I have enough space to not buy a hard disk drive the next 2-3 years. I think I bought my last HDD 2 years ago. Probably this is the case with most people and with SSDs taking the place of boot drives, HDD companies are losing the low capacity market.
For most people who build new systems, they wouldn't know what to do with all that space a 240GB SSD will offer them. No second HDD for them, not to mention that a 128GB USB flash drive sometimes will do the trick, if they need to clean up some space from their SSD, without having to call the technician to install the HDD. On the other hand, people who need space will go for one 4TB or bigger drive, probably external, instead of buying more HDDs with lower capacities to put into their PC case.
Old PCs have enough capacity, new PCs go for an SSD or just a single high capacity HDD, instead of many with lower capacity.
This. Last year I built about 30 desktop computers for typical home users (i.e., office/light productivity, HTPC, and gaming rigs) - three had a spinning hard drive in them. The average user is usually fine with a 250ish GB SSD, and if they run short on room, I tell them to buy a pair of 64GB USB flash drives for $20-30 total.
Anton mentions the rise of 4K video as potentially spurring more sales of higher capacity hard drives, but I rarely have anyone ask about how to store even BR-D-quality video, so I'm skeptical that 4K will become a serious driver of increased household storage needs this decade. (At least at the consumer level.)
The thing is, even if some small percentage do wind up needing more storage (unlikely), many routers these days do actually offer a USB port for attaching and providing access to a HDD. That means even if they have multiple computers or devices, they don't need more than one large capacity HDD for a single household. Heck, you can get a 4TB Seagate external 2.5" hdd (actually twin 2TB's with a USB -> SATA RAID) for $150 at the local Walmart.
The net result in the massive increase in HDD storage capacity along with the rise of the medium capacity (250-500GB) SSD means that your average household has gone from multiple HDDs in their laptops/computers to a single central HDD.
Of course, there are exceptions (I have about 30TB of storage here, but I'm an extreme edge case...) so this will continue to be the trend. Your average storage capacity needs for an entire household are increasing far slower than the average increase in HDD capacity vs price.
Is 30TB really an extreme edge case? Anyone with a serious video collection will surpass that pretty quickly, and if they're using a DrivePool, they'll use at least 60TB in drive space to store that 30TB.
I have a storage array of 9TB usable capacity. Of all the people I know personally, only my brother has a larger storage array. While it's quite easy to get larger than that now, it's definitely not common. So yes, I'd definitely consider 30TB to be an extreme edge case in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah, I have to agree with you Gigaplex. I consider my library to be pretty generous. I probably have something like ~500 movies and maybe 30-40 TV series (granted most are just 1-2 seasons, but some are 5-8), plus some music and pictures (and not JPEGs, but a LOT of RAW images since I am a photographer, even if not a professional). Currently on my 6TB array (5.4TiB formatted) I have 2.86TiB free. I still have some older SD content (or there IS no HD version) where I only have the DVD that I ripped and a lot of my BR collection I only ripped at 720p, but right now I am at about 10% 1080p, 50% 720p and 40% 480p content.
I wouldn't consider that a small collection, but I don't need anything like 30 terabytes of storage. Maybe if my entire collection was BDMVs instead of transcoded down files. There gets to be a point though where that is kind of ridiculous to do and is absolutely not "common". Hell, I probably represent 1% of computer users as it is, the ones who have all of their DVDs and BRs in unreduced files are probably 1% of the 1%.
At my rate of growth, I've figured I have about 3-4 more years before I need to worry about storage at all (I don't like having less than ~20% free capacity, or about 1TiB free in this case) and maybe somewhat longer as I do occasionally cull my collection when I realize I haven't watched a movie or something since I bought it years ago, so it gets wiped and I either donate the BR/DVD or I'll just stuff it in a box and forget about it. My collection growth is still positive though, but we are talking maybe 20-40GiB a month (buy a few BRs a month, pictures I've taken, etc.), maybe .5TiB a year.
I doubt it'll happen, but some of me hopes that TLC/3D NAND SSDs are cheap enough by the time I am hitting my self imposed limits just to replace spinning disks in my desktop and server (data is mirrored between them and on 2x3TB RAID0 arrays, plus an external 5TB USB3 disk as a 3rd copy). Probably still too expensive, but I can hope the prices are lower enough and I have the budget to pony up $500-700 to replace the disks in both machines with SSDs (hoping and figuring maybe in 4 years the price of cheap SSDs has dropped under 5 cents per GB). Even if SSD storage is <20%, the beauty there is they are so much faster, no worries about arrays and I can just create a storage pool and add SSDs to it as capacity starts hitting <10% free.
I only have 2Gbps throughput on my network right now (SMB Multichannel, dual 1GbE links). Though I am also hoping in 4 years 2.5GbE or 5GbE networking gear will be on the market...so even SSDs might be a bottleneck on my network some day (but I think I can probably live with that. I'd love multi GB/sec throughputs on my network, but I am barely realistic enough to know I don't actually need it at all, 200+MB/sec is plenty and not worth the cost to try to realize more than 300 or 400MB/sec in the next few years).
Oh yeah, RAW images...I wasn't even thinking about that. If you're any kind of remotely serious photographer you'd need gigantic piles of storage too.
I remember like early 2000s I had like an 80GB drive in my main system, which was fine. Storage requirements have just absolutely ballooned since then though, while it seems like the rate of drive size increases has massively slowed.
with the advent of netflix, I actually wonder if its worth expending that much on local storage with a plex/emby server running locally. Still, 4 tb drives are now reaching the 100 USD barrier. Which is hella cheap. You can easily buy a good array for what used to cost thousands.
I don't save much video, but even still I keep some shows from my Tivo, and broadcast TV is a (glorious) 7.5GB/hour or so. And as someone mentioned, comics-I've got GB of stuff from Humblebundle. And we didn't used to have to store our games, since they actually bothered putting them on disc. I've long since surpassed what my 4TB drives can hold, and moved on to 8TB ones just for my games from GOG.com and Steam...
Why exactly is that disgusting? Does pirating something you don't need / won't use / wouldn't have bought hurt anybody at all? Seems like all it does is sell more hard drives. Maybe your post was facetious; if so you need to get a little better at that.
"Nothing"? Really? I can think of thousands of things more disgusting, including your judgemental attitude and the stranglehold that certain content developers are provided in the US and their John Doe persecution of people they don't even have sufficient evidence of piracy against, despite reporting record profits then instead claiming massive piracy losses.
Supporting those deceitful !@#$ is far more disgusting to me.
"but I rarely have anyone ask about how to store even BR-D-quality video, so I'm skeptical that 4K will become a serious driver of increased household storage needs this decade. (At least at the consumer level.)" My guess is, people who need you to build them a rig or give them advice, aren't the sort of people into ripping movies in the first place. They are probably fine with tossing the blu ray into their player, hit play, watch it once and then put it in the attic. :D I'm waiting for a more serious shift in prices to get another bunch of 4TB drives for my fileserver (currently 2x[4x2TB] with at 7 more 3.5" bays empty).
That's well and good unless capacity and cost is important. Hard drives are still less than 1/5 the cost per gigabyte, and that's compared to TLC, which has a relatively limited write capability.
