It’s interesting to see WD invest so heavily in improving hard-drive capacity at a time when flash drive sales and capacity are both growing so quickly.
In the end, there are competing forces. And ultimately, the infrastructure, whether it be in the data center or outside, is going to look for the [most] optimal solution available. And ultimately, it’s a trade-off of cost and performance.
The reason we went forward with this investment and this announcement is, number one, for big data and repositories in the data center, and I think we talked about adjacent markets like surveillance, the relative TCO [total cost of ownership] remains very compelling for data center operators and solution providers. And [here is something] you should also think about: As we continue to sequentialize data, the performance benefit on a relative basis between flash and disk gets diminished.
