Hard drives have a fixed cost

[papajo]

@LinusTech https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx91lxMaoSzfeT5L8pbh1VWgGbEywU1I06

 

Like I really don't get why you take the side of all those profiteering companies..  Using what I call "half truths" to hide their greed behind them... 

 

Yes there is a fixed cost for a hard drive and that's about $20

 

How do I know that ? https://geizhals.eu/toshiba-p300-high-performance-500gb-hdwd105uzsva-a1358536.html?hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=eu&hloc=pl&hloc=uk 

This drive costs about 22 euro including VAT , Incuding shipping cost from the factory to the retailer  including profit for the retailer including  profit of the manufacturer (toshiba) 

 

So this particular PCB/chassis/spindle/platter combo obviously costs much less than 22 euros.. 

 

Now for higher capacities the costs is the same the only additional cost is the cost of the machine that creates the sectors on the platters everything else is the same. 

And as for active and passive components again they are the same with minor unimportant differences in costs either for using higher capacity flash (a few cents more per chip) or more than 2 spindles (again a couple of dollars more in cost including the cooper coils )

 

So the rest of  the cost is PROFIT not the fixed manufacturing cost the 10 TB drives litteraly can be sold for 60 euros with good profit both for the retailer and manufacturer and vat and everything else included (I also accounted for the extra platters and stuff compared to the 500GB toshiba above) actually I am pretty sure that they still would profit even if they sell them @40 euros but but the margins would be a little thin in that case...

 

That's why you can find external HDDs at much lower price (despite the additional material cost of a 2nd PCB to interface and the plastic outside chassis and possibly a fan too + a charger) because they market at people that are old and not stupid (maybe tech stupid but they are streetsmart ) 

 

But even those are very expensive because  you only can lower the price "this much" until other (who buy "normal"/bare HDDs) start to complain about THEIR prices... 

 

and I am pretty sure that big companies that buy form them every year or so get them half the retail price if not less .

[mariushm]

The Toshiba 500 GB drive is probably using 2-3 generations old platters with lower data density made in a factory for which the investment was already recuperated so the costs are lower.  It's probably also just one platter or two, using one side for 500 GB and both sides of the platter(s) for 1 TB -you can see in the datasheet that 500 GB and 1 TB SMR drives are 11 Kg per carton (20 drives) while the others are approx. 16 Kg per carton or to be more specific for example you can extrapolate from this: Box weight (gross) 825 g max. (2 TB CMR, 3 TB, 6 TB), 795 g max. (4 TB), 595 g max. (1 TB, 2TB SMR)

 

The higher capacity drives also have more cache (64 for 500 GB, 128 for 2 TB or higher, 256 for let's say 4-6 TB)

 

Last but not least, don't be surprised about 500 GB drives being super cheap, because they're basically dumping them... nobody wants to be stuck with 500 GB drives when 500 GB SSDs are under 20$  - here's result from first page on amazon, 21$ for pny cs900 500 GB : https://www.amazon.com/PNY-CS900-500GB-Internal-Solid/dp/B07XZLN9KM/

 

 

[papajo]

25 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The Toshiba 500 GB drive is probably using 2-3 generations old platters with lower data density

Well maybe this one does (although I wouldnt be surprised If they have 1 platter that has only 1 working side)  but the 1TB that cost the same use about the same density just a single platter 


Platters cost the same as I said the machine that draws the sectors on them is what gets upgraded (imagine its like floppy VS zip same film/materia for the disk just different format ) 

 

25 minutes ago, mariushm said:

t's probably also just one platter or two, using one side for 500 GB and both sides of the platter(s) for 1 TB -you can see in the datasheet that 500 GB and 1 TB SMR drives are 11 Kg per carton (20 drives) while the others are approx. 16 Kg per carton or to be more specific for example you can extrapolate from this: Box weight (gross) 825 g max. (2 TB CMR, 3 TB, 6 TB), 795 g max. (4 TB), 595 g max. (1 TB, 2TB SMR)

Like why are you even mention this? Like do you actually believe that they sell us HDD for the cost and that they are greedy fat cats  that over profit? Why are external hard drives cheaper why are hardrives (in terms of levels /platter count etc obviously the capacity has changed) more expensive than they were in the past. 

 

No delivery cost is based on carton size rather than actual weight except if the weight exceeds the a particular number for that volumentric weight standard X delivery company has. 

