Seagate Hits Milestone with 2 Billionth Hard Drive

Seagate has announced that it has built its two-billionth hard drive. Seagate was founded in 1979; it took 29 years for them to ship their first billion hard drives. Since then, many applications have greatly increased the demand for storage. Particularly thanks to social media, cloud storage, and business computing, it only took Seagate four years to build another billion hard drives. As such, in 2013, Seagate is celebrating the shipment with its two-billionth hard drive...

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Western Digital Regains HDD Market Lead in Q2

Following Seagate, Western Digital has apparently recovered from the impact of the Thailand flood as well. As of Q2, the company has become the leading hard drive maker again.

According to IHS, the company built about 71.0 million HDDs during the quarter, ahead of Seagate, which manufactured 65.9 million devices. WD's revenue was $4.8 billion, while Seagate posted $4.5 billion of sales.

“Western Digital lost its No. 1 unit shipment ranking to Seagate in the fourth quarter of 2012 after flooding in Thailand damaged its HDD manufacturing facility,” said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS. “The company now has fully recovered from the disaster, allowing it to sharply increase shipments of HDDs for notebook PCs, up 28 percent from the first quarter. Western Digital is on track to retain the top spot in shipments and revenue for the third quarter.”...

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Hard drive shortage nails Q4 PC growth, but Apple shines

Global PC shipments for the fourth quarter were down 0.2 percent compared to a year ago as the industry was nailed by hard drive shortages and competition from tablets, phones and e-readers, according to data from IDC and Gartner.

Only Apple—fueled by its solid state drive MacBook Air—skated by unscathed. Apple delivered fourth quarter growth of 18 percent in the U.S.

For 2011, the PC industry grew at a 1.6 percent clip. Europe and Asia was better than expected. Overall though, hard drive shortages and a pause ahead of Windows 8 are going to keep PC growth in check.

IDC expects first quarter shipments to slow, but then pick up in the fourth quarter. For 2012, IDC is expecting growth of 5.4 percent.

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Hard drive manufacturers slash warranty periods

Computerworld - Seagate and Western Digital are cutting back on hard drive warranties, in some instances from five years to one, in order to save money or redirect it to product development.

Seagate's warranties on certain drives will be reduced as of Dec. 31, and WD will follow beginning Jan. 2. All drives shipped prior to those dates will continue to carry the current warranty term associated with the products.

The warranty period reductions, first reported by The Register, mean some of Seagate's and WD's most popular drives for desktops and laptops will no longer carry three- or five-year warranties.

In an email response to Computerworld, Seagate said it was reducing warranty periods as a way to standardize its terms "to be more consistent with those commonly applied throughout the consumer electronics and technology industries.

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How will the disk shortage affect you?

Summary: Massive flooding has shut down disk giant Western Digital’s Thai plant. Asustek could run out of disks by the end of this month; Lenovo and Apple have issued warnings. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We heard a similar story with the Japan earthquake/tsunami/meltdown disaster: plants offline; component shortages; widespread disruptions forecast. But somehow things have kept going for most vendors with the exception of Lexus, Toyota and Honda.

What’s real
There’s 4 feet of water in the WD plant. Even after the flood waters recede a substantial clean up is required: one analyst forecast 56 days of downtime.

That plant produces about half of WDs disks. WD produces about half of the world’s disks, so worst case we’re looking at a 25-30% reduction in global disk supply over the next 2-3 months.

Global production is ≈50 million drives a month, so the shortfall could be 30-50 million drives. Yeah, that would hurt.

Components?
Disk component suppliers have also been affected, but there’s less visibility into their condition. Worst-case so far: the vendor who makes most of the world’s spindle motors has a flooded plant.

But shortages of other critical components are possible, and could affect all vendors, not just WD. OTOH, other plants could ramp up to fill the void - and it would be in their financial interest to do so.

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