Hard Disk Drives and Solid State Drives

Quick question, with the introduction of solid state drives, what will hard drive companies do? Because more and more notebooks have solid state drives in them, does that mean that someday, desktops will follow? Will companies like western digital, seagate, hitachi, fujitsu etc won't have a market anymore?

 

they will introduce larger capacity drives and so drive up minimum acceptable storage requirements, making SSD prices go through the roof...

 

or they could just make ssd drives themselves

 

That seems to be the most plausible outcome.

SSDs WILL be the medium to replace HDDs, it's just a time game now.

 

Yep, SSDs are the future, since they are much faster than conventional drives,save power and withstand shocks.
Prices are expected to drop untill 2010.

 

yes I know that.............again, my question is, what will hard drive companies do?

 

As jisaac said, they will most likely start R&D on SSDs themselves.

No one can give a definite answer right now. It's a guessing from our PoV.

 

they will phase out lower capacity hard drives and replace them with ssds. Large hard drives will be the only left remaining say 500gb+ for the next few years, as these will be the only cost effective solutions for users that require massive storage. In the next few years expect most of the current hard drives for laptops stock to be liquidated, and sold at bargain prices!

 

HDD companies will move on to SSDs , but remember, the main advantage of HDD is storage.
Until they can make 1TB SSDs it will be quite a while.

 

yep thats what i said lol

 

Exactly. Smaller drives, 80GB - 160GB are going to start being sold at a basement price while large 500 GB multi platter HDD's are going to be marketed at better then ever prices. I would expect Seagate, WD, Hitachi etc to have behan research and development already if not in then near future. I am sure that inside the market this theory has been a long time coming (SSD take over).

 

makes sense, but wouldn't that be enormously expensive for companies like fujitsu, western digital, seagate etc to change their entire industry from manufacturing actual hard disk drives, to manufacturing semiconductors and memory chips?

Will this change (costing a LOT) be offset by the amount of money they could earn by changing industries?

 

the fact is that they have no choice, if they do not make the switch then their profits will fall dramatically as they will be selling an obselete product. Theoretically ssd companies will be making more money per unit they sell, than hd companies, however as ssd prices fall there should be not much difference in profits made.

 

This is a situation where, if Seagate, WD, Hitachi etc. don't invest in R & D it will spell the end of there company as one of the major e-storage companies in the world. I

wouldnt be shocked if I saw SSD's start to be resold under another brand name such as Seagate or WD after having been manufactured by Toshiba, Ridata etc.

 

That's already being done. Open up ANY SSD, regardless of the brand, and you'll find that the chips inside are made by Micron, Samsung, Infineon, etc etc, regardless of the name brand on the drive itself

 

i would expect the bigger hd manufacturing names to be making their own ssds, since they can afford the research, and will be able to make bigger profits in doing so.

 

That'd be so weird, seeing a RAM chip with the name SEAGATE on it lol.

Nonetheless, let's all wait and see. These companies probably have something planned out.

 

its not exactly a ram chip lol but close enough

 

no I know, but either way, a flash memory chip, the type depending on the quality of the drive.

 

They already have >1TB SSDs. They just cost an arm and a leg (and possibly more).

 

Yes they do, BitMICRO released a 1.6 TB SSD a while back.