How does Western Digital plan to survive?

[bigboxes]

Update: Seagate claims to have found a way around this physical limitation, but I still think things are going to get harder and harder for this old technology to keep up, while SSD is just getting better and better faster and faster.

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...seagate-promises-60tb-drives-this-decade.html

I was reading your link to a CW article talking about 60TB HDDs and I saw a new article on 100TB HDDs. Wowee!

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...b-disk-drive-youll-have-to-wait-til-2025.html

 

[ZippyDan]

I was reading your link to a CW article talking about 60TB HDDs and I saw a new article on 100TB HDDs. Wowee!

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...b-disk-drive-youll-have-to-wait-til-2025.html

Cool, I also ran into this article: http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-future-of-storage-2015-and-beyond/

Do you have a link for that? I know a few years ago Intel was saying SSDs would hit a wall due to latency and error correction, but even that was somewhere around 16 GB.

I tried to find the article that made me think we were about to hit a wall and it actually came from right here on Anandtech when Seagate was introducing its new Shingled Magnetic Recording, which is basically like an ugly hack to squeeze more space out of a platter:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7290/seagate-to-ship-5tb-hdd-in-2014-using-shingled-magnetic-recording

According to Seagate, its latest 1TB platter 3.5" drives have shrunk read/write heads as small as they can physically go.

 

[bradley]

I am not doing this from a single user perspective, far from it. I work in an environment that has a large amount of storage, triple digit PB, and we cannot wait to get rid of all the slow, and hot spinning disks, and replace it all with SSD or the equivalent.

Obviously everyone wants to replace HDD as a standard. And few will romanticize it's demise.

However we are talking about today, not tomorrow. Phase change memory might even be the death knell of HDD. But when that enterprise HDD breaks the likelihood is that it still will be replaced by another HDD based on cost and capacity alone.

 

[OrionMaster]

They should have bought OCZ out of bankruptcy