With the rise of SSDs, it’s no surprise that HDD manufacturers have been suffering. In a double whammy, PC market which has generally been the biggest hard drive consumer has also been shrinking at the same time. In a move to reduce costs and cut down on production and overhead due to slower sales, Seagate has announced that they will be trimming 8,000 staff globally over the coming year.
The total count builds on top of an earlier plan announced last month which planned to cut 1,600 staff or a little over 1%. The new plan announced will trim a further 6,500 staff or about 14% of their workforce. Combined, the costs of these cuts will be over $200 million but Seagate expects to start seeing savings by the end of 2017. Combined with increased enterprise storage driven by cloud usage, the firm’s margins are expected to increase slightly over the next year.
For now, HDDs continue to hold the GB/$ crown but how long that will hold true remains to be seen. There are new technologies like multiple read heads and HAMR in the pipeline which may breathe some new life into our spinning disks. However, the long-term prognosis isn’t rosy and unlike WD which recently acquired SanDisk, Seagate doesn’t yet have a full SSD division with their own NAND supply. Perhaps that may change soon.
