Western Digital's Kodak moment

trents said:

On Amazon I saw a WD 1tb "blue" SSD for $279. I said to myself, "That's not a good price at all. Who would buy it for that?" I researched the reviews a little bit and discovered that in addition it doesn't get good marks from those in the know, being essentially a rebranded Sandisk X400 (WD bought out Sandisk).

What's incredible to me is that WD and Seagate, two huge, well-established and very successful hard drive manufacturers, got so far behind the curve when it came to getting into the SSD market. They are now trying to catch up by buying out wannabe companies that were already in the SSD market but small players. They let other companies like Samsung and Crucial who had ties to memory chip manufacturers get the jump on them. WD and Seagate were essentially boxed out of the SSD niche for lack of chips as the nand chip production world wide could not keep up with demand.

It reminds me of how Kodak persisted in making film and film cameras when the world was moving over to digital photography and almost went down the tubes. And still, Kodak is a shadow of the company it used to be even though they finally started making digital cameras.

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trents said:

On Amazon I saw a WD 1tb "blue" SSD for $279. I said to myself, "That's not a good price at all. Who would buy it for that?" I researched the reviews a little bit and discovered that in addition it doesn't get good marks from those in the know, being essentially a rebranded Sandisk X400 (WD bought out Sandisk).

What's incredible to me is that WD and Seagate, two huge, well-established and very successful hard drive manufacturers, got so far behind the curve when it came to getting into the SSD market. They are now trying to catch up by buying out wannabe companies that were already in the SSD market but small players. They let other companies like Samsung and Crucial who had ties to memory chip manufacturers get the jump on them. WD and Seagate were essentially boxed out of the SSD niche for lack of chips as the nand chip production world wide could not keep up with demand.

It reminds me of how Kodak persisted in making film and film cameras when the world was moving over to digital photography and almost went down the tubes. And still, Kodak is a shadow of the company it used to be even though they finally started making digital cameras.

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RJARRRPCGP said:

Kodak pretty much went under by 2012! Kodak discontinued all camera manufacturing in 2012, if not before!

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RJARRRPCGP said:

Looks realistic for an SSD. If it were a spinner, then it would be 2011 all over again!

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trents said:

What's incredible to me is that WD and Seagate, two huge, well-established and very successful hard drive manufacturers, got so far behind the curve when it came to getting into the SSD market. They are now trying to catch up by buying out wannabe companies that were already in the SSD market but small players. They let other companies like Samsung and Crucial who had ties to memory chip manufacturers get the jump on them. WD and Seagate were essentially boxed out of the SSD niche for lack of chips as the nand chip production world wide could not keep up with demand.

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knoober said:

I would imagine that if they are profitable enough to purchase another company that they are just being wise and levelheaded with their earnings and looking towards future expansion. By purchasing an existing company they can gain access to all of their existing infrastructure for a cheap price and then put them to work making product that is up the the WD standards. In the meantime they still have to deal with existing stock that was purchased in the merger? This might be WD's bid to enter the SSD market and remain viable -- only time will tell. We will have to see if they bring a better offering to the table later on.

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trents said:

Makes sense but I still marvel that they didn't jump on the SSD bandwagon earlier.

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bob4933 said:

judging by this chart (yes, its a dubious chart that may or may not be correct), it appears WD got into the market at a fair time. I believe purchasing an already established, yet smaller, company that is already producing SSD's was a VERY smart decision on their part. Even last year, a 240gb SSD was more of a niche novelty item than a true consumer grade item. What, 150$ for 240gb?

With changes in fab processes, even "entry level" SSD's are performing at modest levels of performance. My ocz trion 150 480gb cost me 84$, so I bought 2 of em! Performance is over 500mbps read/write, and the access times are fast enough for my uses. Anything faster than sata can handle (At this time, pcie/m.2) has almost no real world benefits over a sata ssd. We're talking a second or two for windows boot times, negligible gains in load times of games, and the only real places youre going to see benefit are LARGE file transfers and benchmarking.

So no, I dont think WD is having a "kodak moment". My 2 cents is all

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EarthDog said:

QFT!!

Though one point of clarity is the IOPS and particularly small file/4k writes is where one tends to notice a difference in drives, not in sata limited bandwidth on large files.

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caddi daddi said:

I can't tell you what the benchmarks for drives really mean, but once in a while I fire up win xp on a spinner and it makes me feel ssd's of any type are........ for lack of a word.... ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!

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HankB said:

I think the situation with SSDs vs HDDs is a little different from film vs. digital. For years after film was introduced, it produced superior images in terms of resolution and (I think) color gamut. Digital was "good enough for the Internet" but simply not good enough for print work. If SSDs were deficient in any way in the early days, it was in terms of price and capacity while they excelled in terms of speed and latency. (I suppose digital photography did excel in terms of speed to 'printable image.) There was never a time when SSD storage was lower quality than HDD storage. Was there ever a time when we thought that SSDs would not eventually replace HDDs? I think in photography there was the feeling that digital would never surpass film. In hindsight we know it was only a matter of time. Kodak's mistake was not recognizing that in time. Nikon, Canon, Fuji and others seem to have made the transition without difficulty.

WD is late to the party and SSD technology is so much different than HDD technology it does make sense to purchase it. Personally I think Sandisk is a good choice since they are a reputable player in the flash market.

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