Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "Thailand’s Hard Drive Industry Problem" video.
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@DumbledoreMcCracken I'd love to make videos, but I have so little free time. Allen was a true character. The company (Seagate) was quite big when I joined, but Allen still found the time to meet with small groups of us. There were a lot of stories circulating... that Allen had a meeting and fired anyone who showed up late because he was tired of nobody taking the meeting times seriously, stuff like that. He is famous for (true story) telling a reporter who asked him "how do you deal with difficult engineers".. his answer "I fire them!". My best story about him was our sailing club. I was invited to join the Seagate sailing club. They had something like a 35 foot Catalina sailboat for company use, totally free. We ended up sailing that every Wednesday in the regular race at Santa Cruz Harbor. It was owned by Allen. On one of those trips, after much beer, the story of the Segate sailboat come out.
Allen didn't sail or even like sailboats. He was a power boater and had a large yacht out of Monterrey harbor. He rented a slip in Santa Cruz, literally on the day the harbor opened, and rented there since. The harbor was divided in two by a large automobile bridge that was low and didn't raise. The clearance was such that only power boats could get through, not sailboats (unless they had special gear to lower the mast). That divided the harbor into the front harbor and back harbor.
As more and more boats wanted space in the harbor, and the waiting list grew to decades, the harbor office came up with a plan to manage the space, which was "all power boats to the back, sailboats to the front", of course with an exception for working (fishing) boats. They called Allen and told him to move. I can well imagine that his answer was unprintable.
Time went on, and their attempts to move Allen ended up in court. Allen felt his position as a first renter exempted him. The harbor actually got a law passed in the city to require sailboats to move to the back, which (of course) Allen termed the "Allen shugart rule".
Sooooo.... comes the day the law goes into effect. The harbormaster calls Allen: "will you move your boat". Allen replies: "look outside". Sure enough, Allen moved his yacht to Monterrey and bought a used sailboat which was now in the slip. Since he had no use for it, the "Seagate sailing club" was born. It was not the end of it. The harbor passed a rule that the owners of boats had to show they were using their boats at least once a month. Since Allen could not sail, he got one of us to take him out on the boat, then he would parade past the Harbormaster's office and honk a horn and wave.
Of course Allen also did fun stuff like run his dog for president. In those days you either loved Allen or hated him, there was no in-between. I was in the former group, in case you could not tell.
I was actually one of the lucky ones. I saw the writing on the wall, that Segate would move most of engineering out of the USA, and I went into networking for Cisco at the time they were still throwing money at engineers. It was a good move. I ran into many an old buddy from Seagate escaping the sinking ship later. Living in the valley is always entertaining.
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Its a good question (further research into hard drives). They are still doing some amazing things, advanced magnetic materials, layered recording, etc. However, the basis of the industry is electromechanical, which means it is inherently slower and more complex than SSDs. You can only move a mass (head arm) so fast.
The recent research in disk drives has gone mainly to increasing their density, and therefore reducing cost. Because this does nothing to help the speed disadvantage of HDDs, this trend will actually accelerate the demise of the HDD industry, because it accelerates the trend of HDDs towards being a backup medium only.
HDDs cannot get any simpler. They have two moving parts: the head and the disks, and both probably spin on air now (certainly true of heads, not sure about spindles). Because HDDs are more complex and take more manufacturing effort than SDDs, the cost advantage of HDDs is an illusion. The fall is near.
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HDDs are an inferior form of storage compared to SSDs (how nice that the world can be described with TLAs). Thus HDDs are going to live or die based on being a form of backup. We saw this same dynamic happen before. Tape drives and optical drives, as a backup media, died out because arrays of HDDs were cheaper. HDDs certainly have a price advantage over SSDs, but that price advantage is eroding as SSDs become cheaper in relative terms. A quick dive in Amazon shows the price advantage at about 5 to 1, HDDs over SSDs, in the same format (SATA). M.2, the rising defacto standard for SSDs (M.2 modules have a significant speed advantage over SATA, which never accounted for the great difference in speed between HDDs and SSDs), have a price premium, but that is eroding rapidly, for the simple reason that there is no fundamental reason for such an advantage of M.2 over SATA. On the contrary, M.2 has less material than SATA and so holds the long term price advantage. SATA drives need a metal case.
The upshot is that HDDs hold a clear advantage, and reason for existence, at the 10 to 1 price level. At 5 to 1 we see that the sales curve for HDDs is trending down. When the price advantage falls below 2 to 1, its time to get out of the pool. The HDD industry will die.
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