With advent of SSDs, are the landscape for 'harddrive' companies going to change?

Western digital, seagate and hitachi has been ruling the harddrive scene for a long time. With the advent of SSDs, surely this will be the future standard medium for data storage no doubt.

From what we have seen in this early stage of commercial deployment of SSDs, we see a set of new players entering the harddisk storage scene, that were once exclusively semiconductor or solidstate device manufacturers. E.g. intel, samsung, OCZ, Kingston, etc. Obviously, their expertise and resources plays to their favor for SSDs.

So then, will the future see a change in the harddrive storage scene? E.g. will WD, seagate and hitachi have to do some real investments ASAP into this field to ensure they are not left behind in this and made redundant in the future? Will the major players of future HDD companies be different to that of WD, seagate and hitachi, given current projections and their state of R&D focus and capabilities?

 

I'm looking at WD's current SSD offerings, and they're... not that great compared to the current king, Intel, or even the runners-up, like OCZ. And I've read somewhere that Seagate has no interest in SSD development at this point.

Yeah, the big names like WD are going to be pushed out of the storage arena, or at least into a corner. The question is for how long, and when.

 

Yea, its especially because their R&D and staff are not specialists in that field, so it will take major resources and effort to turn the company around into the SSD path.

I remember seeing a youtube video somewhere from some WD guy talking about the disadvantages of SSDs and how spin drive HDDs are going to last down the road. Obviously biased and lying to himself a little bit, especially when cost, speed, endurance of SSDs improve dramatically to eventually perhaps beat HDDs in every aspect possible. Right now, cost and read/write cycle limitations are perhaps still on HDDs side. Future, probably not so. At least for hitachi, they develop many other technologies. But WD and seagate are pretty much all HDDs. Same reason I guess why oil companies are investing into green tech now.

 

Is there really any overlap at all between SSDs and HDDs? At this rate, WD and Seagate might as well put their money into something else entirely.

However, I think HDDs will have a significant advantage in space per unit cost for quite a while yet.

 

Yea, but they have always been HDD manufacturers. I know WD and seagate are releasing their own SSDs, but they surely arnt the oligoplies they were in HDD markets, and this is likely going to be true in the future also because the SSD game is the game semiconductor companies are good at, like intel, etc.

 

Yeah, Western Digital and Seagate are going to decline in the next few years, but it's going to be a slow death for them. I just don't see any new fields where their expertise will be applicable.

 

Yea I know what you mean. They arnt as flexible as hitachi will be in such a situation with eggs not all in one basket

 

Samsung also makes HDDs (Spinpoint), but then again, Samsung makes so many different things, it's not all that surprising. What I suspect may be more likely to happen would be the "traditional" HDD makes entering into partnerships, or outright buying out (smaller) companies that specialize in SSDs. After all, (assuming they're not getting bought out) a small company specializing in SSDs that hasn't yet made a name for themselves could gain a lot from a partnership with a big name in terms of advertising and breaking into the market.

 

I think it is a great question and have wondered myself. How much does long term experience with data storage translate over to SSD's? Will WD be a big or little player in the SSD world? Seagate is nuts to ignore SSD's.

I think this is really an excellent question. I am betting that WD SOON has a game changing "BLACK" SSD on the market. At the end of the day, I have always thought that it would be much cheaper to produce chips and circuit boards rathyer than all the necessary parts for a spinner. Did you see the 40 photos of the WD lab on Tom's site? Man, that was some SERIOUSLY expensive looking machinery. Truly amazing. Dave