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  • peevee - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Why are they even sold at all given the availability of cheap SSDs and the transition to streaming (so no home movie collection is necessary)?
    I understand a few corporate clients with petabyte data requirements, but other than that...
  • notashill - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Some people just want/need a lot of storage and "cheap" SSDs are still ~5x the price of hard drives. I certainly do not want to spend over $1000 to get 8TB, which you can't even get in a single drive other than some absurdly expensive esoteric datacenter thing.
  • quiksilvr - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    It is actually now roughly 2x the price now. You can get a 1TB HDD for about $45 new or a 1TB SSD for $95. It really is getting to the point where buying a HDD doesn't make sense. Why spend $360 for an 8TB HDD array when you can spend $760 and get instant reads while using less power and have virtually no noise and much much faster reads and writes with instant access? That is definitely worth the $400 extra investment.
  • darkswordsman17 - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Are you joking? "Why not spend twice the price?" like cost isn't a major (often the most important) factor.

    Also, FYI, you can get 8TB single HDDs (quick check on Amazon puts them in the ~$250 range), so no need for an array, which was the point the other person was making (is that if you need a lot of storage, SSDs are still cost prohibitive).
  • shadowx360 - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Hard drives are significantly cheaper at larger capacities. I can get 4TB HGST Enterprise drives for $90-100 on sale, versus $90-110 for a 1 TB SSD. My 20TB RAID 6 setup was $630. For the same 5:2 parity ratio I would be looking at 24 SSDs for roughly $2400.
  • shadowx360 - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Can't edit but that should be $2800 for 28. Versus $630.
  • Shlong - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    An SSD for your PC is a no brainer now but for NAS Storage, a 50TB solution is too pricy still compeared to HDD.
  • cfenton - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    Also, if you're running a gigabit network (like 99+% of consumers) you're almost always limited by network speed before HDD speed.
  • RSAUser - Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - link

    Well, you might want one SSD for the lower response time.
  • Freeb!rd - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    Yeah, try that pricing ratio with larger HDDs... I paid $200 for an 8TB Toshiba HDD, how much does 4 2TB ssds cost and needs for additional Sata ports... guess what all 2TB units on Amazon are going for $200-$250 and while I was looking an 8TB external was only $139. So the price ratio is NOT 2:1
  • flyingpants265 - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    Hi, 8TB is $174, that's about $600 less than the SSD
  • khanikun - Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - link

    I'm just looking at the Newegg prices for the cheapest SSDs for their given size.

    8 x 1 TB Silicon Power Ace A55 = $783
    4 x 2 TB WD Blue = $899
    2 x 4 TB Samsung 860 QVO = $995
    1 x 7.6 TB Micro 5200 = $1117 (couldn't find a 8 TB consumer SSD)
    1 x 8 TB Intel DC P4510 = $2132 (Enterprise SSD)
  • peevee - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    "Some people just want/need a lot of storage "

    That is the point - who? 290 million people per year?
    It is just the case of PC builders installing this cr@p instead of SSD into new PCs (even laptops) despite them slowing down most operations to 1990s levels. A few $$ to lure ignorant customers.
  • DanNeely - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    the 290M figure is:
    17M enterprise drives (10/15k RPM server drives)
    60M Data center drives (Big bulk storage drives like what cloud providers use)
    68M Consumer electronics (Consoles, video surveillance, TIVO, etc)
    99M External drives
    46M Consumer drives (laptops and desktops)

    On the consumer side you've got some race to the bottom PCs being sold to people who want big numbers on the sticker (1000 >> 256), budget gaming systems (256gb isn't enough with some games above 100gb now), and people with lots of pictures/movies/etc that are putting big HDDs in a desktop instead of a NAS. Hopefully a lot of the last group also have an SSD for OS/Apps.
  • fazalmajid - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    10K rpm drives are actually dying first. SSDs have completely replaced them in their use case of fast, low-latency storage for databases and other critical applications. It's the high-reliability high-capacity drives, including nearline drives, that remain for bulk storage applications in tiered storage environments.
  • DanNeely - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Source? IIRC reading in a prior article here that 15k was going faster than 10k (expectation that there'd be at least one more 10k gen, but doubt over another 15k gen by a major HDD brand).
  • peevee - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    Thanks for the numbers, Dan. Can you disclose the source?
  • khanikun - Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - link

