I'm not intimately familiar with the various players in the storage market, but as an outsider I would guess that Western Digital must be doing alright. They could have, but didn't, break up the price-fixing ruling that market and taken it over handily if need be. Amazing that in 2018 it's still more expensive to get data storage on a dumb grid of NAND gates built out of common materials than it is to get it on hard drives infused with helium, sporting a high precision high speed motor, platters coated with rare materials, neodymium magnets, and, coming soon, lasers!
> Amazing that in 2018 it's still more expensive to get data storage on a dumb grid of NAND gates built out of common materials than it is to get it on hard drives infused with helium, sporting a high precision high speed motor, platters coated with rare materials, neodymium magnets, and, coming soon, lasers!
And the heads, those are incredibly tiny works of art.
All those things are still easier/cheaper in CapEx than new lithographic process nodes.
Which has always been true: ever since the discovery of semiconductors, nothing in tech has ever been more capital-intensive than the R&D and working-up of a new fab that can put out smaller-nanometer—or in this case, many-more-layered—circuits.
It's just that now, process nodes are something that apply to storage, too.
SSDs are trouncing hard drives in capacity, though. AFAIK, they currently top out at 30TB in the 2.5in form factor and 100TB in the 3.5in form factor. (I'm not sure what the current top end is for other form factors but they're probably remarkably high, too.) Of course, prices for these units are also way up there.
Yup, it's hard to get rid of spinning rust unless you want to spend 10x the cost. While we don't have a good future in the sport car market (SSDs), we are truly the good guys are storing lots of stuff cheap on a cent/GB level. Basically we're semi-truck and our future is the cloud. An overview of the hard drive mission and tech we're working on presented at OCP by your's truly and my roadmap buddy.
Lasers are dead. DOA, at least according to WD. Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) is the next thing for rust. WD plans to start shipping MAMR drives in 2019.
