WD Sells 62M HDDs, Wants More Excitement For Windows 8

By Wolfgang Gruener
published

Western Digital (WD) delivered a solid quarterly result by current standards but reflected a cautious stance toward the potential positive impact of Windows 8 on the PC industry.

Right now, it appears WD is counting more on the second generation of Windows 8 products based on Intel's Haswell processors rather than the current product generation.

WD sold 62.5 million HDDs in Q3, up from 57.8 million one year ago. Revenue was up from $2.7 billion to $4.0 billion, while the profit dropped from $260 million to $239 million.

The company projected a total market volume of about 140 million HDDs for Q4, which is rather low given the fact that Microsoft is launching Windows 8. The Q2 market was at about 157 million units, but declined, according to WD, to 140 million in Q3, which means that the company does not see an uptick for Q4.

Asked about Windows 8, president Stephen Milligan said that there has not been enough excitement for Windows 8 products. "We're trying to do our best in terms of some of these hybrid designs and smaller form factor designs that maybe enable our customers to have a little bit of excitement back to the product set," he said.

The opportunity is clearly seen in hybrid drives, but the products that count apparently will not be in the market this year. "What we're doing right now is providing engineering samples to our customers," Milligan said. "In the first half of calendar year 2013, we will be supplying call samples and gearing up for volume kind of activity the back half of 2013." This timing aligns closely with the launch of Intel's Haswell processor in Q2 of next year.

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Wolfgang Gruener
18 Comments Comment from the forums
  • livebriand
    Honestly, for a lot of people, there just isn't much reason to NOT use an SSD anymore - they don't need much space, there isn't a huge price premium (for a 128GB drive), and you get a huge performance boost. If my laptop's hard drive fails, I will be getting an SSD to replace it.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    WD, there are a lot of us waiting to purchase HDDs right now. I could use 4 of them myself to replace an aging and full RAID. But I am not about to sink $140 per drive on a product you are not willing to give more than a 1-2 year warranty! Give us back our 3 and 5 year warranty options, and drop your prices another $20 per drive and we will start buying regardless of what OS or CPU we are running.

    Also, in the last year I have purchased 4 SSDs, and 0 HDDs. This should be a clear message to where the market is moving. With large (2TB) reliable SSDs becoming available for server markets, it is really going to eat into your favorite cash cow. Enterprise SSDs are quieter, cooler, insanely faster, and just as reliable as enterprise HDDs, while not costing much more money. If nobody buys HDDs for home system drives, or laptop drives, or servers, that leaves the cheap home storage market, which has low profit margins... sucks to be a HDD company...
    Reply
  • clownbaby
    glad to see that WD managed to maintain its profit margins while we all paid ridiculous prices for hard drives for the last year (and continue to do so)
    Reply
  • Soul_keeper
    how about giving us an updated black line ?
    1TB/platter would be nice, let's break 200MB/s !
    TLER support is nice, but your 3TB $378 FYYZ/FYYG RE drives are outperformed by seagate's 3TB $145 1TB/platter consumer drive(which is easy to get for $20+ discounts).
    Platter densities seem to have stagnated, and what's with all the 10K rpm drives having tiny platters ? what about a 1TB/platter 10K rpm drive, sequentials would be incredible on that ...
    Reply
  • digiex
    Instead of cursing the floods in Thailand. Hard disk manufacturers are very glad it happened.

    It made the price increase that persist even though they already recovered many times their loses.
    Reply
  • olaf
    and I want a drive that I don't have to return in warranty 3-4 times within those 2 short years of warranty. also I don't like paying ssd price for a damned hard.
    Reply
  • pjmelect
    I don't think that Windows 8 will pick up the market for hard drives. I think (hope) that Windows 8 will flop, and that the people that are likely to buy Windows 8 will get a SSD instead.
    Reply
  • teodoreh
    Magnetic media is the next IT dinosaur. Admit it and move on or die.
    Reply
  • dimar
    When is WD going to refresh the Black HDD models with improvements and stuff??
    Reply
  • neiroatopelcc
    livebriandHonestly, for a lot of people, there just isn't much reason to NOT use an SSD anymore - they don't need much space, there isn't a huge price premium (for a 128GB drive), and you get a huge performance boost. If my laptop's hard drive fails, I will be getting an SSD to replace it.
    For the average consumer that holds true, but power users and professionals need more storage.
    I'm constantly hitting the ceiling in my work laptop due to the 120GB space of the ssd in it.

    For me a hybrid drive clearly is the better choice. I've got a seagate 750gb drive in my system at home, because frankly I can't afford to get adequate ssd storage and thus a hybrid was the obvious choice as the last 2tb drive failed. However 750gb is still on the small side, and I need to avoid installing too many of my steam games at once. Previously I just installed every game so it was ready when I wanted to play. That luxury is not there with a hybrid, and completely impossible with a small ssd.

    I've had serveral builds for other people where I've had to link a mechanical disk to the %programfiles(x86)%\Steam folder in order to make the system viable at all.


    Anyhow for a nongamer misses johnson who just wants some facebook and a few movies, it works. But they probably would rather spend their money on makeup or something than on an ssd
    Reply