The sentiment around buying European/Canadian alternatives to American products and services is a great one, and I can get behind the movement, but there is more to it.
Not all products and services have alternatives that are viable. You can’t get your workplaces to move to libreoffice or get your mom to start using signal messege. Moreover, even when using Europa products and services you still perpetuate the culture of uncontrolled capitalism and enriching tech billionaires. Open Source Alternatives, Piracy, and Ad Blocking are all equally viable.
Keeping this in mind, remember that piracy and ad blocking are great ways to keep using American services without contributing to their bottom line.
There are ad free versions of YouTube, reddit, Instagram and Facebook apps. They’re all patched with revanced and are available on github.
Additionally, pirate media as much as you can and be unapologetic about it. Facebook is doing it, so can you. Pirate music, movies, books they’re all available. Torrents community has never been safer and better organised.
Consume without paying and that does more damage to their bottomlines.
Shame there aren’t any European hard drive manufacturers.
Consumer HDDs are a small part of the revenue of HDD manufactures who make money from businesses and data centers. The money you spent on HDDs is much lower than what you pay for subscriptions over a period of 10 years. So you also contribute less to their bottomlines.
Yeah, I won’t be putting any consumer grade HDDs in my NAS.
Sure … if you compare if for over a couple of decades.
You missed the point. Consumers buying 20-30TB of capacity (even if millions of consumers do so) won’t add much to their margins.
The high margin solutions are managed services where they provide end to end solutions to businesses like data centers and IT companies.
You have a source on this? I was curious and tried to look into it, but info seems to be hard to find.
I did come across this article and it states that 50% of the entire HDD market is still for desktop PCs. Not sure how much of that is between businesses and private users, but at least the marketshare of data centres seems to much lower then I expected.
https://materials.proxyvote.com/Approved/958102/20240923/AR_587276/INDEX.HTML?page=71
This is the financial report 2024 _for Western Digital. Check page 69 (naice)
Cloud revenue 5bn
Client revenue 4bn
Consumer revenues 3bn
I don’t see numbers on gross margins but from what I understand about business, B2B divisions usually are higher margins than consumer divisions.
It’s not European, but if one is simply looking to avoid buying American, Toshiba is an option.
Likely more options as well if one looks at the SSD market, but I am assuming there may be a reason you’re looking for an HDD specifically?
As @[email protected] says, they’re too expensive per TiB
There’s two European manufacturers of SSDs, Wilk Elektronik in Poland and GS Nanotech in Russia.
Unless you’re shitting money SSDs are not really viable for mass storage.