Stephen D. Milligan
Analyst · Technology Insights Research
Well, I mean, that's a hard question to answer in a real simple way. I mean, I think what we're undoubtedly seeing across the industry and its not just call it "the hard drive industry," but we continue to see a tremendous amount of growth in data, right? For a variety of different reasons. And what we're seeing is a proliferation, which, by the way, there's always been a proliferation of storage devices that are used to store that increase in data, right? And so, undoubtedly, a large amount of data growth is going on in the cloud, right? No doubt about that. And we, we being Western Digital, as well as our separate subsidiaries, WD and HGST, are very well-positioned to take advantage of that in a number of different ways, whether it be the, on the HGST side, in terms of the tiering types of drives that we have, enterprise class, SSD on the front, traditional performance drives in the middle and fat drives on the back end. And then on the client side, yes, you're seeing some level of increased participation with solid state drives. But, by the way, that increased participation in pure SSD drives is not outside of our expectations, right? What we are saying, which is certainly benefiting our business, is an increased trend in terms of thin and light hard drives. So we talked about the 7-millimeter drives that, right now, both the WD sub and HGST sub have, that's being coupled up in some cases with solid-state, a dual drive configuration, that is allowing for the performance improvements or benefits that you get instant on whatever it might happen to be, coupled with the storage and cost benefit of a hard drive. And so it's a little bit difficult to answer your question in a direct fashion, but I think that the point is, is that all of this data growth is a good thing for all of us, and that what we've got to do is continue to provide the right level of innovation, the right level of products, interact with our customers in the right way, to continue to bring different solutions that address all these different applications. And so, it's actually, I think we're very optimistic in terms of our ability to be able to do that.