Western Digital, now a pure-play hard disk manufacturer following its separation from SanDisk, finds itself at a familiar crossroads in the long human story of cyclical industries — riding a wave of renewed storage demand while the market prices it as though the tide will never recede. An analyst has raised the quiet but consequential question of whether investors are paying tomorrow's prices for a recovery that belongs to today. In the arc of industrial capitalism, this tension between cyclical reality and optimistic valuation is as old as the markets themselves.