[HN Gopher] Western Digital to spin off flash business
___________________________________________________________________
Western Digital to spin off flash business
Author : dm_me_dogs
Score : 76 points
Date : 2023-10-30 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| bragr wrote:
| So saddle all the legacy liabilities in with the legacy business
| and slowly suck out the equity, while the flash business grows? I
| can see how that's a win for investors at least. Are the flash
| products still going to be branded WD?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yup. Seems like an increasingly common move by businesses. AMD
| did this with global foundries, for example.
| halJordan wrote:
| Im not following the surprise or maybe incredulity of this
| sentiment. It's normal and healthy for businesses to shed
| poor performers and merge to create synergies. The food
| majors went through this in the 2010s and nobody was crying
| or implicating malfeasance. The market should be reacting,
| that's what makes it useful.
| cogman10 wrote:
| There's a difference between what is good for the public,
| what is good for the market, and even what's good for a
| business's long term outlook.
|
| The issue with spinning off losers and acquiring winners is
| the prioritization of short-term gains over long term
| gains. Further, I dispute that it's motivated by "the
| market" and not the gambling habits of corporate leaders.
|
| Take, for example, HP's purchase of Palm for 1 billion
| dollars. But then a few months later, they let go of
| basically the entire palm staff. Then they created their
| webos tablet, then they killed it just a few months after
| launch. Then they let webos linger until finally selling
| rights to it to LG of all places.
|
| You certainly can argue "this is just the market being
| efficient" but was it? Or was it overpaid C level
| individuals making big bets, failing, and punishing their
| employees for their incompetence?
| dehrmann wrote:
| Some companies have done this recently (J&J, iirc), but the
| article didn't mention any liabilities WD was trying to shed,
| and both these businesses are viable, so I'm not sure if this
| was just a knee-jerk corporate criticism or there's something
| to this.
| SSLy wrote:
| Spinning rust side is only living because of price collusion
| by the flash vendors. Price for 8TB of TLC generic is
| currently 170 USD. QLC is cheaper than that.
| dehrmann wrote:
| That's actually a valid reason to spin off a business,
| especially if you happen to know you'll cross the
| inflection point in ~5 years. It isn't the same as the
| "legacy liabilities" game, though. Some investors want the
| growth business, some want the stable business, some want a
| cheaply-priced declining business (seriously; look into
| anything that pays royalties).
| mbreese wrote:
| Spinning rust is still useful for many purposes and will
| probably live on for decades more. We generate a ton of
| data and most of it ends up as read rarely or never. But it
| can live with slower access times on longer duration
| storage.
|
| It's honestly just like tape. There will be an HDD market
| for a long time that will be hidden in the whirl of data
| centers. Consumer HDD will slowly melt away, but the
| price/byte and durability of disk will keep it viable for
| quite a while. It's still faster than tape (but not as
| cheap).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Consumer HDD will slowly melt away
|
| I'd say it already has. Does any consumer PC come with a
| spinning disk anymore?
| purpleflame1257 wrote:
| Many consumer PCs will come with both a smaller capacity
| SSD and a higher-capacity HD.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Nailed it. They've been spending goodwill like crazy with
| debacles like pushing out SMR junk under the Red name.
|
| In my experience, their overall quality control has plummeted
| over the last few years. I've bought 3 Red drives for my home
| Synology. After about a year with each, the drive utilization
| graph will start creeping up toward a steady 100% while the
| other drives in the RAID are mostly idle. All drives have the
| same throughput. All drives have the same IOPS. And yet, the
| Red starts taking longer and longer to complete its requests.
| There aren't any SMART errors or warnings. If I pull the drive
| and run WD's diagnostics, it's fine. It shows every sign of
| being perfectly healthy, other than being dog slow up until the
| day I replace it. I'm 3-for-3 with this happening. Maybe I'm
| the only person and they work great for everyone else. I won't
| buy another, though.
|
| I think we're seeing WD turn into HP. People will still buy it
| for the name on the label, but those in the know will steer
| their friends to calmer waters.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I also had two Reds showing bad sectors after around a year,
| with a Synology. What "colour" drive do you usually buy now?
| Or even which manufacturer?
| sersi wrote:
| I've switched to only buying Toshiba, been very happy with
| them. They're also more silent as a bonus.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I've had good luck with Seagate Iron Wolves. They're a
| little noisier than others, but I've never had one fail.
| The Toshiba I've had in there for 3 years has also been
| fine.
|
| After years of seeing many brands of drives go through good
| and bad years, I'm hesitant to recommend any particular
| manufacturer. Seagate had a rough stretch, but they seem to
| be pretty good right now. WD used to be great, and now I
| don't want anything to do with them. Anytime I look for a
| new drive, I check out the latest Backblaze report and hope
| for the best.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| HP or HPe?
|
| Basically the same segmentation of "good business" and "bad
| business" there too.
| ginko wrote:
| Feels like the HDD business is the more stable of the two. The
| competition in the flash/SSD market if fierce.
| kstrauser wrote:
| True, but it's clearly the future, at least for mass market
| devices.
|
| There's still a place for buggy whip makers. The remaining
| ones can charge an arm and a leg because the few remaining
| ones generally compete on quality. I bet that's what we'll
| see for HDDs soon.
| rasz wrote:
| NAND is unable to replace HDD for long term storage.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Yes, and that's an important market. I suspect that it's
| tiny compared to the mass market devices I mentioned.
