HDD no one buys? Seagate's revenue and profits plummet: it's time to move to SSDs

On October 10, traditional storage giant Seagate released its first financial report for the first quarter of fiscal 27, with total revenue of US$2023.20 billion, a decrease of US$53.10 billion from the same period last fiscal year, and an operating margin decline of 8.13%. It is reported that Seagate has launched a layoff plan of 5,3000 people, which is expected to account for 8% of the total global workforce.

(Image source: Seagate official website)

At present, the demand in the global storage market is declining, and even storage giant Samsung has been giving "preferential prices" in the past few months to reduce inventory pressure. Compared with SSDs, the market shrinkage of mechanical hard disks is more serious. According to the latest financial report released by storage giant Seagate, its profitability rate is declining rapidly, although the specific shipment data is no longer disclosed, but according to expert analysis, the total shipment volume in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022 is only about 1982.<> million units, a decrease of nearly <> million units. Of course, from the consumer's point of view, the price of SSDs has dropped too much, and naturally they will not choose slower mechanical hard disks.

(Image source: Seagate official website)

In fact, the debate between HDDs and SSDs has hardly stopped for a moment, and from the results of market feedback, it has become an indisputable fact that ordinary home users prefer the latter. In the past few years, manufacturers such as Seagate, Western Data and Toshiba have become more dependent on the market in the enterprise field, but after Western Digital tried to transform and focus on the success of SSDs in the consumer field, there was not much time left for Seagate and Toshiba.

However, although the market share of the enterprise field is small, the profit is still considerable, but the company will not continue to update like the consumer field, which has also led to Seagate's earnings beginning to fluctuate a lot. On the other hand, enterprises choose mechanical hard disks naturally in the hope that they will have a longer service life, and manufacturers cannot do anything in quality in order to improve the replacement frequency, which is also the helplessness of Seagate and other manufacturers.

(Image source: Seagate official website)

The frustration of mechanical hard disks may also come from the rise of cloud disk services. As the tariff of cloud disks has decreased, many savvy consumers have begun to back up more files to the cloud, which is a huge blow to mechanical hard disks, which have only the single advantage of low price and large capacity. Of course, even if the market feedback is not good, mechanical hard disk is not completely lost living space, in recent years many DIY enthusiasts have begun to be keen to build their own NAS, in this niche hobby group, mechanical hard disk is still quite popular, just want to return to the former glory, seems unlikely.