Western Digital profits down despite revenue rise

Revenues for disk drive industry leader Western Digital's third fiscal 2013 quarter rose 24 per cent to $3.8 billion – compared to $3 billion a year ago – but profits fell 19 per cent. It's a hard life in the disk drive business. The previous quarter's revenues were $3.8 billion too; no change there, then. Third-quarter …

[BillG]

Failure

The only hard drives I've had failures with is Western Digital. Last one failed SMART only three weeks ago, and I was lucky to transfer only 2.8GB of data to a USB 2.0 drive (which took 45 minutes) before the drive completely failed. Their reputation sucks.

I replaced it with s Seagate.

[kb]

Re: Failure

And you'll be lucky if the Seagate lasts a month pal, that is what happens when you end up with a duopoly, quality goes down the crapper. this is why I tell anybody getting a hard drive that the first thing they need to do is stress test the hack out of it, because I'd say a good 1 in 4 are coming off the line junk.

[Marcelo Rodrigues]

Re: Failure

Is it really this bad? I have been using Seagates on the desktops (about 20 of them, with a service life of 3 years) for the last... six years, I'd say. I believe ONE of them failed me - and was a SMART alert, not a suddenly dead disk.

Maybe I'm lucky... :D

[BillG]

Re: Failure

Seagates are great. For a laptop, grab the Momentus 7200.3. Stay away from the 7200.4.

[ecofeco]

A product that only looks good when compared to....

...Hitachi.

[YARR]

Is it just me...

.... or do those graphs show the beginnings of a hard drive pricing cartel since the floods?