 

25 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The higher capacity drives also have more cache (64 for 500 GB, 128 for 2 TB or higher, 256 for let's say 4-6 TB)

 

Again I mentioned this already and that's like a couple of dollars difference max 

And like you are already biased I mean you ignored what I mentioned you focus on minute details like cache sized yet you ignore external drives having a 2nd PCB a 2nd chassish a power supply 

 

 

 

yet the external drive (All the package booklets/manuals and cables/powersupply) costs less than the same model HDD if bought at retail as a part

 

savvy people actually buy external drives like that to save money for their NAS drives or whatever project that needs many HDDs 

[mariushm]

6 minutes ago, papajo said:

Well maybe this one does (although I wouldnt be surprised If they have 1 platter that has only 1 working side)  but the 1TB that cost the same use about the same density just a single platter 


Platters cost the same as I said the machine that draws the sectors on them is what gets upgraded (imagine its like floppy VS zip same film/materia for the disk just different format )

 

NO, platters don't cost the same. There are small differences / improvements in the way the surface of the platters are made, how the grains of material are arranged and so on. You can't just change the read/write heats and reuse older generation platters, it doesn't work like that.

 

Quote

Like why are you even mention this? Like do you actually believe that they sell us HDD for the cost and that they are greedy fat cats  that over profit? Why are external hard drives cheaper why are hardrives (in terms of levels /platter count etc obviously the capacity has changed) more expensive than they were in the past. 

 

You have a very basic view of this and making some assumptions and posting something that's not correct, so I corrected you.  As I said, just because one basic drive is 20 EUR, you can't make the determination that it costs almost the same for all the other drives.  The smaller drive in the series may even use different heads or different technology (SMR vs CMR for example), so it's not as simple as you say. 

 

It's also differences between series of drives - don't compare the P300 from Toshiba which is like WD Green / Blue  aka desktop no frills, with other series that may have extra hardware for vibration (for example NAS oriented drives) or drives that use Helium inside (datacenter drives)

 

As for external drives being cheaper, there's plenty of good explanations.

For example, hard drives sold for internal use have longer warranties (ex 3 years or 5 years or more) while external drives may come with only 2 years warranty.  A hard drive manufacturer will do the math and know that probably 2-3% of the drives sold will be returned to warranty in those 3 years, and maybe 4% in 5 years, and they know these hard drives have different pattern of usage compared to external drives.  Maybe they did the math and figured out that people buying internal drives are much more likely to bother sending the drive when it fails to get a replacement, and maybe there's lots of companies who buy tons of them and will rma the drives to get replacements, while with external drives I bet there's loads of people that will just treat the external drives as usb sticks, and just trash them after 2-3 years when they start to fail.  Or, the drives are used so rarely for a few hours a day, as backup drives, that they don't fail so much within warranty, and if they do fail there's higher chance of refusing warranty by claiming the drives died due to fall damage.

 

So it can be something as simple as internal drives cost more because there's higher costs with warranty, there's better technology, and external drives can use less popular technologies like SMR.

 

 

 

[papajo]

13 minutes ago, mariushm said:

NO, platters don't cost the same. There are small differences / improvements in the way the surface of the platters are made, how the grains of material are arranged and so on. You can't just change the read/write heats and reuse older generation platters, it doesn't work like that.

 

YES they do, its THE SAME MATERIAL do you know how they are made?
its aluminum that is sprayd with a substrate the process that makes them hold more data is similar (in very general terms) to the CPU lithography so the machine that is able to "Draw" smaller sectors is the thing that makes platter A hold more GB than platter B of the same material and size. 

 

And yes that's an added cost but that's more or less a standard cost of the business. 

I couldnt unfortunately find a chart for many years back but I found this one with Seagates (and the others are the same if not worse I expect WD to pocket more money for example) 



The red blocks are what is relevant to our discussion notice that despite the blue ones (which is the total sales from HDDs) is about the same or LOWER the red blocks are BIGGER compared to one year back that means that they make more money per sale than they used to end of the story. 

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

9 minutes ago, papajo said:

YES they do, its THE SAME MATERIAL do you know how they are made?
its aluminum that is sprayd with a substrate the process that makes them hold more data is similar (in very general terms) to the CPU lithography so the machine that is able to "Draw" smaller sectors is the thing that makes platter A hold more GB than platter B of the same material and size. 

 

And yes that's an added cost but that's more or less a standard cost of the business. 

I couldnt unfortunately find a chart for many years back but I found this one with Seagates (and the others are the same if not worse I expect WD to pocket more money for example) 



The red blocks are what is relevant to our discussion notice that despite the blue ones (which is the total sales from HDDs) is about the same or LOWER the red blocks are BIGGER compared to one year back that means that they make more money per sale than they used to end of the story. 