| ulfw wrote:
| I will never waste money on a Sandisk SSD again. My last one
| stopped working out of nowhere. Much happier with my Crucial X10.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| On the contrary, my Sandisk SSD I got around (roughly) 6 years
| ago is still happily working, despite being utilised for a
| _lot_ of writing. It 's gone through 3 house moves, and it's
| still going strong -- what a great purchase.
|
| My 2 Crucial MX500 SSDs have been pretty solid too; nothing bad
| to report on them.
|
| Re: your SSD, did you RMA it?
| splix wrote:
| There is no brand that never produced a SSD with a fault. I had
| tried all major HDD/SSD brands, and I think every single of
| them failed at some point.
|
| What is important is how they handle that. I had a faulty
| Sandisk and it was replaced with a working one without any
| problem or unnecessary question. Some other brands annoy you
| with stupid questions, puzzles and other tricks trying to avoid
| doing a replacement. And some just ignore any requests (ex.
| Samsung, from my experience) to replace a faulty SSD.
| dboreham wrote:
| I've never had a problem with Intel, but they sold that
| business recently.
| vluft wrote:
| they had a whole series that would irretrievably die after
| 1700 idle hours due to a firmware bug.
| duffyjp wrote:
| This summer I bought two Intel 2TB nvme drives for $65
| each. Not the newest tech but I've also never had a problem
| with an Intel SSD. I still have my original 40GB from 2012
| in an old laptop and it works just like new.
|
| The company that bought their SSD division (Solidigm)
| supports the Intel branded drives, and their utility had
| firmware updates ready to go for the ones I bought.
|
| I'd probably buy a Solidigm if I needed a new drive and
| these firesale Intel drives are gone.
| caycep wrote:
| It's the Koreans - SK Hynix bought it and is using it as
| their consumer drive division. The P44 Pro is supposed to
| be a more reliable and cheaper competitor to the Samsung
| 990 pro...but that unit is also not doing so hot w/ the
| memory downturn/post-covid correction
| toast0 wrote:
| > Not the newest tech but I've also never had a problem
| with an Intel SSD.
|
| I used to run Intel (enterprise) SSDs in servers. I
| didn't run enough other SSDs to have a sense for whether
| the failure rate was abnormally high, but it was
| definitely not zero (it was significantly less than the
| enterprise hard drives we were running). And the failure
| mechanism was sudden disappearance from the bus.
|
| My message to you is not to avoid Intel SSDs, just to
| make sure you have a backup in place, because when they
| fail, my experience is there's no warning, they just
| disappear. This seems to be the common failure mode for
| all/most SSDs, even though they're supposed to fail read-
| only. Hard drives usually give warnings as they fail, but
| not always enough warning to rescue data.
| rasz wrote:
| Lets not forget killing the drive instead of going read
| only, and later lying about this being intended outcome
| despite opposite statements in official documentation.
|
| https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-
| experi...
|
| "After a reboot, the SSD disappeared completely from the
| Intel software. It was still detected by the storage
| driver, but only as an inaccessible, 0GB SATA device.
|
| According to Intel, this end-of-life behavior generally
| matches what's supposed to happen. The write errors suggest
| the 335 Series had entered read-only mode. When the power
| is cycled in this state, a sort of self-destruct mechanism
| is triggered, rendering the drive unresponsive."
| starttoaster wrote:
| > and I think every single of them failed at some point.
|
| I understand that you probably are alluding to the fact that
| you never scientifically measured this experiment and that
| this is anecdotal. But this is pretty loose verbiage when
| we're talking about a product that is guaranteed to fail at
| some point or another. These are a wear item.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| It would be such a great headline if they worked disk and/or disc
| into it somehow
|
| Like
|
| > Western Digital spins Disk+Disc Businesses off
| HPsquared wrote:
| Or how it's a bad sector to be in.
|
| Edit: I'm sure the editorial staff at The Register are
| brainstorming a headline at this very moment.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Something, something, disc-injury spin from disc/disk
| industry on worker injuries
| nix0n wrote:
| > I'm sure the editorial staff at The Register are
| brainstorming a headline at this very moment.
|
| They're "disc"-ussing it.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Curses ;)
| skaushik92 wrote:
| They probably needed to prioritize getting the article out fast
| over coming up with good headlines since it's a flash sale
| greatgib wrote:
| Usually stock investors don't like diversification within
| companies. It is harder to value.
|
| I think that they realized that there is not so much in common
| between the HDD and flash business. No added value to own the 2
| business compared to separated entities.
|
| With that, the WD legacy HDD business can continue as a dividend
| stock dying slowly. And the flash business can now pretend to
| crazy valuations based on a shinny future.
| adventured wrote:
| It might also free up the flash business to make aggressive
| acquisitions without worrying quite as much about anti-trust
| from having a larger position in the overall storage market due
| to the old HDD business (which is dominated by just three
| firms).
|
| The stand-alone HDD business will end up as an acquisition in
| the not-distant future (Toshiba, Seagate, etc. somebody will
| eat it).
| sgerenser wrote:
| They need to come up with a good name for the flash business.
| Maybe something that indicates their products are like disks, but
| made from silicon instead of spinning rust. SiliconDisk? Maybe
| Sand-Disk? Or simplify that to Sandisk?
| chemmail wrote:
| The answer is obvious. Eastern Digital.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-30 23:01 UTC)