Seagate Reports Flat HDD Shipment Growth
Seagate has released a preliminary result of its fiscal second quarter 2013, or the fourth calendar quarter of 2012.
The company said that it shipped about 58 million hard drives during the quarter, resulting in total sales of at least $3.6 billion, down from $3.7 billion in Q3. There was no information on how many drives were enterprise drives and how many units went into the consumer market, but the shipment number was virtually flat with 57.6 million drives in Q3. Seagate said that it believes it maintained its market share, which is about even with Western Digital and right around the 42 percent mark.
Typically, we would expect a noticeable uptick in shipments in the fourth quarter, which was especially true for Q4 2012, since the PC should have benefited from the launch of Windows 8. Seagate's number suggests that the PC industry may not have seen any improvement in shipments over the third quarter. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2011, sales were up sharply from 47 million units, which was impacted constrained supply caused by the Thailand flood.
Like Intel, Seagate is a major indicator of the health of the PC market. It's too early to make any conclusions. For now, we'll have to wait for the detailed results set to be announced on January 28, as well as the Q4 performance of Western Digital, which owns 45 percent of the market, according to IHS.
Compared to a pre-flood Q4 2011 unit shipment number of about 49 million units, the Q4 2012 result does not look too bad, but given the fact that Q3 2012 was already underwhelming - Seagate sold almost 66 million units in Q2 - there may be some concern about the overall PC market, the impact of tablets and hard drive shipments into the notebook market.
To take advantage of even an i3 processor you NEED to have an SSD in your system, and the prices are falling rapidly to the point where even some OEMs are including SSDs as standard fair. In 2 years I expect that every system will have at least a SSD as a system drive, and some systems will start to have SSDs for storage as well.
I had a client ask me to recommend them a 2 tb drive a couple weeks ago. I couldn't. Not professionally. Not for a consumer grade drive. I told him to get a SSD, and then get a bunch of cheap drives, and just RAID them, because there was no way he was going to be able to rely on those drives. Period.
SSDs and poor HDD quality control is to blame, not the death of the PC...
Exactly This.
It's time for seagate to "Adjust to the new reality of the market" and lower prices.
Around $100 for 2TB is only about 40% more than the lowest they have ever been, nowhere near double. Considering the amount of precision machining that goes into those, I doubt there is much of a profit to be made manufacturing mechanical drives beyond single-platter below $80 per unit.
The move to 1-year warranties on HDDs because "drives are so reliable that most failures occur during the first few months" on the other hand bothers/worries me quite a bit. Smells a lot like quality control is slipping. That's one more reason in my book to look at SSDs where the shortest warranties are 3-years with many boasting 5-years and some even going to 7-years.
I bought a Hitachi 5k3000 2TB drive for $70 about 3 months before the flooding!
Price are still way, wary, way too high. 3TB 5400RPM should be less than $100 by now.
At the high end of capacity, they've gotten slightly more reasonable. But for your everyday user who doesn't have 2TB of shemale vids or whatever, they're still quite ridiculous. Used to be $49.99 for 1TB, $39.99 on sale. Now it's at least $80 or $90, and you're lucky to get any hard drive for under $60, even the 320-500GB ones. Not a very attractive pricing scheme.
BTW, they did have a special on Newegg a couple months ago where they were briefly selling 1TB Seagate Barracudas for $49.99 again, so I know they're capable of selling them at a lower price. I bought the max amount, waited 3 weeks, then turned around and sold them for $70 apiece on ebay, which is pretty sad.
At those prices, I'm pretty sure manufacturers were making losses so it shouldn't be any surprise that they are phasing out low capacity drives and constraining production to bring prices back up. The same thing will happen with DRAM eventually, has it has done many times before.
When you can cram 2TB/platter, all capacities 1TB or less cost exactly the same to manufacture since they are all using the exact same single-head single-platter physical design so it makes very little sense for manufacturers to bother selling anything smaller and that is how you end up with all drives below 1TB priced almost the same as 1TB. In many cases, they are simply firmware-locking a 750-1000GB drive to whatever lower capacity is ordered.
This isn't much different from how Intel arbitrarily locks clock multipliers and disables the IGP of dies that could very well have become i5-3570k just to meet demand of i5-3330P... except Intel makes much larger profit margins.
i got a 4tb for 250$... i was mad that it cost 250$ and i had very little choice on who to get it from...
that said, i doubt that hdds are going anywhere... most people need more than an ssd offeres for space needs, but i dont think that internal drives, at least for home users will ever be the same again, what with external sata and usb3 there is little reason to go internal for the average person.
Internal drives still reduce desk, loose wire mess, power bar clutter. It also provides the HDDs with better mechanical protection against accidental bumps/drops/yanking, usually better ventilation for cooling and probably cleaner power in most cases. Forgoing the external box and power brick also shaves $15-25 off the total cost.
So I would say there are plenty of reasons to favor internal for frequently used storage.