. somebody will eat it).

Re: Western Digital to spin off flash business

#34

Post by toast0 »

duffyjp wrote: post #18
dboreham wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had a problem with Intel, but they sold that business recently.

This summer I bought two Intel 2TB nvme drives for $65 each. Not the newest tech but I've also never had a problem with an Intel SSD. I still have my original 40GB from 2012 in an old laptop and it works just like new. The company that bought their SSD division (Solidigm) supports the Intel branded drives, and their utility had firmware updates ready to go for the ones I bought. I'd probably buy a Solidigm if I neede…

> Not the newest tech but I've also never had a problem with an Intel SSD.

I used to run Intel (enterprise) SSDs in servers. I didn't run enough other SSDs to have a sense for whether the failure rate was abnormally high, but it was definitely not zero (it was significantly less than the enterprise hard drives we were running). And the failure mechanism was sudden disappearance from the bus.

My message to you is not to avoid Intel SSDs, just to make sure you have a backup in place, because when they fail, my experience is there's no warning, they just disappear. This seems to be the common failure mode for all/most SSDs, even though they're supposed to fail read-only. Hard drives usually give warnings as they fail, but not always enough warning to rescue data.

Re: Western Digital to spin off flash business

#35

Post by purpleflame1257 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #31
mbreese wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spinning rust is still useful for many purposes and will probably live on for decades more. We generate a ton of data and most of it ends up as read rarely or never. But it can live with slower access times on longer duration storage. It’s honestly just like tape. There will be an HDD market for a long time that will be hidden in the whirl of data centers. Consumer HDD will slowly melt away, but the price/byte and du…

> Consumer HDD will slowly melt away I’d say it already has. Does any consumer PC come with a spinning disk anymore?

Many consumer PCs will come with both a smaller capacity SSD and a higher-capacity HD.

Re: Western Digital to spin off flash business

#36

Post by Obscurity4340 »

nix0n wrote: post #22
HPsquared wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or how it's a bad sector to be in. Edit: I'm sure the editorial staff at The Register are brainstorming a headline at this very moment.

> I'm sure the editorial staff at The Register are brainstorming a headline at this very moment. They're "disc"-ussing it.

Curses ;)

Re: Western Digital to spin off flash business

#37

Post by kstrauser »

ginko wrote: post #24
bragr wrote: post #2

So saddle all the legacy liabilities in with the legacy business and slowly suck out the equity, while the flash business grows? I can see how that's a win for investors at least. Are the flash products still going to be branded WD?

Feels like the HDD business is the more stable of the two. The competition in the flash/SSD market if fierce.

True, but it’s clearly the future, at least for mass market devices.

There’s still a place for buggy whip makers. The remaining ones can charge an arm and a leg because the few remaining ones generally compete on quality. I bet that’s what we’ll see for HDDs soon.

Re: Western Digital to spin off flash business

#38

Post by rasz »

kstrauser wrote: post #37
ginko wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like the HDD business is the more stable of the two. The competition in the flash/SSD market if fierce.

True, but it’s clearly the future, at least for mass market devices. There’s still a place for buggy whip makers. The remaining ones can charge an arm and a leg because the few remaining ones generally compete on quality. I bet that’s what we’ll see for HDDs soon.

NAND is unable to replace HDD for long term storage.

Re: Western Digital to spin off flash business

#39

Post by kstrauser »

rasz wrote: post #38
kstrauser wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it’s clearly the future, at least for mass market devices. There’s still a place for buggy whip makers. The remaining ones can charge an arm and a leg because the few remaining ones generally compete on quality. I bet that’s what we’ll see for HDDs soon.

NAND is unable to replace HDD for long term storage.

Yes, and that's an important market. I suspect that it's tiny compared to the mass market devices I mentioned.

Re: Western Digital to spin off flash business

#40

Post by chemmail »

sgerenser wrote: post #26

They need to come up with a good name for the flash business. Maybe something that indicates their products are like disks, but made from silicon instead of spinning rust. SiliconDisk? Maybe Sand-Disk? Or simplify that to Sandisk?

The answer is obvious. Eastern Digital.
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