[joecool1029]

I already see the ‘save us China’ meme comments, but I want to go a step further and ask: Did they ever develop domestic HDD production (like of the tooling needed to make HDD’s)?

As I understand it, the technology holders for this specific line of technology are Korea (Samsung), Japan (Toshiba), and US (WD/Seagate).

I don’t think China ever developed the tooling internally? Am I wrong?

This feels like the ballpoint pen situation. Where China could build everything but the ballpoint since it took specialized machinery. But HDD gets to be a hard sell with how far NAND has come, and China could just lean on economies of scale here and skip the hard work of what at some point could become overcomplicated abandonware technology. Similar to approach between internal combustion cars and EV’s…

EDIT: And I am very aware production happens in places like Thailand, I don’t forget the flood pricing, I also don’t forget clamcoin shortages. Specifically mean where the core expertise is held.