

Seagate looks forward to crossing the three billion threshold





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RE: .
By Solandri on 3/12/2013 2:49:53 PM , Rating: 2
Stop waiting. The prices aren't going back down, at least not until technology improves to reduce their manufacturing costs.

The HDD industry was one of the most cut-throat out there, with margins so slim that even IBM gave up and sold off their storage division. That's why manufacturers were going out of business and being bought up by competitors - too much competition. It's not that HDD prices are too high now. It's that prices were too low before the flooding.

Now that it's consolidated into 2.5 manufacturers (WD, Seagate, and Toshiba who only makes 2.5" drives), there won't be as much competition, and hopefully profit margins will settle at a healthier level. (Healthier because the more profit a HDD company makes, the more money they can devote to R&D, and the quicker HDDs improve in GB/$ and MB/s.)

Similar thing happened with SSDs. There was a glut of flash memory around summer of 2012, which meant SSDs dropped to about $0.50/GB. The memory manufacturers were losing money so they reduced production. Prices went up, and now the cheapest SSDs are about $0.65/GB. That doesn't mean $0.65/GB is too high. It simply means $0.50/GB was too low.

