Technological bottleneck might be passed but HDD manufacturers intend to keep prices up [1]: > Value-based pricing > This led Sivaram to discuss pricing; “Dis

Technological bottleneck might be passed but HDD manufacturers intend to keep prices up [1]: > Value-based pricing > This led Sivaram to discuss pricing; “Disk capacities are scaling beautifully. We want to move towards value pricing.” Customers are getting substantial added value from the linear scaling in disk drive capacity to the current levels, according to Sivaram. They would get even more from future capacities. > With larger capacity drives the manufacturing cost in $/TB terms comes down. He suggested that, perhaps, it is time to think about moving from manufacturing cost-based pricing centred on $/TB towards value-based pricing: “$/TB is no longer the right metric.” > A customers gets more value from a larger capacity drive, he said. “They can monetise more data.” This extra value could be larger than the sheer savings of the lower $/TB cost that WD can pass on. In that case WD could pass on only a proportion of that cost-saving to the customer and so charge for some of the extra value [1] https://blocksandfiles.com/2019/12/17/western-digital-disk-drive-roadmap/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2019/12/17/western-digital-disk-d...