>which has a relatively limited write capability Please. Educate yourself. Review the TechReport's SSD Torture Test (literally Google "Tech Report SSD Torture Test") and you'll see even TLC SSDs withstood over a PB of data write/reads over the course of their lifetime and far exceeded the manufacturer's claims of endurance.
SSDs have much more endurance than advertised, and even if you were stupid enough to waste limited read/write cycles by performing three daily complete defrags on your SSD (which doesn't increase read/write speeds, but really only wastes time during the defrag and wears out the NAND chips a bit) you'd still have a working SSD 10 years from now. The bigger question then would be if motherboards 10 years from now would even support that SATA 3 SSD.
The consumer has literally NOTHING to worry about for SSD endurance. These figures ONLY see any relevance in data centers where data that is cached on SSDs is constantly read from by servers which deliver relevant data to clients and constantly written to be the storage server itself to hold newly cached data. In this situation only, these drives would get hammered 24/7 and having an SSD with longer endurance is the difference between causing undue downtime for clients (costing you $$$).
The only thing you have to worry about is cold storage for SSDs. Dell found after 6 months of no power you start to see data loss and some even report of loss in a few days at hot temperatures.
Agree with you, even with that.. Why would you need that many writes? HDDs or SSDs used for movie/series.. are a "write once, leave untouched forever and only read" kind of archival style usage. Id say in these kind of jobs.. Spin hdds degrade way faster (thanks to movement) than SSDs.
Not if the cells lose their charge... Mechanical drives a lot of times you've got some warning that they're dying, and they can sit there for years and still work fine.
I honestly have no idea how anyone could survive with a 250GB drive... My main system I got in 2012 has a Seagate 750GB 7200 RPM drive (the largest available at the time for notebooks) and a 500GB Crucial SSD (again, the largest available at the time). I'd need multiple times more to not have to worry about what programs/media/whatever I have installed on it.
Pretty much this. MI recently built a new PC for my parents, and just put 240GB 850 EVO. Their 320GB HDD was only filled like 100GB after like 4+ years of use.
I just bought 2 8TB drives from Seagate, and I'm just hoping to last through the year with 'em. The needs for huge amounts of storage just keep ballooning, and ballooning way way faster than storage sizes have increased :-/
Agreed. I've been on SSDs for quite some time and have yet to have a single failure. Even my servers (which have been all SSD for about 3-4 years now) and get quite a bit of usage have yet to have a single issue. All my new builds have SSDs - I won't ever go back.
Re-posting because I replied to the wrong message earlier. "That's well and good unless capacity and cost is important. Hard drives are still less than 1/5 the cost per gigabyte, and that's compared to TLC, which has a relatively limited write capability."
More and more people don't store games & multimedia files locally. Fast internet connection plus Steam, Netflix, Spotify and such let you download your files anytime you want. Add to this cloud storage for photos and other personal files and no wonder most average users feel like there is no need for big, noisy HDDs, not to mention DAS & NAS. Yeah, consumer HDD is dying in front of us.
Comcrap just raised their data caps in their "test markets" from 300 to 1 Tb so even that argument is going by the wayside. Of course when people are streaming 4k content that might change, but until 4k is prevalent, I don't think data caps will be a big issue for 99.9% of people.
Just how many games do you have to download to hit a terabyte? I do backup my games on an external HDD, and there are maybe 400GB for something like a hundred of titles!
I suspect with that espoused belief, your desired goal is likely not achievable.
But go get 'em tiger. Live the dream.
On caps, any on a wire is stupid, but at least with a 1TB cap, that would be pretty hard to hit (without 4k video) for probably 99.9% of people. I know I am not the heaviest of heavy users, but my entire family of 5 hits around 500-600GB a month. That is about 7hrs per day of Netflix streaming between all 5 family members, though realistically it is a mix of Youtube minecraft videos, some Netflix, PBS kids, the rare game download, etc and probably working out to an average 2hrs per person per day.
I am sure if we cut the cord entirely it would go up even more, but probably still pretty comfortably under 1TB. I am absolutely not advocating that caps are reasonable. I feel like it isn't unreasonable to say that there should be SOME super high cap, especially if the point is it is a residential connection and not supposed to be running a business, "servers", etc. The data does cost your ISP something if it goes outside their network, even if we are talking a penny a GB, so I don't think it is unreasonable to say that pushing/pulling something like 30TB of data a month is "okay", but your typical even 1TB cap is just stupid.
I have numerous friends with rapidly growing repository of video and image files (NEF files for Nikon D800 are 30-35MB each). Hard drives are the only realistic option to store multi terabyte libraries of created content that is typically mirrored and backed up. Proliferation of video created with GoPro or other action video cameras (including drone mounted cameras) will force consumers to buy hard drives since upload speed of typical Internet connection is too slow for upload of high resolution video content.
at the end of the day, not a high % of people do that kind of stuff even though it's gotten more popular over the year. Just about everybody I know owns a laptop. If those increasingly come without HDDs but with SSDs, that's gone, RAW photographers or not.
In the medium term I wouldn't be concerned about disks for photography (or other bulk storage). The 3.5" HDDs best suited for USB drives/NASes are most similar to enterprise nearline storage drives; which as a segment dominated by cost/gb should be the most resilient part of the HDD market. Until/unless flash becomes cheaper per GB they're unlikely to go away.
The short term situation of bottom end consumer drives being in freefall doesn't really matter beyond headline sales figures. The margin on those drives is near zero, so losing them doesn't affect the bottom line much (and that primarily from one time costs related to scaling down production capacity).
I wouldn't worry until sales for 10/15k SAS drives start plummeting as well. They have the highest margins and fund an out-sized share of the R&D needed to develop higher capacity drives. When that goes away we'll either see a significant slowdown in capacity growth or rise in prices to sustain R&D spending (or both). That will probably be the beginning of the end for HDDs by making it much easier for flash to catch up in price/GB.
yeah. what drove the first PC period was Word/Office at home, likely pirated from work. no one has ever had much need for more than 640K until the recent gaming fiasco. windoze bloated up, which drove it, too. but that has ended. we're now in the Times of Good Enough.
Agreed. I just updated my NAS with some 4TB enterprise drives (3x4TB in RAID5) and retired my 5x2TB RAID5 array. Same overall size, but vastly increased reliability and I should be good for a few years.
SSDs are big enough now that most users dont need HDDs anymore.
Even for gamers, the richer ones can afford all SSD storage. My laptop has a 256 and 512GB SSDs in it, and I feel no squeeze for space, just install the games you actually play. And if more space is needed, 2TB SSDs exist now. I doubt many gamers need more than 2TB of games downloaded at any one point.
Which leaves media creation and one of the few that still need HDDs, although that may change. Outside of backup devices, HDDs dont have much of a future in consumer devices.
Agreed; however the problem is that most consumers don't understand that SSDs will make their laptop much more responsive; and that the lack of spinning rust is the biggest reason why their phone and tablet are so much more responsive. 3/4ths of PCs are still crippled with HDDs and sold to customers who only understand two numbers: Total price, less is always better here. Number of GB, more is always better here. If they don't actually need the disk space, and most don't, they're wrong about the latter; but you can't fight ignorance at the boxmart.
