Thread regarding Western Digital Corp. layoffs

Wells Fargo Summit thoughts?

Interesting it was only Sivaram and CFO present.

"The 18 terabyte product that is going out this December will use a variant of the MAMR technology."- Siva Sivaram. What does 'a variant of the MAMR' mean? Either it's microwave or not.

"So that the 18, 20, 16 that family is one qual." - Siva Sivaram. That implies 16 is conventional PMR with 9 platters (i.e. what STX and Toshiba currently ships)- hedging their bets against 'MAMR variant' before it even ships?

Expect "mid-30% margin" on HDD and "40% margin" on SSD (up from the current 15%). Seems like a stretch.

It was refreshing to hear a leader able to talk about technology. Unfortunately, it wasn't very convincing.

by Anonymous
| 2351 views | | 3 replies (last December 14, 2019) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+12lkjqmr
Comment! It's anonymous!

3 replies (most recent on top)

Seems like that dog and pony show two years ago was nothing. Sad.

by Anonymous
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"Western Digital has talked about timeframes for the introduction of MAMR drives. They had working prototypes on display at the press and analyst event yesterday. WD's datacenter customers have their own four to six month qualification cycle, and MAMR drives for that purpose are expected to be out towards the middle of next year. Production-level HDDs based on MAMR technology are expected to start shipping in 2019."

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11925/western-digital-stuns-storage-industry-with-mamr-breakthrough-for-nextgen-hdds/3

They said this OVER TWO YEARS AGO.

by Boolean
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Post ID: @9ahk+12lkjqmr

Today for Barclay's, CEO and CFO made an appearance.

"And we do believe that HAMR is going to have to be introduced at some point, in other words MAMR will run out of gas, do not dispute that fact. Or the difference in terms of our major competitor is that we don't believe that we need to introduce HAMR-based drives as quickly as they do. But we're not here to argue HAMR versus MAMR. I think that's a losing argument." - Steve Milligan

So, no CAGR of 15% for MAMR? No 40TB MAMR drive as suggested in 2017? Shocking! Yeah, ok, not really. Assume this is 'MAMR variant', though he didn't say it.

Still waiting to ship samples to customers, though they been saying this for about a quarter.

It would be nice if they had a consistent message/lie.

by Anonymous
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