Ah, back to spouting nonsense based on an incorrect understanding of articles you link? Take a professional magnetic storage tape from the 90s and from 2023, looks quite the same doesn't it? (And conceptually it is the same product.) But there's a massive difference in physical material properties, storage strategy, read/write head design, etc. and all these will look identical to the casual observer. Heck, fundamentally, there's no difference between the silicon and manufacturing processes being used in the 90s and now, and yet the performance is vastly different. It's not because the same materials and processes are used that the complexity or actual outcome is anywhere near the same.  This is the same sort of logic that led to management at a company where I previously worked thinking that they could just transfer a sputtering process from one fab to another "because both can just use the same target", failing to understand that the desired material properties were achieved by a combination of process steps that translated to a single simple looking process step in the rough overview. Took over half a year for the new fab to even get close to achieving the performance of the old one.

 

Much in the same way, small nuances in the manufacturing process for platters can have a massive difference on the actual outcome, and the process cost for that matter. A good example of such a thing is the obliquely evaporated SiO₂ LCD alignment layers that were all the rage in academia in the 90s. If you were to actually use this process you'd be using the same processes and materials as you've been before, the only thing that changes is how you position the wafers within the manufacturing equipment. But part of the reason this technology never got off the ground on a large scale is because it would have significantly increasing the price per unit area, because it allowed you to process less wafers at a time, and simultaneously also increased cycle times.

 

Also, revenue isn't profit.

 

18 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Well, he could have pulled the server, put it in his car, go to work with it, transfer the stuff to the servers at work, replace drives, recreate array with new drives and copy the stuff back.

 

This is potentially a bad idea if your hard drives were all manufactured around the same time and come from the same manufacturer, because if one in the array starts failing it's quite likely the others will start to fail as well quite soon if this is the case. So transporting the HDDs (with all the shocks, bumps and vibrations associated with that) could potentially exacerbate that issue.

 

39 minutes ago, mariushm said:

You have a very basic view of this and making some assumptions and posting something that's not correct, so I corrected you.  As I said, just because one basic drive is 20 EUR, you can't make the determination that it costs almost the same for all the other drives.  The smaller drive in the series may even use different heads or different technology (SMR vs CMR for example), so it's not as simple as you say. 

There's also the factor of inventory cost and minimizing the expected loss on EOL products. In some instances it might be cheaper for the manufacturer to get rid of these drives for $20 than it is to keep them in storage for a prolonged period and then sell them for even less or recycle them when they're too old to be relevant. Industrial supply chain

 

3 minutes ago, 10leej said:

What are the chances I can buy old Whonnock?

Be careful if LTT offers drop shipping on Whonnock, you never know how Linus might interpret that when LTT forwards the shipping order to him.  

[papajo]

24 minutes ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

Ah, back to spouting nonsense based on an incorrect understanding of articles you link?

My understanding is solid and beyond links I use links for laymen like you actually not you cause you are obviously just here to create some sort of meaningless war of attrition without having the slightest intend to understand anything, who the heck are you btw? also i wont waste time reading nonsense if you believe that HDD platters differ in anything else* than their sector etching then you just wasted your time spamming nonsense. 

*Meaningful cause e.g I said they are usually made out of aluminium but some are made out of glass (even cheaper I think) but the difference related to the subject at hand (so manufacturing cost) is miniscule. 

[ToboRobot]

2 hours ago, papajo said:

@LinusTech https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx91lxMaoSzfeT5L8pbh1VWgGbEywU1I06

 

Like I really don't get why you take the side of all those profiteering companies..  Using what I call "half truths" to hide their greed behind them... 

 

Yes there is a fixed cost for a hard drive and that's about $20

 

How do I know that ? https://geizhals.eu/toshiba-p300-high-performance-500gb-hdwd105uzsva-a1358536.html?hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=eu&hloc=pl&hloc=uk 

This drive costs about 22 euro including VAT , Incuding shipping cost from the factory to the retailer  including profit for the retailer including  profit of the manufacturer (toshiba) 

 

So this particular PCB/chassis/spindle/platter combo obviously costs much less than 22 euros.. 

 

Now for higher capacities the costs is the same the only additional cost is the cost of the machine that creates the sectors on the platters everything else is the same. 

And as for active and passive components again they are the same with minor unimportant differences in costs either for using higher capacity flash (a few cents more per chip) or more than 2 spindles (again a couple of dollars more in cost including the cooper coils )

 

So the rest of  the cost is PROFIT not the fixed manufacturing cost the 10 TB drives litteraly can be sold for 60 euros with good profit both for the retailer and manufacturer and vat and everything else included (I also accounted for the extra platters and stuff compared to the 500GB toshiba above) actually I am pretty sure that they still would profit even if they sell them @40 euros but but the margins would be a little thin in that case...

