Micron Technology (MU)

[JLS]

MU vs WDC & STX

The case for MU that I've been trying to make:

Pure-play or half-n-half?

A Look At The SSD Market: Where Do Seagate and Western Digital Stand?
http://tinyurl.com/yaey2rwd

Hard drive manufacturers Seagate Technology and Western Digital face an uphill battle in attempting to sustain sales of traditional rotating-disk drives in the coming years. Since the introduction of flash-based memory chips, there have been constant talks about how long it will be before hard disk drives eventually become obsolete. NAND-flash based storage, or solid state drives, have numerous advantages over rotating-disk drives, ranging from the sheer speed of read/write operations, low latency in data access, relatively low power consumption, as well as lighter and more durable drives with a greater resistance to mechanical shock. So why hasn’t there been an industry-wide switch to solid state drives already?

It all comes down to the price. Traditional storage drives currently cost around 7 to 8 cents per usable gigabyte, whereas even the best-priced SSDs cost over $0.40 per usable gigabyte. However, it is interesting to note that SSD prices have been falling drastically in the last few years as demand has picked up. Prices are likely to continue to drop in the coming years, thereby posing a major threat to hard drive makers such as Seagate and Western Digital. In this article we take a look at the presence of NAND-flash chip makers in the SSD market and how the drop in SSD prices could impact them.

I'll take the pure play, MU. It has a much prettier and predictable chart, and I like the steadier climb. Not to mention, why invest in a company which has one side of their business directly competing with the other side? Doesn't that explain why WDC has traded so flat for so long?

There are also errors (by omission) in the article regarding cost. There is a cost to having lower-reliability memory (and lower life expectancy) devices in the cloud storage, and there is a cost in needing more real estate for cloud storage, and there is a cost in needing air conditioning in the cloud in order to keep devices cooler and therefore reliability higher than it would be without that cooling.