HDDs, SSDs Grow Seasonally to 143 Exabytes: TRENDFOCUS 3rd Calendar Quarter Analysis
TRENDFOCUS recently released its latest quarterly analysis, which showed that 143 exabytes of HDD and SSD capacity shipped in CQ3 on a total of 145 million units. Western Digital and Seagate led the HDD industry, while Samsung, Kingston, and SanDisk topped the SSD...
Can a Tablet Replace a Notebook?
The short answer right now is, “not yet”. However before you conclude that this is an obvious statement, it is a conclusion that is loaded with contextual circumstances. To expect a tablet, which is based on a touch-based interface, to easily replace a mouse and a...
Notebook sales need miracle December
Notebook production was down in October, but primary because of the factory shutdown due to Chinese national holiday and not because PC demand softened. However, Windows 10 PC system sales have been sluggish to date, and unless there is a miraculous December finish,...
How far has NAND output come in order to supply all our storage devices – Part II
As a follow up to our blog posted on October 5, 2015, I wanted to comment further on the future of NAND output and how that will effect HDD demand, or not. We all know that NAND bit output continues to increase each year. This is enabled mainly by the development and...
WDCs Big Week
Tsinghua Holdings, parent company of Unisplendour and Tsinghua Unigroup is also the business affiliate of one of China’s top universities and is state owned. The WDC investment follows Unisplendour’s $2.3 billion, 51% controlling...
How far does NAND output have to grow in order to supply all our storage devices?
In the 2nd quarter of this year, all five NAND fabs combined to ship about 19 exabytes of NAND, or 19 million terabytes. About 1/3 of this total output went to SSDs, another 1/3 went towards smart phones, and the remaining balance going to tablets, thumb drives, and...
The Notebook PC market is not collapsing!
After several dismal months of low notebook production, ODMs finally posted solid gains in August. Notebook production rose double digits sequentially in August due to the combination of back-to-school sales and early builds timed to the Windows 10 launch. This...
How Do You Spell “Lumpy”? H-Y-P-E-R-S-C-A-L-E
A widely accepted position in the HDD industry is that demand for capacity enterprise (nearline) HDDs is driven by large hyperscale companies, typified by cloud service providers (CSPs) and “as-a-service”, or XaaS datacenter companies. What is difficult to read is the...
SSD Shipments Continued Growth Despite Shrinking PC Market: TRENDFOCUS 2nd Calendar Quarter Analysis
TRENDFOCUS recently published its updated Quarterly NAND/SSD report covering the NAND & SSD industries’ performance in CQ2 ’15. In the SSD market, unit shipments increased, despite the fact that a good portion of the volume is tied to a weak notebook PC market....
Still bullish on the HDD market
Even though the early reviews of Microsoft’s new OS, Windows 10, have been positive, the PC market outlook has been downgraded, and the new figure shows the market contracting over double digits in 2015. PC companies are cautiously optimistic about Windows 10, and...