 

That's why you can find external HDDs at much lower price (despite the additional material cost of a 2nd PCB to interface and the plastic outside chassis and possibly a fan too + a charger) because they market at people that are old and not stupid (maybe tech stupid but they are streetsmart ) 

 

But even those are very expensive because  you only can lower the price "this much" until other (who buy "normal"/bare HDDs) start to complain about THEIR prices... 

 

and I am pretty sure that big companies that buy form them every year or so get them half the retail price if not less .

So you are going to open a hard drive company and undercut them?  Ok, I'll buy a few.

[papajo]

13 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

So you are going to open a hard drive company and undercut them?  Ok, I'll buy a few.

Yea because e.g if you are not satisfied with your government or a policy etc the only solution is to make your own political party 

 

If you are not satisfied with your Personal trainer the only solution is to become one yourself. 

 

You are a genius in problem solving my friend. 

 

[ToboRobot]

2 minutes ago, papajo said:

Yea because e.g if you are not satisfied with your government or a policy etc the only solution is to make your own political party 

 

If you are not satisfied with your Personal trainer the only solution is to become one yourself. 

 

You are a genius in problem solving my friend. 

 

It's just a hard drive factory.

If your personal trailer sucks, sure, read a book and do better.

Your simplistic business calculus would be exposed as bs if you tried to do it yourself, even as a thought exercise. 

 

[papajo]

10 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

It's just a hard drive factory.

If your personal trailer sucks, sure, read a book and do better.

Your simplistic business calculus would be exposed as bs if you tried to do it yourself, even as a thought exercise. 

 

Expose it 
 

[dogwitch]

1 minute ago, papajo said:

Expose it 
 

do you factory in replacement cost?  for large clients?

my amazon store i have.

i have to factor in per year. Annual replacement or refund cost of products i sell..

that separate from profit amount. but is included for tax reason . for total profit.

[papajo]

15 minutes ago, dogwitch said:

do you factory in replacement cost?  for large clients?

my amazon store i have.

i have to factor in per year. Annual replacement or refund cost of products i sell..

that separate from profit amount. but is included for tax reason . for total profit.

Dont lose focus, the focus is not to reverse engineer e.g seagate's  business plan just for the sake of detailing it. 

Obviously there are logistics but the nice thing about logistics is that if we are talking about the same product category and dimensions etc they are the same. 

So replacement cost differs only to the degree the manufacturing cost  differs form one product to an other. 

And my point is that manufacturing cost differs only slightly (for the manufacturer mostly and less for the retailer) since the parts that are manufactured (the physical parts not the virtual value or in other words capacity) are more or less the same between all the hard drives. 

 

Namely, aluminium, cooper (for the coils ) magnets, resin and solder (PCB) and chips/controllers + some chemicals (e.g sprayed on the platters, or helium that pumped inside some high end drives) that are of trivial cost.

That fixed cost is my argument. 


 

[ToboRobot]

19 minutes ago, papajo said:

That fixed cost is my argument. 


 

By ignoring all the other variables? 

Like R&D to build the next generation, because if you don't your competition will kill you.

Like labour, which wants raises.

Like transportation, which goes up with energy costs.

Like machine costs, because tooling needs to be replaced to maintain QC standards so that returns kill your profits.

 

etc. etc.

 

[papajo]

36 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

By ignoring all the other variables? 

 

By neutralizing variables that are identical or similar between product A and product B I wont retype what I just said in the post you quoted re read it if you cant understand it. 

E.g 2a *3x/4a = 3x/2 I didnt ignore the terms here I just neutralized the similar ones. 

===============================================================================

Here are the Unit sales of HDDs for WD we can see that they shrinking (because capacities are higher I guess) 

 

 

 

 

and here is the revenue

 

Here we can see that e.g comparing 2022 to 2016 the units sold (in 2016) are double the units sold in 2022 yet the revenue is about the same if not a little higher 

 

That means more simply they sold less than half the units but got about the same money or more for those units.

Unfortunately I cant find a source that's not behind a paywall for the net profit margins but judging the seagate graph I posted previously (and given that more or less both WD and Seagate have about the same market share) I guess that its the same story so at same revenue higher net profits (compared to the past) 

 

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

1 hour ago, papajo said:

My understanding is solid and beyond links I use links for laymen like you actually not you cause you are obviously just here to create some sort of meaningless war of attrition without having the slightest intend to understand anything, who the heck are you btw? also i wont waste time reading nonsense if you believe that HDD platters differ in anything else* than their sector etching then you just wasted your time spamming nonsense. 

