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Western Digital Black

As SSDs become more popular and prices drop, hard bulldoze manufacturers are adjusting their long-term manufacturing plans and preparing for a hereafter in which fewer and fewer hard drives are built. For Western Digital, that means planning to shut down a factory it's operated for decades.

Western Digital plans to shut down its manufactory almost Kuala Lumpur, then sell the facility, Anandtech reports. Difficult drive shipments take dropped significantly in recent years, after briefly spiking in the backwash of the 2011 Thailand floods that heavily depressed drive product due to widespread water damage.

HDD-Shipments

All three companies have been impacted by the declines, with total capacity falling to around 400 meg drives in 2017, down from 550 million in 2014. The closure volition get out WD with two drive manufacturing plants — Blindside Pa-In (1.7m sq ft) and Prachinburi (730k sq ft). WD is a vertically integrated hard drive manufacturer, which ways information technology owns the facilities that handle its own production from outset to cease. A WD spokesperson told The Register:

In response to declining long-term demand for client HDDs, Western Digital has taken steps to rationalize its HDD manufacturing operations globally. The company volition decommission its HDD manufacturing facility in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, past the terminate of calendar 2019. This transition volition be executed in close collaboration with employees, customers, supply partners and other critical stakeholders.

The data engineering science industry is undergoing substantial change. This market transformation is driving increased adoption of SSDs and NAND flash in traditional HDD applications. The change has contributed to growth in SSD/NAND flash and declining long-term demand for customer HDDs. Consequently, Western Digital plans to aggrandize SSD manufacturing in Penang. The company is in the final stages of commissioning its second SSD facility in Penang, which will go into production in the coming months.

The transition abroad from hard drives to other media will proceed in the consumer market, even as bulldoze capacities continue to rising and enterprise deployments of high capacity drives continue to abound. Deject storage and SSDs SEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce seem likely to collectively replace the traditional consumer market place for HDDs in large part, though we suspect there'll always be a market for cheap external storage. It's just too useful to be able to plug a laptop hard bulldoze into an enclosure for moving information effectually speedily to give up on HDDs altogether.

Simply just because the market for magnetic storage is changing doesn't mean it'due south ending. With helium-filled difficult drives offer more platters and higher capacities and certain capabilities, like surveillance cameras, capable of eating every bit much HDD space as the market can throw at them, magnetic storage is going nowhere anytime presently — even if the markets it'll be deployed into are changing in response to shifting NAND flash costs.

At present read: How Practice SSDs Work?