    The source is the article that you are commenting on. Scroll up
  • baka_toroi - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Archiving is still necessary and optical media just doesn't cut it anymore.
  • HStewart - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    That is what I used my old hard drivers are used. I even replace a Lenovo Y50 1T hard disk for a 500SSD. Been debating of clone my XPS 15 2in1 500G ssd to say 1G or 2G ssd - but so far that is not required.
  • DanNeely - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    On the consumer side, because some users do need more than 128/256gb; and outside of occasional crazy sales 1 tb of spinning rust is still significantly cheaper than a 1tb ssd. OTOH the price gap is continuing to shrink while the minimum viable ssd size keeps going up; which is driving sales of consumer drives ever downward. On the laptop side the quest for thin is helping some too.

    I'm honestly more surprised about the resilience of enterprise HDDs. Since they're breaking out data center drives, these are presumably 10/15k RPM SAS models; and those only ever make sense in cases where you're IO limited. AFAIK SSD equipped systems generally crush 10/15k RPM hdd ones in total cost/performance in IO bound workloads; so I was expecting sales to collapse toward RAID replacements for old systems and the like.
  • peevee - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    "On the consumer side, because some users do need more than 128/256gb; and outside of occasional crazy sales 1 tb of spinning rust is still significantly cheaper than a 1tb ssd."

    Not significantly in a $500+ new computer (and most are more than that). While speed improvements in the most operations people actually wait for (like launching programs, searching something on a disk, opening files) are easily 10x faster. With an HDD as a main drive, all the improvements in CPUs, memory speed etc over the last 2 decades are complete waste. It is literally (in terms of access speed ratios) like using a 1GHz Pentium III from 1999 with a cassette main storage from a 1970s 8080 home computer. Nobody with $1000 for a new PC was THAT stupid back then, what happened?
  • freeskier93 - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Why do you keep assuming everyone who needs a lot of storage uses the HDD as their main drive? Small SSD for the OS and programs then HDD for data is a pretty common setup.
  • khanikun - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    He can't think outside of his little box for some reason. My gaming rig has 512 GB m2 SSD for OS, two 512 GB sata SSD (raid 0) for programs, two 512 GB sata SSD (raid 0) for games, and four 4 TB HDDs for storage.

    Even my file server uses a 1 TB m2 SSD for OS and programs, with eight 6 TB HDDs for storage. Adding in four more 6 TB HDDs soon.

    I'm not buying ridiculously expensive SSDs for mass storage. Nothing about it is going to give me any benefits. I'm limited by the network when transferring files between computers and even the data sitting locally is nothing more than mp3s or videos. Where an ssd isn't going to provide any benefits when listening to music or watching a video.
  • peevee - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    Most PCs sold are laptops, and even most desktops have just 1 drive.
    Don't get me wrong, I use HDD just like you described myself, but it is 2011 self-build.

    Today the storage configuration which makes sense is PCIe x4 NVMe SSD (1TB), and MAYBE big cheap SATA SSD (or 2) as a 2nd (3rd) drive if you are into home-made video.

    The problem is that very few self-build, and manufacturers still offer HDDs in basic configurations of mainstream desktops and even laptops, without disclosing that it degrades real-life performance by a decade or more.
  • khanikun - Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - link