Just checking prices for new name brand laptop HDDs on Newegg shows the price margin between 1TB drives and smaller ones has almost completely vanished: 250 GB, $39; 320 GB, $45, 500 GB, $45; 1TB $52; 2 TB, $94. Just based on how far 1 TB laptop drives have dropped in price I'm not surprised that Seagate's discontinuing their smaller capacity drives; WD and Toshiba will probably end up doing the same within a year.
At the same time the cheapest ~960GB SSD on Newegg is still $200, with $50 only getting you 240GB. That's enough of a price/capacity gap to keep the majority of the clueless with legacy storage for at least a few more years.
Very true, but the kind of people that dont understand SSDs are probably the same kind of people that want the most GBs because they think it will make the computer faster. Nothing will help them I'm afraid.
But then, the cheap junk they usually buy gets the scrap parts anyway, the good lines of HDDs always went into business machines and stuff with a higher margin. That market is falling in love with SSDs very quickly.
-- But then, the cheap junk they usually buy gets the scrap parts anyway, the good lines of HDDs always went into business machines and stuff with a higher margin.
Technically illiterate customers looking at the only number they think they understand and wanting HDDs was my point. Excluding those willing to pay a little extra for a stylish thin laptop I don't see that changing any time soon because the price per GB difference is still way too large.
Perhaps if the HDD manufacturers did more than put the most pathetic scrap of SSD in their hybrid offerings they could have retained some traction. Segate tooting their horn recently about the staggering upgrade to 32GB flash on the SSHD... I mean come on...
Do that, and you get a corresponding increase in price. Their main customer is not you or me, but OEMs making PCs, which are themselves deadlocked in the race to the bottom.
I wonder how that performed? I used their first gen hybrid drive for about 3 years. Had a 500GB 7200RPM drive + 4GB SLC + 32MB RAM. Performed really well for the time, like honestly it 'felt' closer to an ssd than a mechanical drive (though since programs keep getting bigger, I don't know that that would always be the case-seems like Windows 10's constantly doing stuff too, that an SSD can handle better).
I was disappointed when they switched from 7200 to 5400RPM, though a larger flash cache might negate that.
I wonder how Samsung's new 16TB SSD will change things by next year in the enterprise? it has the highest capacity with far lower power usage than any 3.5" HDD.
Call me crazy, but having pricing in the 1-3 TB range be basically flat since 2010 is not going to help them sell at all. Sure bigger models are out now, but the pricing is just awful, and every day SSDs become more attractive in every regard compared to magnetic disks.
You can get an 8TB non-SMR air based desktop drive and put it in an external enclosure, but honestly I'd save my money and just get the SMR drive. SMR isn't that bad for writing large sequential files, like videos, and reads are just as fast as a normal drive. Unless you're doing something really demanding SMR is fine, and if you are doing something demanding you'd be better off with some sort of expensive RAID setup, anyways.
SMR is almost a perfect match for the kind of massive media library or backups that you might use an HDD for these days. Unless you're modifying/overwriting data, the firmware will ensure that the data is written to "pristine" tracks. Even when you do modify data, there's the non-SMR buffer. There's the issue with RAID, but most RAID modes are a bad idea with >2TB drives anyway.
90 million units is hardly a "niche" market, and HDDs will remain for many years to come. There's just no other option if you need to store more than a terabyte or two of data, especially when you don't actually need the superior performance of the SSD (such as media libraries and backups).
I'm just nervous about reliability with those SMR drives. Maybe I'm concerned for no reason, but I feel like storage tech is fragile enough as it is.
The SMR externals were like $220 or so for a Seagate, versus $350 for a "normal" drive (and then I had to buy an enclose). So far so good though, using them for a few months.
Wowzers, 10TB? I didn't know that... I just bought 8TB Seagate NAS drives a few months ago. Almost double the price of the SMR drives, but I'm just nervous about those.
Segate JUST released 8TB internal drives. I bought an enclosure that can hold 4 drives, + 2 8TB drives. They're...umm...I guess they're considered NAS drives. They were like $350 a piece though, something like that, but I need every scrap of space I can get, and I didn't really trust that new SMR tech.
I try to never use a mechanical HDD when ever i can, and now that SSD's are $60 for 250GB and come with 3 or 5 year warranties its perfect. Most people will never fill a 250GB drive with just pictures and music. But i still recommend using a HDD as a backup and only using while backing up.
Test your drives before use. Especially Seagates. Their build practices frighten me. I have 8 4TB drives, and went through 22 drives before I got 8 that passed the tests... THAT is scary. But they've been running since release without further issues. I hear they are far better now but I still test each one before using it.
You can probably thank weak consumer protection laws for that. In AU and NZ (and probably UK and other parts of Europe) they don't do that because it's not legal.
That's because the $/GB has barely budged since what it was at before the 2011 flood. I remember routinely seeing 3 TB internal HDDs going on sale for $80 before the flood.
Then the HDD vendors all merged and jacked up prices while massively slowing down aerial density innovations.
Hu? They are up to 10TB drives now in test cases and 8TB regularly purchasable... It's only 2016. Plus the cost of components has changed. I'd consider the 2011 pre-flood an all time low, rather amazing prices then a norm to aim for... Still I never saw a 3TB drive I'd buy, let alone one for that price.
You can now get a very decent Plextor M7V ( TLC Based ) or SanDisk SSD Plus ( MLC Based ), both with decent Controller and Firmware support for less then $40 with 128GB.
I expect the price to stay put, in 2017 once all the Fab from China and New Fab from Samsung are up, we will likely see 256GB SSD going for $40 in 2018. That should be the point where most people are fine with SSD in terms of capacity.
The hard-drive market going down sounds like a predictive failure from their own technical jargon. It was worth mentioning that the price per gig on the hard-drives won't go down, which means that at some point in time, when the prices of the hard-drive will go up according to their bigger capacity (10 Tb, 12 Tb ...etc) and the price of the SSDs going down, then it will make it easier to switch to SSDs. In other words their strategy won't resist that much in time. Also if prices since the flood in Thailand have not much fluctuated on the hard-drives makers, the cost on the consumer went from 1 to 3 for the same hard-drive capacity. A few days before the flood I had bought around 20 Tb of drives for a few hundreds of dollars, and i have never seen those prices going back to those prices and it probably will never go back to that trend. At a consumer level, I am willing to upgrade to 8Tb drives, but those prices are too expensive. I am pretty sure that many consumers are waiting to upgrade to bigger drives and are waiting to see the prices getting slashed. Worse case scenario I will keep buying 4 Tb drives. It is the enterprise market that help the hard-drives makers to survive, especially in the NAS enterprise market (a SAS 6 15K drive costs so much money). Maybe they should not cut production, but help to replace failed hard-drives with newer hard-drives instead of refurbished drives that will fail again in a few weeks/months to raise customer's satisfaction, because customer's satisfaction dropped to low levels a few years ago. Please make the customer happy first and they'll start buying again hard-drives. Thanks ;)
I think people are waiting to see what comes out of the merger between WD and Sandisk. I am surprised that Seagate did not make a bid late last year for Micron.
