Western Digital Will Close HDD Plant and Focus on SSD Production

Western Digital Will Close HDD Plant

As to the brand of hard drives, Western Digital is a world-renowned hard disk manufacturer founded in 1970, providing memory products to users in five continents. Recently, according to report, Western Digital will close HDD plant in Malaysia and sell the facility.

The Register reports that the production facility in Malaysia is invested in 1973, initially making custom semiconductors and switching to producing HDD hard drives in 1994. Generally speaking, this factory has been used for several decades.

In addition to the plant in Petaling Jaya (Malaysia), Western Digital has two other HDD factories in Thailand: the largest one is located in Bang Pa and the smallest one is sited in Prachinburi. WD also has hard disk PCB production bases in Johor and Kuching in Malaysia, and an office in Penang for SSD hard disk assembly, test, media, research and development.

Hard Drive Shipments Is Dropping

Actually, hard drive shipments have been dropping significantly in recent years due to widespread water damage and the available market for client hard drives will continue to be shrinking. This is why this company does not need the extra manufacturing capacities that it will not be able to use. See the following figure, and you can know this point.

In 2017, the total available market of hard drives dropped to around 400 million units from around 550 million units in 2014.

Due to this, both Seagate and Western Digital take measures to reduce their HDD manufacturing capacities, for example, Seagate shut down its HDD assembly plant in Suzhou, China, in 2017, and Western Digital closed its head wafer facility in Odawara, Japan, in 2016. 

Western Digital spokesperson states “In response to declining long-term demand for client HDDs, Western Digital has taken steps to rationalize its HDD manufacturing operations globally. The company will decommission its HDD manufacturing facility in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, by the end of calendar 2019. This transition will be executed in close collaboration with employees, customers, supply partners and other critical stakeholders.“

Increase Western Digital SSD Production

Nowadays, the data technology industry is undergoing major changes, and this transformation is driving the replacement of traditional HDD hard disks with NAND flash memory and SSD.

This change has also caused the growth in demand for NAND/SSD and recession in demand for HDD hard disks. Hence, Western Digital makes a plan to expand SSD manufacturing in Penang. Now, it is in the final stages of building its second SSD facility, and it will go into production in the coming months.

Final Words

From this news, you know exactly that HDD mechanical hard disk market has been declining and it eventually can’t compete with SDD.

Compared with HDD, SSD has many highlighted features, for example, fast read-write speed, no noise, lower consumption, etc. Therefore, SSD is gaining popularity from users all over the world.