*Meaningful cause e.g I said they are usually made out of aluminium but some are made out of glass (even cheaper I think) but the difference related to the subject at hand (so manufacturing cost) is miniscule. 

An interesting take on the subject, I believe you've said everything that has to be said to assess your knowledge on the subject.

 

Also we most definitely didn't switch to glass due to it being insensitive to corrosion, having significantly lower thermal conductivity, having more favourable properties when it comes to magnetisation of the surface layers - being non-conductive and all, being significantly flatter, etc. But hey, making a perfectly balanced chemically-strengthened specialty glass disk with a hole in it with no residual stress is trivial, right? It definitely sounds a lot cheaper than using a relatively soft commodity metal frequently used in construction that we can process with a punch. I mean, why would anyone want to avoid precision grinding, HF etching and DRIE steps in their manufacturing process? Let's just avoid aluminium and go for all that instead! 

 

23 minutes ago, papajo said:

Dont lose focus, the focus is not to reverse engineer e.g seagate's  business plan just for the sake of detailing it. 

Obviously there are logistics but the nice thing about logistics is that if we are talking about the same product category and dimensions etc they are the same. 

So replacement cost differs only to the degree the manufacturing cost  differs form one product to an other. 

And my point is that manufacturing cost differs only slightly (for the manufacturer mostly and less for the retailer) since the parts that are manufactured (the physical parts not the virtual value or in other words capacity) are more or less the same between all the hard drives. 

 

Namely, aluminium, cooper (for the coils ) magnets, resin and solder (PCB) and chips/controllers + some chemicals (e.g sprayed on the platters, or helium that pumped inside some high end drives) that are of trivial cost.

That fixed cost is my argument. 


 

A most interesting assessment of the subject, so please do tell me, how do you plan to amortize the development cost of different read/write heads in this scheme? Surely, running an entire fab with non-standard materials to make drive heads is a very economical operation that would never impact the cost of the final product.

[leadeater]

9 hours ago, papajo said:

YES they do, its THE SAME MATERIAL do you know how they are made?

How does the aerial data density increase over the same physical area if the same technology is used?

 

Then you have entirely different technologies being used like SMR, HAMR, MAMR. What we call PMR/CMR today was actually only introduced in to the market in 2005 and before then we use Longitudinal Magnetic Recording (LMR).

 

Material cost of computer electronics almost has nothing to do with product cost (see CPU cost), that includes sub component parts as those too have research and development costs, quality control, quality variance grading for productizing etc.

 

How much aluminum costs is probably 0.1% the cost of the product.

 

Also it's not like an enterprise HDD costs more to manufacture itself, more cost comes in for the development side and firmware customizations required for that use case. One of the main cost differences is that an enterprise HDD has a 5 year warranty with different allowed wear/usage, like powered on hours and data written per year. Your WD Green warranty can be denied by power on hours or number of bytes written within the warranty period. An HDD under higher usage is more likely to fail so you have to account for that in the cost of the product, warranty is not free it's in the product cost.

 

The reality is it gets more and more costly to get more data in to the same given physical area, both in manufacturing cost and in the research cost. This is also true in lithography for silicon transistors, if you take away the raw wafer cost the cost per physical area to produce smaller and smaller transistors goes and has gone up because it legitimately does cost more. HDD's have defects just like silicon dies, not everything comes out perfect. The more "perfect" you need something the more it costs regardless of the raw manufacturing cost, rarity increases value.

 

But overall what you are really saying is that you do not value people's hard efforts and time, because the only thing that should go in to the cost of a product is the raw materials. If you are willing to work for free for your entire life then go right ahead and lead by example.

[dogwitch]

7 hours ago, papajo said:

Dont lose focus, the focus is not to reverse engineer e.g seagate's  business plan just for the sake of detailing it. 

Obviously there are logistics but the nice thing about logistics is that if we are talking about the same product category and dimensions etc they are the same. 

So replacement cost differs only to the degree the manufacturing cost  differs form one product to an other. 

And my point is that manufacturing cost differs only slightly (for the manufacturer mostly and less for the retailer) since the parts that are manufactured (the physical parts not the virtual value or in other words capacity) are more or less the same between all the hard drives. 

 

Namely, aluminium, cooper (for the coils ) magnets, resin and solder (PCB) and chips/controllers + some chemicals (e.g sprayed on the platters, or helium that pumped inside some high end drives) that are of trivial cost.