I think much of the blame for the decline in the PC market in general is due to Intel failing to innovate. The drop in HDD shipments effectively just mirrors the lower number of new computers being shipped. But that may be a bit harsh on Intel and the rest of the PC industry. It has become much more difficult to make a game changing product given the level of excellence found in existing technology. The same can be said for smartphones.
Hard drives may turn around in another couple of years if designers can get hybrid drives to work as intended. Or perhaps 3D XPoint lives up to the hype and changes the market in another few years.
There also is a risk that the cost reduction on SSDs comes back to haunt them. General consumers will just lump all SSDs together or may view them based on brand names. So SSD makers could get hurt if the cheapest SSDs run into more issues for consumers.
With these numbers, I am wondering: does this include disks delivered to the cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google), Facebook and other big consumers? They are always expanding their datacenters and use a lot of storage, while no one seems to really know how big their "market share" is. Can anyone share some insight in this?
Couldn't agreed more with what some already said. The per GB price of HDD will not go further down, it will just stay stagnant. Right now the lowest per GB price is on 3TB and 4TB drives, once you go further up eyeing for 5TB and more, the prices simply rocket sky high. I think in the future, all those 1TB and 2TB drives will go extinct while 5TB and higher prices will drop down to the level of 3TB and 4TB. 1TB and lower storage space belongs to the SSD, and it will happen very soon.
My educated guess is that costs of HDDs doesn't scale well at the low end since HDD manufacturers still have to build the entire drive assembly minus platters for a 1TB or less HDD while NAND is far more flexible in physical packaging.
LOL. I feel bad for these ageing kings of storage.
They have to throw out their cash and apply for some loans to be build a NAND fab. It is the only way to stay relevant for the next 10 to 20 years. SSDs are already eating from the top and bottom of the food chain. The last remaining stronghold of HDDs is cost per GB; but SSDs doesn't have to go there as HDDs didn't replaced Tape drives for cost per GB.
Most of the reasons for declining sales are because of steafy decline in the pricing of small to medium capacity ssd, hdd are used for long term storage nowadays and those drives are never below 1tb, personally i have 2 2tb usb hdd, 1 1tb usb hdd and a 2 tb in my build, and 2 more 2 tb beauties are on their way... The thing is many of my friends don't consider that they can add another hard disk without removing the old one in a desktop, another lot of them don't need so m7ch storage and the last lot are unaware of this data expansion method
For a lot of stuff we have gone from "owning" digital libraries to "subscribing". If people had to locally store their netflix content or their Amazon books and their MP3s, the need for space would have grown considerably. With a fast network you can always rely on re-downloading content you want, instead of storing.
Also, in my opinion, the industry has stagnated. Price per GB is today similar to what I paid the last time I upgraded my HDs, in 2009. This is unacceptable. I know I would have bought a ton of 2.5" 2TB HDs for backups and the like, but they are still priced at ~$100. Too expensive... Plus, there has been little progress with hybrid HD/SSDs, which would be a great solution for people who don't want to mess with multiple drives. In fact, all I see is rebranding the same drive with slightly modified firmware and selling it as "NAS" or "workstation" or "IP camera" or "NAS pro" or "Storage" etc.
They have been milking us for too long. Time to start innovating.
What a great article! It reads like an MBA project. Even more impressive - by, um, a lot - if English is not Anton's first language. Efforts like this keep the shine on Anandtech (and remind us of what we lost in X-Bit Labs). Thanks.
Part of this is that the current computers have CPU's that are so fast and dependable that it may be taking longer before someone wants to purchase a desktop with a hard drive in it. The computer market is very diverse with many options like video game consoles, Roku, Tablets, Phones Phablets, so there is just less demand for a desktop computer.
This is classic disruption. SSD started from the bottom in terms of capacity. HDD guys thought that was a toy and that HDD will forever be much cheaper $/GB.
Problem is once SSDs hit a good enough capacity for $30 per drive oem price, that's the end of HDD. I believe the good enough capacity for 2.5" is 256GB. $30 is around the corner.
HDD has a floor cost. HDD cannot be produced for lower than floor cost by cutting capacity but flash can continuously shrink and deliver lower cost per GB in forseeable future. 2.5" HDD floor cost is probably $25. By the time ssd hits sub $20 for 256Gb, HDDs will have no choice but to give up. All entry level notebook PC models will go for ssd 256GB. HDD TAM will see a sudden huge drop when that happens.
One thing I never understood is why Seagate and Western Digital did pounce all over the SSD (emerging) market 10 years ago. Obviously some of the skill-set involved would overlap, it was obvious they'd become more popular. I guess Seagate's maybe done some enterprise drives? I'm not even sure... but I don't get why they're not one of the biggest names in SSDs...
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yannigr2 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
I have enough space to not buy a hard disk drive the next 2-3 years. I think I bought my last HDD 2 years ago. Probably this is the case with most people and with SSDs taking the place of boot drives, HDD companies are losing the low capacity market.For most people who build new systems, they wouldn't know what to do with all that space a 240GB SSD will offer them. No second HDD for them, not to mention that a 128GB USB flash drive sometimes will do the trick, if they need to clean up some space from their SSD, without having to call the technician to install the HDD. On the other hand, people who need space will go for one 4TB or bigger drive, probably external, instead of buying more HDDs with lower capacities to put into their PC case.
Old PCs have enough capacity, new PCs go for an SSD or just a single high capacity HDD, instead of many with lower capacity.
Gigantopithecus - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
This. Last year I built about 30 desktop computers for typical home users (i.e., office/light productivity, HTPC, and gaming rigs) - three had a spinning hard drive in them. The average user is usually fine with a 250ish GB SSD, and if they run short on room, I tell them to buy a pair of 64GB USB flash drives for $20-30 total.Anton mentions the rise of 4K video as potentially spurring more sales of higher capacity hard drives, but I rarely have anyone ask about how to store even BR-D-quality video, so I'm skeptical that 4K will become a serious driver of increased household storage needs this decade. (At least at the consumer level.)
bill.rookard - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
The thing is, even if some small percentage do wind up needing more storage (unlikely), many routers these days do actually offer a USB port for attaching and providing access to a HDD. That means even if they have multiple computers or devices, they don't need more than one large capacity HDD for a single household. Heck, you can get a 4TB Seagate external 2.5" hdd (actually twin 2TB's with a USB -> SATA RAID) for $150 at the local Walmart.The net result in the massive increase in HDD storage capacity along with the rise of the medium capacity (250-500GB) SSD means that your average household has gone from multiple HDDs in their laptops/computers to a single central HDD.
Of course, there are exceptions (I have about 30TB of storage here, but I'm an extreme edge case...) so this will continue to be the trend. Your average storage capacity needs for an entire household are increasing far slower than the average increase in HDD capacity vs price.
JeffFlanagan - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Is 30TB really an extreme edge case? Anyone with a serious video collection will surpass that pretty quickly, and if they're using a DrivePool, they'll use at least 60TB in drive space to store that 30TB.OVerLoRDI - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Or Plex peopleLolimaster - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
Just a collection of movies, anime (h264/HEVC quality) comics andmanga and you're looking at 30TB's for storage in a matter of a few years.Michael Bay - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link
>using hevc before our Lord and Savior Daiz ordered us toBlasphemer.
