rjohnson11
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https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/17/western_digital_petaling_jaya_malaysia/ Western Digital will close its HDD factory near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This is one of the company's first factories, operating since 1973. After the shutdown of the Malaysia plant, WD will be left with only two factories in Thailand, and is now trying to gain more share in the SSD market. So finally the demand for SSDs is increasing and mechanical hard drive sales continue to decline massively. I'm actually surprised it took this long.
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XrayMan
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/18 23:32:18
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That's a shame. Many people still use HD's.
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bill1024
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/19 00:05:36
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I am kind of surprised, I can see demand for small spinners, 120gb - 750tb or so is down. The price of small SSDs is not too bad
The cost of 2tb, 3tb and bigger SSDs are way to expensive for most people. 200+$ for a 1tb SSD is not really cheap VS 1tb HD 50$
One of the first thing people do with a laptop is take out the spinner HD and put in a SSD.
But then again, there is a lot of competition in the HD market these days. I wonder if they are losing market share or is it overall demand.
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GTXJackBauer
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/19 01:53:03
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I wouldn't mind a spinner if the prices were low enough. I'd slap a bunch of them in RAID0. 10K RPM Raptors preferably as I do atm with three.
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kram36
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/19 06:29:42
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It's not shut down yet, they plan to shut it down in 2019. Maybe WD would do better if they stopped offering those cheap HGST drives? I still buy spinner drives for storage drives, much cheaper. We need to keep spinner drives going for the process to recover lost files. Can you even get files off a dead SSD?
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Cool GTX
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/19 06:49:51
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The memory can be read off of a "dead SSD" as it does not change state
The plant was old (operation since 1973) that is ancient in the tech industry
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kram36
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/19 07:18:12
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Looked into SSD data recovery and it's very complicated. The data is encrypted by the controller and you will have to find a company that can unscramble the code depending on the SSD controller.
Just because a plant was built in 1973 doesn't mean it's never been updated. BMW still uses a plant built in 1913 to produce the Mini.
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puzion
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/19 08:52:05
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2 plants still a lot of the remaining plants are able to produce at better rates.
How about Seagate?
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veganfanatic
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/19 11:58:03
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hard disks are useful for backups, is your data safe?
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Tribbs
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/19 12:19:14
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I see this as WD artificially increasing demand by reducing supply to maintain profit margins. Not too long ago the flooding in Malaysia shut down plants and caused prices to skyrocket. Large Data centers and cloud storage aren't going away anytime soon.
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GTXJackBauer
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/19 12:45:09
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Tribbs
I see this as WD artificially increasing demand by reducing supply to maintain profit margins. Not too long ago the flooding in Malaysia shut down plants and caused prices to skyrocket. Large Data centers and cloud storage aren't going away anytime soon.
Great assessment. While everyone else is doing it, why not mechanical storage right? lol
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veganfanatic
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Re: Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand
2018/07/19 17:41:41
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being cynical, RAM is still sky high and video cards are out of sight
ssd prices are about the only item that seems to be coming down
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