That fixed cost is my argument. 


 

its the transpiration cost. is the wild factor. is what am getting at.

[LinusTech]

Papajoe.... 

 

There's only a couple reasons I end up remembering the username of a random on the forum:

 

1. Really good, thought-provoking contributions over a long period of time. 

 

2. The opposite. 

 

Which one do you think this is?

 

Very knowledgeable people are trying to help you gain a better understanding of how all of this works. I'd suggest you listen to them. 

[papajo]

6 hours ago, LinusTech said:

Papajoe.... 

 

There's only a couple reasons I end up remembering the username of a random on the forum:

 

1. Really good, thought-provoking contributions over a long period of time. 

 

2. The opposite. 

 

Which one do you think this is?

 

Very knowledgeable people are trying to help you gain a better understanding of how all of this works. I'd suggest you listen to them. 

Wow.. Platitudes and generalities with a snob aftertaste coming from the guy who has a Steve Job-esque avatar. 

You probably remember me because I dont suck up to you (also despite my account being kinda old I rarely am here in the first place so that means that you "feel" my presence every rare time it occurs thank you I guess )  

Also I dont consider you to be particularly knowledgeable in the first place maybe in some things more than the average viewer of yours but that's it, mr big mouth, 

 

I guess you remember the sleazy company practices only when your interest lies in their competitors.  

Maybe you will say something about the HDD costs if you do a marketing deal with a SSD only brand....

I still have a PM correspondence going 9 years back(mainly because I did not delete any of my PMs from anybody until now)

In which I asked you to try something on the first Asus hybrid cooled card (had fans and a waterblock but could work just with the fans or just with a loop) you just reviewed back then

 

 

 

And yet a few years later VAPOR CHAMPERS  for cooling gpus and electronics are a thing maybe if you heard me instead of the young people you describe as knowledgeable you would have been the first youtuber who practically invented vapor chamber usage in GPUs lol

You would have become something like der8auer years before Alex (der8auer) even had the slightest thought of creating a channel. 

 

The sad thing is that the only thing you risked back then to lose was a midrange GPU you got for free in the first place (and not even that actually worse case scenario would have been that you did not a good job sealing the waterblock intake and outtake -very realistic for you now that I think about it - and have some small leakage which would not result in hardware damage if you  the card in your sight during testing..) 

(Also what's up with your leather concept backpack you hinted in a video a few weeks back?   what made you think about that one? ) 


Or how about the cool case you found by accident because something went wrong when shipping (as in you expected a mobo and you received a case from a completely different guy instead lol) ? 

 

 

 

I am really sad that you became so snobbish dont you remember that things were so grim you couldnt afford to keep up renting the first house in which you reduced yourself at the end to review cheap gizmos in that first real kitchen setup ?
Things were so bad that you and luke asked for help via a crowdfund and were so lucky to get over 1M even I felt sad that I considered donating but I didnt since I saw so much money.
So you basically are not different from a random guy who won the lottery and didnt build this channel from scratch like gamer nexus (I mean you did but it failed and on the heyday of youtube were it not to be for that 1+M out of nowhere). 

And I was really happy for you guys when you practically "won" that 1+M in crowdfunding (well I wasnt really that satisfied with Luke's behavior which was "please halp" before the crowdfund and "I dont need to give you any account on what I do with my money" <-- not exact words in both cases but more or less the gist of them, once people that gave you money asked what you plan to do with that money. ) 

But I have to give credit where it is due, you didnt waste that money .. you didnt particularly grow that money either (given that its more than 10 years since that) but you grow and did not stagnate (well I dont know calculating mortgages and loans etc you are negative but I hope your are not) and that is commendable on its own. 


And dont get me wrong this is tough love I watched you periodically since NCIX and we are about the same age so in a sense I grew up alongside you and whatever feedback I give I do because I believe that this channel has better potential an most of all can be more impactful than the mainstream common denominator stuff and shilling going on (which I am not exactly against one has to do what one has to do I am more against this being the only thing produced and having vritually 0 real tech jurnalism)  there are surely some good stuff too but there is no reason to give feedback on good stuff at least not for me. 

 

* And in general EVERYTHING I said (especially about companies) proved to be true years after I said it .

