WD disk revenues spin slower as its flash fireworks go off

Re: "Unless Seagate gets seriously into the flash business"

Pretty much.

Read previous articles on here. Seagate has no real focus on SSD or Flash at all. All they have or know is hard disk so they are pushing enterprise, high-RPM, helium-filled stuff. That'll last. For a while. But they really have no public plan, certainly, for anything else.

There I was thinking that helium was rare and expensive, that commercial size arrays were all going Flash, and that the writing was on the wall for hard disks.

Even at a consumer level the SSD winners are Samsung and Intel, maybe Crucial and Kingston - not traditionally large hard disk storage manufacturers.

Given the physical size of SSD chips (tiny, my 1Tb barely occupies it's 2.5", non-hermetically-sealed, snap-together chassis, god knows what you could fit if you crammed it into 3.5" formats as much as you can), the speed of them, the capacity of them, the longevity of them (disks fail whatever the make, but SSDs appear no worse) and the reliability of them, the only obstacle is price, and the only to get that down is to mass-produce.

I have literally no idea what the traditional HDD manufacturers think they are playing at at the moment. All my money is going to Samsung.

And while the RAIDs in work are all on disk for now, I'm hard-pushed to think why they couldn't be SSD of equivalent size except for - quite literally - manufacturer certified compatibility. I'll still buy the "official" IBM/Lenovo replacement drives for our arrays but the second they approve an SSD I can't see why I wouldn't start putting those in in their place. Hell, we only deal in 2Tb disks as it is, and there's already consumer- and pro-level 2Tb SSDs for much cheaper than enterprise drives, that massively outperform them.

Unless your load is literally 100% write, why on earth would anyone touch non-SSDs if they come down in price.

Seagate, et al, are dead in the water unless they compete or have a subsidiary taking up the SSD slack.