    There is no such thing as a big cheap SATA SSD. They're either cheap and small storage amount or expensive with large storage amount. A 4 TB SATA SSD is going to run you at minimum $500-1200, while a 4 TB hdd is $100-$180.
  • Ananke - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    With Big Data you also have data migration, which doesn't simply happen without archive and mirroring, because you don't want ti risk corruption or failure during database migrations. Therefore, even you may have a 50 TB SSD server, you still need another 65-80 TB migration storage. Enterprise/workstation 50TB is $250-400k for the device, around $120k for the storage array. Better to mirror it with HDDs....
  • Lord of the Bored - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    I hereby propose that if we are going to keep referring to hard disks as "spinning rust", we also need to refer to flash storage as "quartz shards".
  • fazalmajid - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    NAND flash SSDs are not an archival medium, they lose data if left unpowered for more than a year or so. Thus you still need HDDs for backup.
  • RobATiOyP - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Ummm, well I turned on 2 machines with consumer SSD's one an early consumer OCW 64GiB SSD which never really worked smoothly. Both OSes booted up fine and updated as best they could. I don't think the flash lostone byte in 3 years.
  • voicequal - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    It depends on temperatures, flash density (i.e MLC, TLC, QLC), and wear levels, but SSDs are not generally spec'd for long term offline (unpowered) storage. Samsung's 840 EVO was a notorious example where read rates slowed over time until you overwrote those areas of flash with recent data.
  • beginner99 - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Because even for games a cheap ssd is still easily 3xtimes more expensive than a HDD.

    And then there are does that don't stream (because the quality really is bad best example being the too dark GoT episode 3) and have their collection.
  • rocky12345 - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Why are they sold probably because a lot of people want to have big storage and do not want to pay double or more for the same amount of space from a SSD drive setup. There is more use for large storage than just movies. With the size of most current games having only SSD as storage makes very little sense when you can get triple the amount of storage with standard hard drives at a fraction of the price of SSD drives.

    Yes SSD is faster but why pay double for half the space or less.
  • Shlong - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Video people or content creators that want to save their original 4K video files. I have a massive storage of Blu-Ray's saved to NAS (much better quality than streaming), so HDD's still has its uses.
  • eastcoast_pete - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    +1. Exactly. Gets even worse if you're making and editing videos yourself; 4K looks great, but good quality RAW or ProRes files are 200 or 400 Mbs; those positively eat storage.
  • saboken - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    Having your data stored locally is safer than putting your trust in the cloud! Sure a HDD can fail but if you invest in 2 or 3 drives store them in a safe place EG fire safe it a Bank Deposit box it will remain in your custody also your not paying to have your data floating around in a cloud where there are many more risks! Hacker's, Bankruptcy (the plug being pulled on your data) etc! Trusting your data to the cloud is like handing your cash over to some invisible entity you never know where it is and if it will be there when you want it back!
  • eastcoast_pete - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    Regarding having one's own cold storage, as you describe: I agree 100%. One of the always possible events that can disrupt or destroy online backups is your cloud storage provider going bankrupt. If you rely on online storage, read the contract text (esp. the fine print) very, very carefully.
  • svan1971 - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    What happens when you purchase a few hundred movies from a streaming company and that company goes belly up?
  • cornandbeans - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    Uh, for archiving? I have a huge collection of Blurays, lossless music, games, photos, videos....that I need 20TB for. I never stream since I already OWN everything, not to mention my collection is superior in quality.
  • Alexvrb - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    One month, Netflix has <insert TV series or movie here>, the next it's gone. Oh and don't get me started about <Movie X> or <Movie Y>, neither they nor Hulu has them. How many streaming services do I need to pay for to have access to all known movies and TV shows, again? Tell me. I'm dying to know.

    Next you'll recommend we just buy discs. Seriously, there's a whole world of people and they don't all have your exact wants and needs, peewee.
  • Beaver M. - Sunday, May 5, 2019 - link

    If I didnt have my movie collection, then it would have been really bad the still very numerous times when my Internet went out.

    Also Im not going to subscribe to 3 or 4 providers just to have everything available I want. Seeing how bad movies have become the last few years, its also not worth it anymore. I just buy the movies I want, so I dont have to pay a monthly subscription, which would be much more expensive. The only thing I regret so far is not being able to watch Netflix' Bandersnatch. But I am sure they will find a solution to watch that offline sooner or later.