==================================================================================

 

Now to the subject at hand (Which you did not talk nor at least pointed towards which other post you agree with just did an adhominem attack towards me lol) 

I finally found the net profits for the revenue graphs I mentioned above for WD (and also the graph where it shows the unit number sales get lower) and they for the year 2020 they increased for 424% so they sold less units made the same revenue but did 4 times the profit what does this mean?  = it means they have fatter profit margins per unit sold.  as simple as that

https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20200501A04ENN00

 

here is translated text incase for some reason one cant automagically (e.g using google translate) translate it on his/her own 

 

Quote

Western Digital released its financial report for the third fiscal quarter of 2020 (as of April 3 this year) this morning. Non-GAPP (under non-US GAAP), the total revenue was 4.175 billion US dollars, an increase of 14% year-on-year, and the gross profit margin increased 2.6 percentage points to 27.9%, net profit of 257 million US dollars, a sharp increase of 424% year-on-year.

 

Here also a post from a Seagate associate (contact details on the bottom) which has a long presence in that site mentioning that enterprise grade hdd manufacturing cost is $10 (which also agrees with the costs more or less that I mentioned above, to be frank my ballpark calculations were higher than $10 but even $10 do not seem very high for me)

 

https://www.zhihu.com/tardis/bd/art/107001908

 

here is translated text in case for some reason one cant automagically translate it on his/her own 

Quote

Enterprise-level hard disks are mainly large-capacity hard disks. According to the current storage technology, large capacity often means more disks, and the more disks, the higher the cost. Enterprise-level hard disks are guaranteed for five years, and the annual data load cannot be lower than 550TB, while ordinary hard disks are only 60-80TB. The average time between failures should not be less than 1.5 million hours, and 800,000 hours for ordinary hard disks.

Those high indicators are doomed that the discs used in enterprise-class hard drives are much more stringent than ordinary hard drives. But it's not the speculation of some people on the Internet that high-quality ones are for enterprise-level disks, and low-quality ones are for ordinary disks.

The manufacturing cost of an enterprise disc is about $10, and the obsolescence rate is surprisingly high.

The core part of the disk is the magnetic medium sprayed on the surface, which is the key material used to store data. However, most enterprise-level hard disks are deployed in areas with harsh working conditions, such as high temperature, high humidity, and vibration.

Then the requirements for magnetic media are even higher. In order to prevent oxidation, there is a special protective layer on top of the magnetic medium.

But no matter how sophisticated your craftsmanship is, there will always be some uncontrollable factors, such as uneven thickness distribution of the protective layer, or even perforation. Once this happens to the disk, the magnetic medium will be quickly oxidized by the air, which is the demagnetization I mentioned before.

The result of loss of magnetism is bad sectors. If the location of loss of magnetism is unfortunately located in the firmware area, then the hard disk will be slow to recognize, unable to recognize or even hit the head. Generally speaking, the platters of ordinary hard disks will not be checked or checked in a small amount.

 

 

So yea I believe this case is closed have a nice day. 

 

[ToboRobot]

2 minutes ago, papajo said:

Wow.. Platitudes and generalities with a snob aftertaste coming from the guy who has a Steve Job-esque avatar. 

You probably remember me because I dont suck up to you (also despite my account being kinda old I am rarely am here in the first place so that means that you "feel" my presence every rare time it occurs thank you I guess )  

Also I dont consider you to be particularly knowledgeable in the first place maybe in some things more than the average viewer of yours but that's it, mr big mouth, 
I guess you remember the sleazy company practices only when your interest lies in their competitors.  

Maybe you will say something about the HDD costs if you do a marketing deal with a SSD only brand....

 

(Also what's up with your leather concept backpack you hinted in a video a few weeks back?   what made you think about that one? ) 


Or how about the cool case you found by accident because something went wrong when shipping (as in you expected a mobo and you received a case from a completely different guy instead lol) ? 

 

 

* And in general EVERYTHING I said (especially about companies) proved to be true years after I said it .

==================================================================================

 

Now to the subject at hand (Which you did not talk nor at least pointed towards which other post you agree with just did an adhominem attack towards me lol) 

I finally found the net profits for the revenue graphs I mentioned above for WD (and also the graph where it shows the unit number sales get lower) and they for the year 2020 they increased for 424% so they sold less units made the same revenue but did 4 times the profit what does this mean?  = it means they have fatter profit margins per unit sold.  as simple as that

https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20200501A04ENN00

 

here is translated text incase for some reason one cant automagically (e.g using google translate) translate it on his/her own 

 

 

Here also a post from a Seagate associate (contact details on the bottom) which has a long presence in that site mentioning that enterprise grade hdd manufacturing cost is $10 (which also agrees with the costs more or less that I mentioned above, to be frank my ballpark calculations were higher than $10 but even $10 do not seem very high for me)

 

https://www.zhihu.com/tardis/bd/art/107001908

 

here is translated text in case for some reason one cant automagically translate it on his/her own 

 

 

So yea I believe this case is closed have a nice day. 

