Thread by @wmhuo168

China didn't wait for the market to kill hard drives. It executed them. Here's how NAND flash took over everything from laptops to datacenters while the West kept clinging to spinners.

techradar.com/pro/well-thats…

HDDs are dead in China—everywhere that matters.
This wasn’t just market drift. It was deliberate policy, executed with precision. A short thread on how and why NAND killed the hard drive in China:

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Forget what’s happening in the West. In China, spinning disks are already legacy. Laptops, desktops, tablets, and even entry-tier machines are now SSD by default. No debate. No nostalgia. Just purge.

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Why? Because NAND is strategic. HDDs were never China's game. No domestic champion. No IP base. No reason to subsidize a sunset industry when you can bankroll YMTC and control the future.

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Consumer PC makers—Lenovo, Huawei, Tongfang—all flipped. Government contracts mandated SSDs. Schools, tax bureaus, telecoms. From Beijing to the provinces, HDDs were slowly pushed to the margins.

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And it’s not just the endpoint. National clouds—Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu—are migrating tier by tier. Cold data still sits on massive HDD arrays, but that’s inertia. No one’s scaling up on spinners anymore.

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Surveillance? Yes, still HDD-heavy. China’s CCTV grid is unmatched in scale and cost-sensitivity. But even there, hybrid SSD-HDD setups are taking hold. Flash-first, archive later.

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Don’t expect a Chinese Seagate. They skipped that chapter. It’s NAND or bust. Domestic fabs, domestic firmware, domestic controllers. Vertical ambition—HDDs were horizontal deadweight.

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The message from Zhongnanhai to Zhongguancun was clear: build what's next, not what’s fading. That’s how flash won. Not by consumer demand but by state foresight.

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Bottom line: HDDs aren’t just dying in China. They’ve been defeated. On price, on policy, on principle. Spinners still turn. But no one’s betting the future on them anymore.

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