    So yeah, I am happy with my 12 TB HDD (actually only 10.8 TB), but probably will need more than that in a few years.
  • flyingpants265 - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    Because I have 2x4TB drives, and one 2.5" 1TB drive acting as a pure backup.
  • damianrobertjones - Thursday, May 9, 2019 - link

    You are not the only person in the world. Some of use don't wish to pay a monthly subscription to service x, y and z, only to find stuff STILL not on that service. Some of us prefer to outright OWN our media instead of hiring everything.

    I have over 20Tb of backed-up films, music I've owned over the years, on my small server. It might be convenient for many people to stream, but that's for them.
  • 3DoubleD - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    It would be most interesting to see these trends compared with the amount of total storage shipped per year. This data on a per market segment basis would be even more interesting. I'm curious if the number of units is going down because the average drive size is increasing. I'd guess that this effect is strongest in the data center market, but it might be present elsewhere.
  • DanNeely - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Look at the graphs and read the article first please. Data center drive shipments are going up. The shrinking is primary due to consumer (PC/Laptop) HDD sales collapsing.

    Previous reports have shown total storage going up and HDD maker revenue fairly stable because the drives going away are low capacity low margin models; while the data center drives are both much more profitable/drive and keep going up in size.
  • ghostbit - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    So will we get discounts on WD Red/Seagate IronWolf or will they fall under the "enterprise" category?
  • DanNeely - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Definitely not enterprise that's SAS drives; Red/Ironwolf's small/medium size nas straddles the line between Consumer and Data Center. From the perspective of an HDD motor maker I suspect they go in the latter bucket since they need to have the same higher vibration tolerance.
  • eastcoast_pete - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    One of the reasons why demand for "spinning rust" drives is slumping is the cartel-like absence of real competition among HDD makers, which keeps HDD prices artificially high. Really wish the respective authorities in the US, the EU and China would take a close look at that trio! That anti-competitive situation in the HDD market will get even worse now, as the same companies (WD/HGST, Seagate and Toshiba) have build up too much solid state drive capacities, and want to move those to avoid write-downs. Don't get me wrong, I also prefer an SSD as the boot and work drive, but for larger scale cold storage of UHD video files and for backup in general, a couple of 6, 8 or 10 TB drives is still the way to go.
  • khanikun - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    Yep. I remember getting HGST NAS 6 TB 7200 rpm drives for around the $175 mark. WD bought them up, got rid of HGST. Now you can only find a 7200 rpm drive with their WD Red Pro, which at 6 TB is $220. Their regular Red is just 5400 rpm and that still costs $200.

    At least there is still Seagate. Wish Toshiba was a better competition.
  • flyingpants265 - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    HDD prices used to get cut in half every couple years. Shortly after they introduced 4TB, it's like prices stopped going down.. There was also the whole factory flood which they managed to milk for years.

    Should have gone to 4" or higher platter sizes, stacked more platters, and used the 5.25" drive bays. We could have had 30TB drives by now. Now it's too late, a lot of self-built cases don't even have 5.25" bays.
  • Dizoja86 - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    Agreed. I bought a couple 2TB Seagate Green drives back in 2010 for $69 Cdn each.
  • Ian Cutress - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    r/datahoarder
  • eastcoast_pete - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    That's another term that can be used for many (most?) HTPC/mediaplex users also. Similarly, if one's hobby or job (or both) involves taking and editing videos, the Tb accumulate quickly, especially now with 4K being the norm.
  • rocky12345 - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Hmm...I guess I better get those 2 8TB hard drives I was planning on getting for my new build this summer. I was planning on getting them in July but with this news the cost of the drives just may double by July form what they are now. I was also planning on getting 2 1TB NVMe PCI-e 3.0 x4 drives for that build as well and I'm getting those asap as well because of the news form last week about the memory manufactures cutting production on the chips.
  • dromoxen - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    Dont be afraid of the second hand market .. all recent hard drives are pretty robust and they will doubtless be better packaged than AMZ. I bought two 2x2tb wd black and they are still going 8 years later .. so add on their previous life 10+ years
  • name99 - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    IF (and this is a big if) the "tech world" gets its act together, Nidec will be just fine.
    For every hard drive that's sold, there are plenty of IoT uses for small motors that are currently not being done or are way more expensive than they need to be because they're still priced at the luxury level.

