As he said in the very beginning - he is explaining the technology in mechanical hard drives. He thinks the technology in good old fashioned hard drives is getting the short shift.
Basically that's a perfect example of what happens when "Someone Moved The Cheese". Every SSD sale is a lost HDD sale for Seagate or Western Digital. Seagate has become a "Me Too!" player in the SSD market recently, but they are WAY behind most of the other SSD makers in terms of market share.
I think the guy in the vid sees his job being threatened in the next few years, so he is doing his best to remain relevant. In the not-too-distant future spinning platter drives will be as rare as carburetors. SSD prices are already dropping like a rock, while capacities are increasing nicely. If/when spinning platter drives go away then that guy won't be needed to manufacture thin-film heads for HDD's any more.
Yes, it's tough to be standing directly in the path of progress. But it happens all the time. Folks that made a living selling horse-drawn buggies, or selling or tending horses were swept aside in the years after Henry Ford crushed their business models. Many jobs have been rendered unneeded over the ages, but it seems that the rate of change has rapidly accelerated in the last few decades.
Henry Ford also paid the line workers a handy sum if money so they could afford the products they are making, so while some jobs were eliminated through technology others were made for the displaced workers. Now income has stagnated for decades and people are working longer hours for same salaries (read...lower...due to inflation and concern of being replaced) while major companies find ways to appease the short term stock market and earn money for shareholders while slowly destroying the domestic market for their own goods and services because people won't be signing up for Spotify if they can barely buy milk, bread, and gas.
Henry Ford also paid the line workers a handy sum if money so they could afford the products they are making, so while some jobs were eliminated through technology others were made for the displaced workers. Now income has stagnated for decades and people are working longer hours for same salaries (read...lower...due to inflation and concern of being replaced) while major companies find ways to appease the short term stock market and earn money for shareholders while slowly destroying the domestic market for their own goods and services because people won't be signing up for Spotify if they can barely buy milk, bread, and gas.
Sounds like you should spend a bit of time reading some books on Economics. There are no easy answers to what ails the US economy. Thanks to the ease with which products and services can be produced anywhere and sold anywhere, EVERYONE ON EARTH has become "the competition". NOTHING can be done in the USA to change that. You could start a company and pay your workers boatloads of cash, but if you want to be profitable then that forces you to price your products or services higher. The extra money has come from somewhere. Price your stuff too high beyond what a competitor from a third world country can provide, and you would soon go out of business as your competitor enjoys record sales. Long term effect? The standard of living in the US will continue to erode until equilibrium is reached with our competitors. The process started around 30 years ago and has been on a steady decline since. Millions of jobs have been moved offshore, to cheaper locations. Millions more have been replaced by robotics and other automation. Even China is starting to feel some of the effects of this process, as some manufacturers have already stopped having their items made in China and moved production to other countries where labor and other business costs are lower. Why? Because the Chinese workers started demanding higher pay...
Now their jobs are done in Vietnam, Brazil, etc.
Foxconn, a company in China that make iPhones and lots of other electronic devices, employs over ONE MILLION workers on their assembly lines. The workers and activist groups started complaining a couple of years ago about working conditions and pay. Guess what Foxconn has done to "fix" the problem? They have placed orders for ONE MILLION robotic assembly units to be delivered to them over the next three years. So most of those workers will be looking for new jobs soon. But hey, at least they won't have to worry about being worked too hard at Foxconn any longer.
I never said I was an economist, all the points you've made I am aware of and yes, I don't have all the answers. I'm just hoping that they get to that Utopian state where everything is done by robotos so I can sit at the beach with my robot made pina colada and enjoy doing nothing
I don't know. Seagate was so late to the SSD party that I haven't paid them much attention. Even if they do the actual drive manufacturing, they would almost certainly use flash chips from one of the existing makers. The market is awash in flash chips so it would be financially imprudent to build your own fab just for those.
I am sure that the flash (data-storage) chips would not be unique to Seagate; the controller and its firmware might be unique (if the SSD's are Seagate's own design) or they might be shared with other products (if the company is re-branding some existing SSD's).
I've got a Seagate 600 SSD 240GB and am happy with it. It does use a Link A Media LM87800 controller (now owned by Hynix) with what appears to be custom Seagate firmware (there haven't been any firmware updates since the original release of the SSD) and Toshiba MLC NAND. According to the Anandtech review, earlier Seagate SSD designs used a two chip controller configuration - a Seagate chip responsible for the host interface and a Link A Media chip for the NAND interface - the LM87800 is apparently the single chip integration of the earlier design.
I'm not going to be making the move to ssd's until they come with free life time recovery and replacements. I use one program that's a live environment and it's constantly writing. so what am I to do? I'll stick with the spinning old man drives.
HDD's will still be around for awhile for those that need cheap large storage
sure once SSD's get to the 4+TB range and near the same $/gig then maybe
I wasn't implying that they'll go away this month, but the trend is clear. SSD's are here to stay and every SSD sale is a lost sale for the mechanical drive makers. Very few people ever use more than 30-40 GB anyway so they don't need massive SSD's.
I'm sure that there were people making carburetors for cars just 25 or so years ago that made similar statements about the silly expense of fuel injection and how it would never replace the tried and true simplicity of a carb. I wonder what they're doing these days?
For a lot of consumers the SSD drive makes more sense from a speed perspective. But you need to look at all the ancillary markets that are not consumer driven....
Cloud storage providers isn't going to switch to SSDs due to cost 4K Video is going to drive traditional hard drive consumption for people who want to store their media at home Content creators also need more storage (20+ Megapixel cameras and video anyone?) Surveillance systems require gobs and gobs of storage for surveillance footage NAS has been made more affordable and demystified so more consumers are setting up centralized storage for their home (prosumer market) Etc...
Mechanical drives have a loooooooong way to go before they are deemed useless like the floppy as long as they are able to increase the capacity and do not allow SSDs to match them in size and price.
Exactly The way I see it it the pro-summer's will move to having NAS/SAN arrays with HDD's and use SSD's only on the desktops
so sure in a few years desktops bight be all SSD's the HDD won't be dead but hybrid drives and eco drives might be because eco drives aren't NAS friendly nor are hybrids
I myself am already there, I have a Qnap TS-469-Pro with 4x 2TB drives and my computer only has a 480GB SSD (though IMO the qnap is a bit slow so I hope to replace it with something faster some time.
Still making carbs because they're still used just not on production cars.
You're cracking me up! Just how many people do you think Holley has to keep around for making a few carbs for motorheads vs. the millions-per-year that Holley, Rochester, Carter, Weber, Stromberg, etc. used to make? 99% of the people that used to make carbs now do something else.
Do you think that because a couple of people still make custom buggy whips in their spare time that the buggy whip industry is thriving?
The read/write head of the arm is made on a silicon wafer, and the chips on the drive are made on wafers. I used to make a machine that made the read/write heads, and Seagate was one of our top customers. I don't think that MHDDs are at all like SSDs, one uses spinning disks the other simply stores on chips. Yes, the electronics has some in common, but they are different devices. Actually, an optical disk drive could be argued to have more in common with MHDDs than SSDs.
Yeah that guy in the vid should fear losing his job by working for Seagate in the first place. I have had 4 of their mechanical drives fail on me out of all 4 of the Seagate drives I have owned.
This company just is not known for reliability. So I can see why they have to play on words to get some kind of attention.