Gigaplex - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
I have a storage array of 9TB usable capacity. Of all the people I know personally, only my brother has a larger storage array. While it's quite easy to get larger than that now, it's definitely not common. So yes, I'd definitely consider 30TB to be an extreme edge case in the grand scheme of things.azazel1024 - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
Yeah, I have to agree with you Gigaplex. I consider my library to be pretty generous. I probably have something like ~500 movies and maybe 30-40 TV series (granted most are just 1-2 seasons, but some are 5-8), plus some music and pictures (and not JPEGs, but a LOT of RAW images since I am a photographer, even if not a professional). Currently on my 6TB array (5.4TiB formatted) I have 2.86TiB free. I still have some older SD content (or there IS no HD version) where I only have the DVD that I ripped and a lot of my BR collection I only ripped at 720p, but right now I am at about 10% 1080p, 50% 720p and 40% 480p content.I wouldn't consider that a small collection, but I don't need anything like 30 terabytes of storage. Maybe if my entire collection was BDMVs instead of transcoded down files. There gets to be a point though where that is kind of ridiculous to do and is absolutely not "common". Hell, I probably represent 1% of computer users as it is, the ones who have all of their DVDs and BRs in unreduced files are probably 1% of the 1%.
At my rate of growth, I've figured I have about 3-4 more years before I need to worry about storage at all (I don't like having less than ~20% free capacity, or about 1TiB free in this case) and maybe somewhat longer as I do occasionally cull my collection when I realize I haven't watched a movie or something since I bought it years ago, so it gets wiped and I either donate the BR/DVD or I'll just stuff it in a box and forget about it. My collection growth is still positive though, but we are talking maybe 20-40GiB a month (buy a few BRs a month, pictures I've taken, etc.), maybe .5TiB a year.
I doubt it'll happen, but some of me hopes that TLC/3D NAND SSDs are cheap enough by the time I am hitting my self imposed limits just to replace spinning disks in my desktop and server (data is mirrored between them and on 2x3TB RAID0 arrays, plus an external 5TB USB3 disk as a 3rd copy). Probably still too expensive, but I can hope the prices are lower enough and I have the budget to pony up $500-700 to replace the disks in both machines with SSDs (hoping and figuring maybe in 4 years the price of cheap SSDs has dropped under 5 cents per GB). Even if SSD storage is <20%, the beauty there is they are so much faster, no worries about arrays and I can just create a storage pool and add SSDs to it as capacity starts hitting <10% free.
I only have 2Gbps throughput on my network right now (SMB Multichannel, dual 1GbE links). Though I am also hoping in 4 years 2.5GbE or 5GbE networking gear will be on the market...so even SSDs might be a bottleneck on my network some day (but I think I can probably live with that. I'd love multi GB/sec throughputs on my network, but I am barely realistic enough to know I don't actually need it at all, 200+MB/sec is plenty and not worth the cost to try to realize more than 300 or 400MB/sec in the next few years).
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Oh yeah, RAW images...I wasn't even thinking about that. If you're any kind of remotely serious photographer you'd need gigantic piles of storage too.I remember like early 2000s I had like an 80GB drive in my main system, which was fine. Storage requirements have just absolutely ballooned since then though, while it seems like the rate of drive size increases has massively slowed.
tamalero - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
with the advent of netflix, I actually wonder if its worth expending that much on local storage with a plex/emby server running locally.Still, 4 tb drives are now reaching the 100 USD barrier. Which is hella cheap.
You can easily buy a good array for what used to cost thousands.
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I don't save much video, but even still I keep some shows from my Tivo, and broadcast TV is a (glorious) 7.5GB/hour or so. And as someone mentioned, comics-I've got GB of stuff from Humblebundle. And we didn't used to have to store our games, since they actually bothered putting them on disc. I've long since surpassed what my 4TB drives can hold, and moved on to 8TB ones just for my games from GOG.com and Steam...Murloc - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
some people systematically rip everything they buy, but it's home cinema audiophiles with projector kind of people. Very rare.bji - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
Nothing more disgusting than people who pirate things they don't even need just because they're so in love with the idea of hoarding pirated goods.Oh yeah and then they bitch about the cost of the hard drives that they use to store their pirated goods. Truly classy.
DanNeely - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
If they bought the disk they're not pirating it. The pirates are the people renting disks from Redbox (or old Netflix) and ripping them.Arbie - Saturday, May 14, 2016 - link
Why exactly is that disgusting? Does pirating something you don't need / won't use / wouldn't have bought hurt anybody at all? Seems like all it does is sell more hard drives. Maybe your post was facetious; if so you need to get a little better at that.Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Murloc specifically said *BUY*, not seal. I don't even feel like I buy that much anymore, but still have piles of CDs, DVDs, etc.mindless1 - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
"Nothing"? Really? I can think of thousands of things more disgusting, including your judgemental attitude and the stranglehold that certain content developers are provided in the US and their John Doe persecution of people they don't even have sufficient evidence of piracy against, despite reporting record profits then instead claiming massive piracy losses.Supporting those deceitful !@#$ is far more disgusting to me.
Death666Angel - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
"but I rarely have anyone ask about how to store even BR-D-quality video, so I'm skeptical that 4K will become a serious driver of increased household storage needs this decade. (At least at the consumer level.)"My guess is, people who need you to build them a rig or give them advice, aren't the sort of people into ripping movies in the first place. They are probably fine with tossing the blu ray into their player, hit play, watch it once and then put it in the attic. :D I'm waiting for a more serious shift in prices to get another bunch of 4TB drives for my fileserver (currently 2x[4x2TB] with at 7 more 3.5" bays empty).
JoeyJoJo123 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Except HDD prices haven't significantly changed in the last 2-3 years, following the normalization of prices after the floods.They don't seem to be changing anytime in the near future either; in fact, it may just go up as HDDs die off and exit the market.
Sivar - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
That's well and good unless capacity and cost is important. Hard drives are still less than 1/5 the cost per gigabyte, and that's compared to TLC, which has a relatively limited write capability.JoeyJoJo123 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
>which has a relatively limited write capabilityPlease. Educate yourself. Review the TechReport's SSD Torture Test (literally Google "Tech Report SSD Torture Test") and you'll see even TLC SSDs withstood over a PB of data write/reads over the course of their lifetime and far exceeded the manufacturer's claims of endurance.
SSDs have much more endurance than advertised, and even if you were stupid enough to waste limited read/write cycles by performing three daily complete defrags on your SSD (which doesn't increase read/write speeds, but really only wastes time during the defrag and wears out the NAND chips a bit) you'd still have a working SSD 10 years from now. The bigger question then would be if motherboards 10 years from now would even support that SATA 3 SSD.
The consumer has literally NOTHING to worry about for SSD endurance. These figures ONLY see any relevance in data centers where data that is cached on SSDs is constantly read from by servers which deliver relevant data to clients and constantly written to be the storage server itself to hold newly cached data. In this situation only, these drives would get hammered 24/7 and having an SSD with longer endurance is the difference between causing undue downtime for clients (costing you $$$).
