Western digital announces the closure of a hard drive factory

Western Digital has announced that it will close its hard drive factory in Petaling Jaya, near Kuala Lumpur, due to a lack of demand for traditional hard drives. Without a doubt the great boom in SSDs, and the great drop in prices in recent months, have put traditional hard drives back in check.

Western Digital Says Measure Meets Lower Demand

Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers said closing the Petaling Jaya million-square-foot factory would leave WD with two disk drive manufacturing plants, both in Thailand. WD has hard drive substrate manufacturing sites in Johor and Kuching in Malaysia, as well as testing and mounting facilities for solid state drives, media manufacturing lines, and R&D offices in Penang.

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Thanks to its joint joint venture with Toshiba, WD has an extensive line of solid state drives, which it can sell in place of hard drives in markets where hard drives are in danger of extinction. The company has already announced that affected employees will receive assistance, including severance pay and support for improving their skills.

Western Digital will maintain a Center of Excellence at Selangor, which will have several key engineering teams, central operational planning and regional support functions. Western Digital remains firmly committed to Malaysia, the company values ​​and appreciates its 45-year history of partnering with the Malaysian government and looks forward to many more years of prosperity and success.

A new sign that SSDs represent the future, and that HDDs will continue to lose popularity over the coming years.

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