I'm sorry Papajo, you are right.  You know everything.  We are all stupid.

You clearly are the expert on hard disk manufacturing and sales. 

WE BOW BEFORE OUR NEW TECH GOD, the almighty Papajo and your nearly ten years of posting on the forum!

[papajo]

16 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

I'm sorry Papajo, you are right.  You know everything.  We are all stupid.

You clearly are the expert on hard disk manufacturing and sales. 

WE BOW BEFORE OUR NEW TECH GOD, the almighty Papajo and your nearly ten years of posting on the forum!

I did not make the graphs the experts made them I am just able to read them, are you? 

[RokinAmerica]

16 hours ago, papajo said:

By neutralizing variables that are identical or similar between product A and product B I wont retype what I just said in the post you quoted re read it if you cant understand it. 

E.g 2a *3x/4a = 3x/2 I didnt ignore the terms here I just neutralized the similar ones. 

===============================================================================

Here are the Unit sales of HDDs for WD we can see that they shrinking (because capacities are higher I guess) 

 

 

 

 

and here is the revenue

 

Here we can see that e.g comparing 2022 to 2016 the units sold (in 2016) are double the units sold in 2022 yet the revenue is about the same if not a little higher 

 

That means more simply they sold less than half the units but got about the same money or more for those units.

Unfortunately I cant find a source that's not behind a paywall for the net profit margins but judging the seagate graph I posted previously (and given that more or less both WD and Seagate have about the same market share) I guess that its the same story so at same revenue higher net profits (compared to the past) 

 

The first graph states it is HDD only, the second one, I see no mention of HDD only, so that would be the SSD division making up those profits in the face of shrinking sales. 

 

And I apologize if I missed the second graph showing it is only HDD, worked long and late yesterday and just getting awake.

[tikker]

1 hour ago, papajo said:

Here also a post from a Seagate associate (contact details on the bottom) which has a long presence in that site mentioning that enterprise grade hdd manufacturing cost is $10 (which also agrees with the costs more or less that I mentioned above, to be frank my ballpark calculations were higher than $10 but even $10 do not seem very high for me)

 

https://www.zhihu.com/tardis/bd/art/107001908

 

here is translated text in case for some reason one cant automagically translate it on his/her own 

Is this "manufacturing cost" mentioned here just material cost or full end-to-end cost including R&D, recuperating machines bought, honouring warranties etc.? Because they also mention the burden of warranty replacements:

Quote

Practical applications are full of uncertainties, and there are many damaged hard disks within the warranty period promised by the manufacturer. These hard disk manufacturers need to replace them after sales, which is a huge expense. It can be seen from the shortening of the previous 3-year warranty of ordinary hard drives to 2 year

and the aspect of hidden cost:

Quote

From the design of an enterprise-level product to the purchase by users, there have been many, many links, each of which is crucial and has a lot of tangible and intangible costs, which need to be treated with caution and not to be lazy.

but it is unclear whether they have folded that in with their $10 estimate.

 

If you buy a $50M platter making machine and get 1M platters out of it then from a business perspective each platter will automatically cost $50 to produce regardless of what the materials themselves cost because you want to recoup the investment cost of that machine. Those kind of things are all the extra costs that people have been mentioning. Of course they also want to make a profit, so naturally it'll cost less to produce then what they ask, but you can't say nothing has changed in terms of cost over the years.

[SansVarnic]

21 hours ago, papajo said:

Yes there is a fixed cost for a hard drive and that's about $20

Yeah no that's not how much it costs. Material yes but not how much is costs to turn that material into the product. I am going to be nice to you and inform you that you are so very wrong and you're tripling down into a hole you cannot get yourself out of.

 

The below example applies to the majority every product you buy... the more complex the more the cost inflates, HDD's or more complex to build than my example.

 

Where I work the material of the main product we make cost about $300usd, product is sold for $1997.00usd after you add in what it takes to make that material into the product. Only about %10 goes as profit which goes to covering other company expenses and product research. I happen to know the exact breakdown so I can confidently say you're wrong and stand by it. Simple break down, material handlers, laser to cut said material, break press operators, welders, polishing team, paint line, assembly team, shipping/receiving team all need to be paid for their part.... and dont forget office staff that takes the orders, processes payment, warranty, HR, safety staff. And oof course, that wonderful health insurance, and the other items of necessity like tools and equipment, electricity, welding supplies, gas, and ecterera.

 

How do you think all that is paid for... Thin air?

 

You are welcome and good night.