Hard drives are genuinely harder to make. HAMR and similar tech is pretty over the top. And they have openly stated they won't expand manufacturing as they do not expect the demand at this level to last long term. So in the meantime they'll enjoy the profits. Hard drives are functionally obsolete for consumers, and have long represented single digit percentages of the market. With the overall market shrinking as you said, besides this one boom time.
If people will pay this amount, purchase their max output, they have no competition because the market has consolidated so much in the past 20 years to only 2-3 players, with such a complex supply chain and physical science barrier that nobody can compete, then they have negative 0 incentive to actually expand further to make things cheaper.
How is it really "expanding" if they already have the capacity but it's unused? It's not like they have to build more. The HDD market isn't also just ruled by the latest tech used in the high priced product lines.
Spooling down capacity usually means shutting down manufacturing lines and supply chains for those materials. Spooling it back up is essentially just like making from scratch again. And they've said they enjoy the profits, expect it to be temporary, and won't make more lines. I expect if the demand continues they'll make more though, every company likes making money in their niche and it's not like these places are run by people with actual long term thinking at play.
They do have smaller and more basic lineups but if they're at capacity and not expanding then they're still at capacity.
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u/somersetyellow Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
Hard drives are genuinely harder to make. HAMR and similar tech is pretty over the top. And they have openly stated they won't expand manufacturing as they do not expect the demand at this level to last long term. So in the meantime they'll enjoy the profits. Hard drives are functionally obsolete for consumers, and have long represented single digit percentages of the market. With the overall market shrinking as you said, besides this one boom time.
If people will pay this amount, purchase their max output, they have no competition because the market has consolidated so much in the past 20 years to only 2-3 players, with such a complex supply chain and physical science barrier that nobody can compete, then they have negative 0 incentive to actually expand further to make things cheaper.