Byte - Saturday, May 14, 2016 - link
The only thing you have to worry about is cold storage for SSDs. Dell found after 6 months of no power you start to see data loss and some even report of loss in a few days at hot temperatures.Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Yowzers, that's terrifying... We really, REALLY need something better than SSDs. They're just fragile and tiny.tamalero - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
Agree with you, even with that.. Why would you need that many writes? HDDs or SSDs used for movie/series.. are a "write once, leave untouched forever and only read" kind of archival style usage.Id say in these kind of jobs.. Spin hdds degrade way faster (thanks to movement) than SSDs.
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Not if the cells lose their charge... Mechanical drives a lot of times you've got some warning that they're dying, and they can sit there for years and still work fine.Gigaplex - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
When you're archiving large files, NAND write endurance is the least of your worries.Lolimaster - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
Maybe because the people with actual need for space won't ask a typical seller and they simply use internet to know about it.Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I honestly have no idea how anyone could survive with a 250GB drive... My main system I got in 2012 has a Seagate 750GB 7200 RPM drive (the largest available at the time for notebooks) and a 500GB Crucial SSD (again, the largest available at the time). I'd need multiple times more to not have to worry about what programs/media/whatever I have installed on it.lilmoe - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
I'm actually surprised the drop was only 20%Shadow7037932 - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
Pretty much this. MI recently built a new PC for my parents, and just put 240GB 850 EVO. Their 320GB HDD was only filled like 100GB after like 4+ years of use.Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I just bought 2 8TB drives from Seagate, and I'm just hoping to last through the year with 'em. The needs for huge amounts of storage just keep ballooning, and ballooning way way faster than storage sizes have increased :-/maximumGPU - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
I've been HDD free for a year now, and i love it!bill.rookard - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Agreed. I've been on SSDs for quite some time and have yet to have a single failure. Even my servers (which have been all SSD for about 3-4 years now) and get quite a bit of usage have yet to have a single issue. All my new builds have SSDs - I won't ever go back.Sivar - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Re-posting because I replied to the wrong message earlier."That's well and good unless capacity and cost is important. Hard drives are still less than 1/5 the cost per gigabyte, and that's compared to TLC, which has a relatively limited write capability."
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Uh...I assume you mean mechanical drive free? (!)ex_User - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
More and more people don't store games & multimedia files locally. Fast internet connection plus Steam, Netflix, Spotify and such let you download your files anytime you want. Add to this cloud storage for photos and other personal files and no wonder most average users feel like there is no need for big, noisy HDDs, not to mention DAS & NAS. Yeah, consumer HDD is dying in front of us.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
The spread of data caps may put an end to that.fanofanand - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Comcrap just raised their data caps in their "test markets" from 300 to 1 Tb so even that argument is going by the wayside. Of course when people are streaming 4k content that might change, but until 4k is prevalent, I don't think data caps will be a big issue for 99.9% of people.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
1TB is nothing. I alone can use a TB download games in a month, if I had a wife/kids, that cap would be far too low.Especially as more and more games push past 50GB.
Michael Bay - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Just how many games do you have to download to hit a terabyte?I do backup my games on an external HDD, and there are maybe 400GB for something like a hundred of titles!
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
My library long since outgrew my 4TB drives...though thankfully still fits inside 8TB (I think...I'm not done redownloading it ahead of the caps...)olderkid - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
I think the fact that you download a TB of games a month negates worrying about adding a wife and kids....maximumGPU - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
i lol'd!FunBunny2 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
yeah, cruel.Gothmoth - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
wife and kids are useless.get a fuckfriend and live happy.....
azazel1024 - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
I suspect with that espoused belief, your desired goal is likely not achievable.But go get 'em tiger. Live the dream.
On caps, any on a wire is stupid, but at least with a 1TB cap, that would be pretty hard to hit (without 4k video) for probably 99.9% of people. I know I am not the heaviest of heavy users, but my entire family of 5 hits around 500-600GB a month. That is about 7hrs per day of Netflix streaming between all 5 family members, though realistically it is a mix of Youtube minecraft videos, some Netflix, PBS kids, the rare game download, etc and probably working out to an average 2hrs per person per day.
I am sure if we cut the cord entirely it would go up even more, but probably still pretty comfortably under 1TB. I am absolutely not advocating that caps are reasonable. I feel like it isn't unreasonable to say that there should be SOME super high cap, especially if the point is it is a residential connection and not supposed to be running a business, "servers", etc. The data does cost your ISP something if it goes outside their network, even if we are talking a penny a GB, so I don't think it is unreasonable to say that pushing/pulling something like 30TB of data a month is "okay", but your typical even 1TB cap is just stupid.
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
That little? I use about that much on months I'm not downloading much just for mostly myself, and I could go MUCH heavier on the streaming video..Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
*rolls eyes*Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Yeah, I've been redownloading my library the past few months and using like 2TB+.Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
No it isn't. 1TB is nothing if you're having to pull in this kind of data. Hell, a lot of new games are about 50GB a piece now.seerak - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link
Or screwups like this onehttp://www.snopes.com/apple-music-deleting-files/
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Yeah, Comcast is rolling their caps out wider starting NEXT MONTH. They're the largest ISP, so....will792 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
I have numerous friends with rapidly growing repository of video and image files (NEF files for Nikon D800 are 30-35MB each). Hard drives are the only realistic option to store multi terabyte libraries of created content that is typically mirrored and backed up. Proliferation of video created with GoPro or other action video cameras (including drone mounted cameras) will force consumers to buy hard drives since upload speed of typical Internet connection is too slow for upload of high resolution video content.Murloc - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
at the end of the day, not a high % of people do that kind of stuff even though it's gotten more popular over the year.Just about everybody I know owns a laptop. If those increasingly come without HDDs but with SSDs, that's gone, RAW photographers or not.
DanNeely - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
In the medium term I wouldn't be concerned about disks for photography (or other bulk storage). The 3.5" HDDs best suited for USB drives/NASes are most similar to enterprise nearline storage drives; which as a segment dominated by cost/gb should be the most resilient part of the HDD market. Until/unless flash becomes cheaper per GB they're unlikely to go away.The short term situation of bottom end consumer drives being in freefall doesn't really matter beyond headline sales figures. The margin on those drives is near zero, so losing them doesn't affect the bottom line much (and that primarily from one time costs related to scaling down production capacity).
I wouldn't worry until sales for 10/15k SAS drives start plummeting as well. They have the highest margins and fund an out-sized share of the R&D needed to develop higher capacity drives. When that goes away we'll either see a significant slowdown in capacity growth or rise in prices to sustain R&D spending (or both). That will probably be the beginning of the end for HDDs by making it much easier for flash to catch up in price/GB.
tamalero - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
arent 10k 15k sas drives being replaced by SSDs in the corporate level?FunBunny2 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
yeah. what drove the first PC period was Word/Office at home, likely pirated from work. no one has ever had much need for more than 640K until the recent gaming fiasco. windoze bloated up, which drove it, too. but that has ended. we're now in the Times of Good Enough.Michael Bay - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
>gaming fiasco>windoze
Don`t forget to take your meds, please.
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
<<< no one has ever had much need for more than 640K>>>(!) Uh... Are you in the right decade?
