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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (55037)	5/31/2013 10:23:29 PM
From: HenryMiller	Respond to of 60323

ciovaccocapital.com A pretty interesting take on where the market is at the moment. Bonds weak, semis strong.

To: Sam who wrote (55037)	6/3/2013 12:27:25 PM
From: Bargain Hunter	Respond to of 60323

I think TCO is a big deal for big clouds--they will save a lot of money on power consumption with a room full of SSDs vs a room full of HDs in addition to not needing as many drives and getting far better performance. It depends on the application that the cloud is running. Depending on the data storage and access needs it will be a giant win for some sites and a more modest win for others. In these early days of the transition to SSD the vendors are picking off the customers where the improvement is best. My point was simply that we should not assume that all server farms will benefit to the same degree as some of the success stories we have heard about. Question--Lam says it costs $3b to convert half a million NAND wafer starts; how much storage does that half a million wafers represent? Assuming MLC chips. I have no idea off-hand how to compute that, but I'm sure someone reading this must. Or at least know someone who would know (Shlomi? Dan?). If you want to perform the calculation you can get a rough idea by looking at SanDisk's wafer start numbers and bits shipped. But Luzco was looking at what would be necessary to replace HDDs completely which no one seriously expects to happen until the per-bit price of SSDs drops a lot more. My point with regard to Luzco's statement was that he was diverting attention from the fact that SSDs are going to tend to cream off the more lucrative higher-performance segment of the HDD business. The total capacity of HDDs sold for server farms is likely to keep growing but the revenue is likely to grow more slowly or even shrink.