China’s Enterprise Storage Market Close to Reaching Hyper Speed
This week TRENDFOCUS co-sponsored The Enterprise Storage Conference in Beijing. Other sponsors included Dell, VMWare, Lenovo, Nutanix, Huawei, HGST, Kaminario, Alibaba, Intel, Tencent and more than 40 other Chinese and global data storage companies. Approximately 400...
HDD Companies Celebrating the Total Eclipse of the Sun
With the two first quarters of sub-100 million sales, some people in the HDD industry may be feeling that the “sky is falling” again. It’s easy to understand this sentiment, especially with SSDs making steady inroads in the client PC space. However, HDD demand...
What Will Replace Your Smartphone?
The short answer is, “I don’t know”, but consider where the modern smartphone is today, what it does, and what may it become, results in a few very important points to consider when trying to predict what will come next. The screen is still the most important user...
Optane in Its Cheapest, and Possibly, Best Form Right Now
Intel made several Optane product announcements over the past couple of weeks, including high-end NVMe-based add-in-cards targeting enterprise servers. Optane is the commercial product name for 3D XPoint (pronounced “cross point”), next generation non-volatile storage...
How Many Price Hikes are Enough?
It has definitely been a wild ride over the past four quarters when it comes to SSD pricing…. And, unfortunately for system OEMs and hyperscale companies, this trend of increasing prices doesn’t look like there will be any relief until later this year, and likely in...
That Great Sucking Sound: Phones Will Consume Even More NAND Now
Regardless of any slowing of market growth or anticipation whether or not 2017’s new releases by Samsung and Apple will cause a sharp spike in demand, on Tuesday, March 21, Apple quietly announced minor changes to its existing iPhone line up that point to even greater...
Toshiba Considers Options for Its Memory Business
While rumors published this week in Japan’s Nikkei news suggested that Toshiba was considering selling a stake of its semiconductor business to WDC, an official company note confirmed a day later that the Japanese conglomerate was considering splitting its memory...
Just Like Old Times Again
CQ4 is history, and preliminary results have starting rolling in. All the data suggests that PC sales were better than expected, and unit shipments were up sequentially in CQ4. This fueled ODM builds and HDD shipments, as both segments posted flat to higher results,...
HDD TAM/Build Disconnect
With fewer than 10 days left in the year, the disconnect between HDD TAM and production continues. As stated earlier this month in one of TRENDFOCUS’ Executive Briefs, the CQ4 build plan is tracking measurably higher than the expected HDD TAM. This would be less of an...
Game Console HDD Demand Plunging from a Record Quarter
2.5” CE HDDs for game consoles hit a record high unit shipment level in CQ3 ’16, ramping up for what appears to be another strong holiday season for console system sales. With mid-cycle upgrades by Microsoft and Sony, along with price cuts to modified original systems...