Seagate closes one of its hard drive factories

Seagate is one of the largest manufacturers of hard drives in the world, and even they do not escape the passage of time and the changes that storage technology is beginning to undergo.

Seagate hard drive sales drop vs. SSDs

Seagate will shut down one of its largest hard drive production plants, which is located in the city of Suzhou in China. This 2, 200-employee plant is engaged in final assembly and testing of Seagate hard drives before being shipped to dealers. This would be one of the company's three hard drive production plants, the remaining two are located in Wuxi (China) and Korat (Thailand). The closure and layoffs will occur this coming January 18.

In the middle of last year we discussed in an article the alarming drop in sales of hard drives, which have been plummeting more or less since mid-2014.

What is the cause?

We came from decades of stagnation with the same mechanical hard drives, which at the moment offer great capacities to retain information but have a limitation, speed. Today much faster data reading and writing is required, and that's where the new SSD drives come into play.

The consumer is betting increasingly on SSDs (solid disks), which offer impressive data transfer speeds, which are getting closer and closer to what fast RAM offers. It also influences that the prices of these units are lower and lower, and therefore more attractive to the average consumer.

Still, hard drives will still be the cheapest option and the one with the most storage space it will offer for a few years, but this move to SSDs is a trend that can no longer be reversed.