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Will SSDs Make HD’s Obsolete?
HD makers can expect to see revenues decline as demand for traditional disk drives falls, according to IHS Isuppli.
Hard drive manufacturers Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba have carved up most of the market, lowering warranties and keeping prices high after the Thai floods in 2011 that shuttered several factories. Now IHS Isuppli claims that the good times have come to an end, with industry revenues expected to drop by 11.8 percent in 2013 and 2014 not expected to show signs of improvement.
While Seagate and Western Digital gouged consumers by keeping prices artificially high even after production recovered to pre-flood levels, solid-state disk (SSD) drive makers aggressively brought prices down. Intel has also been pushing SSDs as part of its ultrabook specification and with Windows 8 tablets using SSDs, the long term prospects for hard drive makers are not looking good.
Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS Isuppli said, “The HDD industry will face myriad challenges in 2013. Shipments for desktop PCs will slip this year, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to favour smartphones and tablets. The declining price of SSDs also will allow them to take away some share from conventional HDDs. However, HDDs will continue to be the dominant form of storage this year, especially as demand for ultrabooks picks up and hard drives remain essential in business computing.”
IHS Isuppli said Western Digital could overtake Seagate to become the market share leader by the end of 2013, and said that hard drives will see greater use in the enterprise market in cloud and big data use cases.
PC Sales Takes Toll On Seagate
Seagate Technology Plc’s shares tumbled as much as 8 percent on Tuesday, after the hard disk drive (HDD) maker projected first-quarter revenue below estimates on slowing sales of personal computers.
The company has been hit by sluggish economic growth and shaky sales of PCs as consumers shift toward tablets and smartphones.
FBN Securities cut its price target on Seagate’s stock to $32, saying selling prices had started to decline from their peak levels after theThailand floods last year and inventory had started rising.
Seagate’s weak outlook follows an upbeat fiscal 2013 forecast from rival Western Digital Corp, which is banking on strong sales to big businesses.
The company forecast first-quarter sales of about $4 billion, below analysts’ estimates of $4.62 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Yahoo Wins Major Lawsuit
December 17, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Yahoo has achieved a big victory against spammers, a legal victory that also includes a default judgment of $610 million.
In the lawsuit, filed in May 2008, Yahoo targeted a variety of individuals and companies, accusing them of trying to defraud people via a spam campaign that falsely informed email recipients that they had won prizes in a non-existent Yahoo-sponsored lottery.
Yahoo alleged that the defendants’ goal was to trick email recipients into providing them with personal and financial information that could be used to commit fraud by raiding victims’ bank accounts, using their credit cards and applying for loans on their behalf.
Judge Laura Taylor Swain from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that Yahoo’s allegations are “uncontroverted” and said the company is entitled to $27 million in statutory damages for trademark infringement and $583 million in statutory damages for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.
It’s not clear whether Yahoo will be able to collect the money. A default judgment is rendered when defendants in a case fail to plead or defend an action, as happened in this case, in which the defendants never responded to Yahoo’s complaint.