And what's a "gaming fiasco"?
nandnandnand - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Don't trust the cloud! It's meant to shackle and spy on you!Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
It's also way too slow, way too unreliable, and way, way, way too limited by bandwidth caps.tamalero - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
Makes you wonder if most companies will just switch to corporate/business storage devices in the end. And leave the SSDs for consumer market.Achaios - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
I upgraded my Dec 2013 rig last mont.One of the upgrades, was replacing the two WD Green 2TB drives in Raid 1 I had with two WD Blue 6 TB drives also placed in Raid 1.
This will set me up for the next 5-6 years, so presumably I won't be buying any more HDD's until then.
My rig uses a Samsung 840 EVO 500 GB SSD as an OS/Games drive and a Samsung 750 120GB SSD (upgrade) as an emergency boot drive/virtual memory drive.
I think I am all set until the next major upgrade event. Don't think I will be buying any more storage (SSD or HDD) for the next 5 years or so.
bill.rookard - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Agreed. I just updated my NAS with some 4TB enterprise drives (3x4TB in RAID5) and retired my 5x2TB RAID5 array. Same overall size, but vastly increased reliability and I should be good for a few years.Meanwhile all my new builds are SSD based.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
SSDs are big enough now that most users dont need HDDs anymore.Even for gamers, the richer ones can afford all SSD storage. My laptop has a 256 and 512GB SSDs in it, and I feel no squeeze for space, just install the games you actually play. And if more space is needed, 2TB SSDs exist now. I doubt many gamers need more than 2TB of games downloaded at any one point.
Which leaves media creation and one of the few that still need HDDs, although that may change. Outside of backup devices, HDDs dont have much of a future in consumer devices.
DanNeely - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Agreed; however the problem is that most consumers don't understand that SSDs will make their laptop much more responsive; and that the lack of spinning rust is the biggest reason why their phone and tablet are so much more responsive. 3/4ths of PCs are still crippled with HDDs and sold to customers who only understand two numbers: Total price, less is always better here. Number of GB, more is always better here. If they don't actually need the disk space, and most don't, they're wrong about the latter; but you can't fight ignorance at the boxmart.Just checking prices for new name brand laptop HDDs on Newegg shows the price margin between 1TB drives and smaller ones has almost completely vanished: 250 GB, $39; 320 GB, $45, 500 GB, $45; 1TB $52; 2 TB, $94. Just based on how far 1 TB laptop drives have dropped in price I'm not surprised that Seagate's discontinuing their smaller capacity drives; WD and Toshiba will probably end up doing the same within a year.
At the same time the cheapest ~960GB SSD on Newegg is still $200, with $50 only getting you 240GB. That's enough of a price/capacity gap to keep the majority of the clueless with legacy storage for at least a few more years.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Very true, but the kind of people that dont understand SSDs are probably the same kind of people that want the most GBs because they think it will make the computer faster. Nothing will help them I'm afraid.But then, the cheap junk they usually buy gets the scrap parts anyway, the good lines of HDDs always went into business machines and stuff with a higher margin. That market is falling in love with SSDs very quickly.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
-- But then, the cheap junk they usually buy gets the scrap parts anyway, the good lines of HDDs always went into business machines and stuff with a higher margin.and the same thing is happening in the SSD space.
DanNeely - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Technically illiterate customers looking at the only number they think they understand and wanting HDDs was my point. Excluding those willing to pay a little extra for a stylish thin laptop I don't see that changing any time soon because the price per GB difference is still way too large.Gunbuster - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Perhaps if the HDD manufacturers did more than put the most pathetic scrap of SSD in their hybrid offerings they could have retained some traction. Segate tooting their horn recently about the staggering upgrade to 32GB flash on the SSHD... I mean come on...Michael Bay - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Do that, and you get a corresponding increase in price.Their main customer is not you or me, but OEMs making PCs, which are themselves deadlocked in the race to the bottom.
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I wonder how that performed? I used their first gen hybrid drive for about 3 years. Had a 500GB 7200RPM drive + 4GB SLC + 32MB RAM. Performed really well for the time, like honestly it 'felt' closer to an ssd than a mechanical drive (though since programs keep getting bigger, I don't know that that would always be the case-seems like Windows 10's constantly doing stuff too, that an SSD can handle better).I was disappointed when they switched from 7200 to 5400RPM, though a larger flash cache might negate that.
Ushio01 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
I wonder how Samsung's new 16TB SSD will change things by next year in the enterprise? it has the highest capacity with far lower power usage than any 3.5" HDD.madspartus - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Call me crazy, but having pricing in the 1-3 TB range be basically flat since 2010 is not going to help them sell at all. Sure bigger models are out now, but the pricing is just awful, and every day SSDs become more attractive in every regard compared to magnetic disks.tamalero - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
4tb now costs the same as 3tb/2tb costed a year ago. So no idea why you're saying they're flat.dsraa - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
What about all the porn??? I use up atleast 1-2 TB for just that....Michael Bay - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
But why do you need YEARS of porn?TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
We all know the answer to that....HighTech4US - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Quote: Due to severe declines in demand for hard drives, it does not look like HDD makers want to fight for market share.Ahh I sure do miss the price war days
darkfalz - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Waiting for external drives of 8 or 10 TB (not SMR). Then I'll buy a couple more.takeshi7 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
They've had non-SMR 8TB drives for a while now, and you can buy a 10TB non-SMR drive right now.http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Enterprise-Capacity-...
DanNeely - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
External drives are the cheap low RRM, low duty cycle models. Helium has only be used in the eye searingly expensive enterprise drives.takeshi7 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
You can get an 8TB non-SMR air based desktop drive and put it in an external enclosure, but honestly I'd save my money and just get the SMR drive. SMR isn't that bad for writing large sequential files, like videos, and reads are just as fast as a normal drive. Unless you're doing something really demanding SMR is fine, and if you are doing something demanding you'd be better off with some sort of expensive RAID setup, anyways.Lolimaster - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
I would stick to at most a WD Blue 6TB until HARM finally arrives.15-20TB disks.
JimmiG - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
SMR is almost a perfect match for the kind of massive media library or backups that you might use an HDD for these days. Unless you're modifying/overwriting data, the firmware will ensure that the data is written to "pristine" tracks. Even when you do modify data, there's the non-SMR buffer. There's the issue with RAID, but most RAID modes are a bad idea with >2TB drives anyway.90 million units is hardly a "niche" market, and HDDs will remain for many years to come. There's just no other option if you need to store more than a terabyte or two of data, especially when you don't actually need the superior performance of the SSD (such as media libraries and backups).
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I'm just nervous about reliability with those SMR drives. Maybe I'm concerned for no reason, but I feel like storage tech is fragile enough as it is.The SMR externals were like $220 or so for a Seagate, versus $350 for a "normal" drive (and then I had to buy an enclose). So far so good though, using them for a few months.
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Wowzers, 10TB? I didn't know that... I just bought 8TB Seagate NAS drives a few months ago. Almost double the price of the SMR drives, but I'm just nervous about those.Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Segate JUST released 8TB internal drives. I bought an enclosure that can hold 4 drives, + 2 8TB drives. They're...umm...I guess they're considered NAS drives. They were like $350 a piece though, something like that, but I need every scrap of space I can get, and I didn't really trust that new SMR tech.NeatOman - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
I try to never use a mechanical HDD when ever i can, and now that SSD's are $60 for 250GB and come with 3 or 5 year warranties its perfect. Most people will never fill a 250GB drive with just pictures and music. But i still recommend using a HDD as a backup and only using while backing up.Gothmoth - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
HDD´s drop dead like flies... no wonder nobodys want´s to buy that crap.seagate is replacing my 3 month old 4TB drive with a FACTORY REPAIRED drive.
i did not pay for a second hand drive!!!
