

The Wobbly Future of the Hard Disk Drive Industry
Sep 19, 2024
00:00
Today, the hard disk drive industry and its big three companies - Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba - are in decline. The Solid State Drive or SSD is on the rise. SSDs are faster, more reliable, and consume less power. Something that began 30 years ago with replacing audio tapes in telephone answering machines - remember those? - has grown to power a $60 billion market per the IEEE. HDD unit volume sales will never be as they were before. Consumers no longer buy HDDs for their iPods, laptops or even desktops. Sad. But the HDD's march towards oblivion has been arrested by a new market: Growing demand from enterprise companies storing data for "nearline" storage. Nearline, referring to data that the customer needs accessible but not so frequently nor immediately. This market is real. Companies in all sorts of fields are producing data at a far faster rate than they can afford to store it.
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