WDC - The Cloud Slowdown Is Crushing Western Digital
While hard drives have been largely supplanted in the PC market by speedier solid-state drives (SSDs), the decades-old storage technology still has its place. In any application where data access times aren't all that important or where data needs to be stored for long periods, hard drives generally offer more bang for your buck.
The cloud-computing market is one area where hard drives are still widely used. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, offers its S3 cloud-storage product with a range of storage classes that help customers minimize costs. While Amazon doesn't disclose information on what hardware it uses, hard drives are almost certainly used for data that doesn't need to be accessed quickly.
Strong demand from cloud customers has helped offset declining consumer demand for hard-drive manufacturer Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) , but the cloud market is now starting to show signs of weakness as well. U.S. cloud customers are cutting back drastically on component inventories, a sign that they're slowing growth and becoming more cautious.
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The Cloud Slowdown Is Crushing Western Digital