Western Digital is renowned for making hard drives and considered with Seagate to be the hard drive manufacturers. However as consumer trends have started to change, demand for desktop computers and notebooks have started to weaken, hence hard drive sales are on a decline. Tablets have become a major vertical for consumer electronic manufacturers. What are Seagate and Western Digital doing to counteract the decline in their key industries?
Allow me a bit of creative license as I think the race is now on to make thinner hard drives to fit into ultrabooks which are also becoming thinner by the week. These thinner solid state drives (SSD) could be used in tablets. As tablet adoption has grown manufacturers have had to adapt to the changes in requirements for companies such as Apple, Samsung, Google etc.
“With 500GB of storage capacity and models with high performance-enabling solid state hybrid drive technology, this slim product line helps to address the tradeoffs system designers often make between capacity, physical size and performance.”
It seems that the thinner hard drives are aimed at ultrabooks and notebooks but I wonder if Western Digital is looking at becoming a tablet and cellphone storage business down the line. They surely would be looking at a future in which desktops and notebooks would be less important.
“With the launch of our new WD Blue 5 mm ultra slim hard drives and our WD Black SSHD products, currently shipping to OEMs, WD is delivering to our customers a variety of solutions that maximize storage capacity and volumetric efficiency, as well as performance and system responsiveness, for consumers,” said Matt Rutledge, vice president of WD’s client computing business unit.
This could be an interesting story to keep an eye on as Western Digital is a silent giant in the computer storage business. Seagate, are you going to respond to this development?