    The kinds of things I'm thinking of are things like motorized blinds or robot vacuum cleaners or tilt-and-pan cameras. When you think of what COULD be done by IoT, or done better, or done cheaper, we've only just started, and motors will be a substantial part of it.
    BUT it starts with the tech world getting its act together, and right now we're in that depressing state of new tech where everyone is obsessed with me-too products and almost no-one is actually thinking originality...
  • coburn_c - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    Maybe this has something to do with mechanical hard drive prices being stagnant for a decade, while every other storage medium (save optical) has improved dramatically.
  • StrangerGuy - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link

    1. Streaming has ironically cut demand to local storage for most consumers.
    2. Low end HDDs have higher BoM costs than low end SSDs = Less incentive for HDD manufacturers to continue making them.
    3. SSDs are least a magnitude higher in real world MTBF = less warranty costs for OEMs.
  • Beaver M. - Sunday, May 5, 2019 - link

    3)
    Maybe, but when they fail its always catastrophic. HDDs can most of the time be fixed. Even by yourself, if its just the board that is defective.
  • 808Hilo - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link



    No need to backup anything. Just get a freedom of information act form and the NSA will restore your hard drives of the past 20 years :-) Its all there and thats why HD sell in the 100rds of millions.
  • eastcoast_pete - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    (: The NSA is probably one, if not the top buyer of HDDs. Their data storage facilities are enormous.
  • svan1971 - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    The cost and performance is to blame, hard drive manufactures have stuck it to consumers for years.
  • paul sss - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    i looked into buying a 4TB hhd in the last 3 months.
    i problem was everyone was selling bare drives with no warranty buy the manufacturer.
    bare drives are considered OEM and too be warranted by the seller.
    i was looking at Neweggdotcom.
    and if you pour thru the reviews it seems like newegg is selling used drives alot with hundreds of hours on them when they are too be new.
  • Destoya - Sunday, May 5, 2019 - link

    Look into buying a external HDD and either using it as-is or shucking the case and installing it in your system. I was able to get a new WD 8TB for $120 with a rebranded Red inside a few weeks ago. The same drive is $230 if you buy it bare.

    Told myself I wasn't ever going to buy a HDD again but the price was right.
  • Cliff34 - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link

    What I like to know is whether the sales of SSD is making up for the loss of HDD sales. I think there's a general market slowdown for both HDD and SDD. Then again with the recent drop in price for SSD and increasing SSD capacity to 2tb (and soon 4 TB), more people are snagging them to replace their HDDs
  • ruzveh - Sunday, May 5, 2019 - link

    HDD princes are the same even after a decade and there is no advancement in this department. I want to buy 5 HDD more but cant due to continued high prices. 8 years back 8TB HDD were selling for $180 and even today it is around $200. Demand increased but prices never came down. Today they will feel heat from SSD and other competition and one day they will eventually fail coz of their arrogance
  • Beaver M. - Sunday, May 5, 2019 - link

    Its pretty obvious they fixed the prices. Cant prove it though, since they all know what to do without talking to each other.
  • smartthanyou - Sunday, May 5, 2019 - link

    Don't worry hard drive fans, chances are they will still be included in iMacs for years to come. ;)
  • jjj - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    Next year will be worse than they expect as at least Sony is going SSD but Microsoft would be likely to go SSD too for next gen console.
  • Targon - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    With the move to SSDs, combined with the problems at Intel driving down sales of desktop and laptops(because OEMs have been slow when it comes to selling more AMD based machines), it makes sense for hard drive motors to be sliding downward. We will also see a similar decline in the next few years away from 2.5 inch SSD drives to m.2 drives(both SATA as well as NVMe), and people will be talking about that market going away since every machine will have at least one M.2 slot for storage.
  • Skeptical123 - Monday, May 6, 2019 - link

    TIL one Japanese company named Nidec is responsible for making 85% of the worlds HDD spindle motors
  • Dizoja86 - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    So total drives PC drives shipped dropped by 50%, but overall the drop was only 6%. That doesn't seem like a huge deal.

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