They’ve been commodities for years, and I imagine will continue to be. What helped them (I’m talking about the hard disk drive companies now), was all the consolidation through the years that got them down to 2 main competitors (Western Digital and Seagate) that started playing nice (so they were each able to keep some profits) rather than having constant price wars and losing money.
I thought HDD were doomed years ago. Spinning platters on a no moving part device? But the HDD makers confounded me by being able to constantly improve the product just enough to stay ahead of SSD. And some HDD makers also confounded the usual Innovator’s Dilemma outcome by successfully branching out into SSD.
Maybe this worked because the superiority of SSD was obvious even to the biggest fuddy duddies in the industry. And because unlike the iPhone they had time to change. Perhaps the same thing will take place in the car business as incumbents try to adapt to the clearly superior BEV and autopilot mode. As a TSLA share holder that’s OK with me, I will be satisfied with a profitable 5% of the $100 billion/year vehicle market.
Mature industries tend to develop into duopolies or oligopolies. When your products are virtually identical, economies of scale rule. Especially if it is a non consumer product.
A very good day in the markets today, though none of my holdings had any spectacular pop. PAYC was the best at +2.55%
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Foodles - thanks for posting that about SSD memory. If people don’t realize the cloud is networked memory, what are people thinking it is? I’m not sure of what the most commonly used technology is for the cloud memory, but I’d think it would be the fastest and most reliable.
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F1,
I’m not sure of what the most commonly used technology is for the cloud memory
I don’t know the percentage use of HDD vs SSD in cloud computing currently, either (a quick internet search did not turn that up for me), but here’s a relatively recent article describing the differences between the two storage systems. SSDs have advantages in most all areas except price anymore (and that is diminishing quickly). So sooner than later most everything will be SSDs. That’s why Western Digital purchased Sandisk recently and is trying to stop the sale of Toshiba’s chip unit (that they’re currently partners in because of the previously mentioned Sandisk purchase) and keep it for themselves. At least the dinosaur is trying to adapt.
https://www.zadarastorage.com/blog/tech-corner/hdd-versus-ss…
It’s clear that when HDDs and SSDs are compared feature for feature, the advantage lies heavily with SSDs. The only thing HDDs still have going for them is their continuing (but continually diminishing) price advantage. When it comes to bulk storage of data for which the highest levels of input/output performance are not required, HDDs, either alone or, more likely, as part of a HDD/SSD hybrid solution, may still be the most cost-effective option. Clearly, however, the future of storage in the corporate data center lies with solid state memory, and not with spinning platters.
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