An interesting point from Zecco on $WDC and $STX

The Raven read this and thought it was interesting;

http://pulse.zecco.com/2010/07/data-storage-valuation-versus-earnings-stx-wdc/

Basically it points out that data storage is cheap ie. $100 for a terabyte now. It doesn't explicitly say it, but the argument is then that 1Terabyte is enough space for you to store everything you could want and therefore that you'd just buy the cheaper version of the 1TB. Now it would be easy to dismiss this argument by regurgitating a quote about a desktop PC being everything you could need in the 90s. The Raven thinks it more interesting to wonder where the actual limit might be using a bit of imagination. As we're only really looking at personal data storage what items do people like to store? (and a point he's going to dig some more into offline)
photos, music, films, books? software? personal documents


photos, music and films all have the potential to upgrade again to higher resolution formats requiring more storage space, books less so, but software and the personal documents they produce if anything produce larger and larger files. Without even looking at the massive increase in commercial data that will be stored in the future its easy to make an argument that the size of files will expand to fill the space available to store them.

The other point that really should be thought about is what percentage of the population actually store this kind of data on their pc's, and if there is a potential generational effect, as stupid as this sounds the Raven would have a rather good punt that penetration of these sorts of products is much lower with consumers the older they are. ie. Your average 50yr old isn't going to have as many digital photos as your 30 something, or as many photos as that 30 something will have in 20yrs. Just to make the maths easier, lets say people only buy storage when they get to 20, and that penetration really only goes up to 40, thats 20yrs of the population that could be 40yrs in 20yrs time. Not a huge growth rate, but certainley not a stagnating industry at 3.5% p.a. growth for 20yrs.

It still looks like a situation to sit on one's hands. Especially given his other previous thoughts on WDC and STX...

http://blackraven999.blogspot.com/2010/08/wdc.html

http://blackraven999.blogspot.com/2010/08/stx-translation-of-wdc-comments.html