WD is not much better.
seagate cheats their customers with their crappy warranty.
jwcalla - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
I agree. It's one of the reasons I'm hesitant to buy any. Most of them are complete junk.SirGCal - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
Test your drives before use. Especially Seagates. Their build practices frighten me. I have 8 4TB drives, and went through 22 drives before I got 8 that passed the tests... THAT is scary. But they've been running since release without further issues. I hear they are far better now but I still test each one before using it.jbrizz - Sunday, May 15, 2016 - link
You can probably thank weak consumer protection laws for that. In AU and NZ (and probably UK and other parts of Europe) they don't do that because it's not legal.svan1971 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
The price has not gone down though...sonicmerlin - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
That's because the $/GB has barely budged since what it was at before the 2011 flood. I remember routinely seeing 3 TB internal HDDs going on sale for $80 before the flood.Then the HDD vendors all merged and jacked up prices while massively slowing down aerial density innovations.
SirGCal - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
Hu? They are up to 10TB drives now in test cases and 8TB regularly purchasable... It's only 2016. Plus the cost of components has changed. I'd consider the 2011 pre-flood an all time low, rather amazing prices then a norm to aim for... Still I never saw a 3TB drive I'd buy, let alone one for that price.Burns101 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
HDDs are only good for porn and movies!iwod - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
You can now get a very decent Plextor M7V ( TLC Based ) or SanDisk SSD Plus ( MLC Based ), both with decent Controller and Firmware support for less then $40 with 128GB.I expect the price to stay put, in 2017 once all the Fab from China and New Fab from Samsung are up, we will likely see 256GB SSD going for $40 in 2018. That should be the point where most people are fine with SSD in terms of capacity.
stevenrix - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
The hard-drive market going down sounds like a predictive failure from their own technical jargon.It was worth mentioning that the price per gig on the hard-drives won't go down, which means that at some point in time, when the prices of the hard-drive will go up according to their bigger capacity (10 Tb, 12 Tb ...etc) and the price of the SSDs going down, then it will make it easier to switch to SSDs. In other words their strategy won't resist that much in time. Also if prices since the flood in Thailand have not much fluctuated on the hard-drives makers, the cost on the consumer went from 1 to 3 for the same hard-drive capacity. A few days before the flood I had bought around 20 Tb of drives for a few hundreds of dollars, and i have never seen those prices going back to those prices and it probably will never go back to that trend.
At a consumer level, I am willing to upgrade to 8Tb drives, but those prices are too expensive. I am pretty sure that many consumers are waiting to upgrade to bigger drives and are waiting to see the prices getting slashed. Worse case scenario I will keep buying 4 Tb drives. It is the enterprise market that help the hard-drives makers to survive, especially in the NAS enterprise market (a SAS 6 15K drive costs so much money). Maybe they should not cut production, but help to replace failed hard-drives with newer hard-drives instead of refurbished drives that will fail again in a few weeks/months to raise customer's satisfaction, because customer's satisfaction dropped to low levels a few years ago. Please make the customer happy first and they'll start buying again hard-drives. Thanks ;)
nils_ - Monday, May 30, 2016 - link
Is anyone still buying those 15k or even 10k drives?glad2meetu - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
I think people are waiting to see what comes out of the merger between WD and Sandisk. I am surprised that Seagate did not make a bid late last year for Micron.I think much of the blame for the decline in the PC market in general is due to Intel failing to innovate. The drop in HDD shipments effectively just mirrors the lower number of new computers being shipped. But that may be a bit harsh on Intel and the rest of the PC industry. It has become much more difficult to make a game changing product given the level of excellence found in existing technology. The same can be said for smartphones.
Hard drives may turn around in another couple of years if designers can get hybrid drives to work as intended. Or perhaps 3D XPoint lives up to the hype and changes the market in another few years.
There also is a risk that the cost reduction on SSDs comes back to haunt them. General consumers will just lump all SSDs together or may view them based on brand names. So SSD makers could get hurt if the cheapest SSDs run into more issues for consumers.
avbohemen - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
With these numbers, I am wondering: does this include disks delivered to the cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google), Facebook and other big consumers? They are always expanding their datacenters and use a lot of storage, while no one seems to really know how big their "market share" is. Can anyone share some insight in this?Pix2Go - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
The numbers in the article do include those customers. They typically are the ones using "Enterprise" drives, with some exceptions.As an idea of how many drives they need, consider this random nugget from "the internet":
"The volumes of storage Google needs are insane: as the post notes, YouTube alone requires a petabyte of new storage every single day."
Yep, at least 1000TB a day in new storage requirements. And I'd bet that's a low estimate.
This link doesn't give a solid answer, but gives some ideas about how much data is really out there. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/200-petabytes-of-cu...
revanchrist - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
Couldn't agreed more with what some already said. The per GB price of HDD will not go further down, it will just stay stagnant. Right now the lowest per GB price is on 3TB and 4TB drives, once you go further up eyeing for 5TB and more, the prices simply rocket sky high. I think in the future, all those 1TB and 2TB drives will go extinct while 5TB and higher prices will drop down to the level of 3TB and 4TB. 1TB and lower storage space belongs to the SSD, and it will happen very soon.StrangerGuy - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
My educated guess is that costs of HDDs doesn't scale well at the low end since HDD manufacturers still have to build the entire drive assembly minus platters for a 1TB or less HDD while NAND is far more flexible in physical packaging.zodiacfml - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
LOL. I feel bad for these ageing kings of storage.They have to throw out their cash and apply for some loans to be build a NAND fab. It is the only way to stay relevant for the next 10 to 20 years. SSDs are already eating from the top and bottom of the food chain. The last remaining stronghold of HDDs is cost per GB; but SSDs doesn't have to go there as HDDs didn't replaced Tape drives for cost per GB.
zodiacfml - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
Edit: Got carried away and forgot WDs acquisition of Sandisk which puts them on track. Seagate, just do it.vivekvs1992 - Saturday, May 14, 2016 - link
Most of the reasons for declining sales are because of steafy decline in the pricing of small to medium capacity ssd, hdd are used for long term storage nowadays and those drives are never below 1tb, personally i have 2 2tb usb hdd, 1 1tb usb hdd and a 2 tb in my build, and 2 more 2 tb beauties are on their way... The thing is many of my friends don't consider that they can add another hard disk without removing the old one in a desktop, another lot of them don't need so m7ch storage and the last lot are unaware of this data expansion methodFriendlyUser - Saturday, May 14, 2016 - link
For a lot of stuff we have gone from "owning" digital libraries to "subscribing". If people had to locally store their netflix content or their Amazon books and their MP3s, the need for space would have grown considerably. With a fast network you can always rely on re-downloading content you want, instead of storing.Also, in my opinion, the industry has stagnated. Price per GB is today similar to what I paid the last time I upgraded my HDs, in 2009. This is unacceptable. I know I would have bought a ton of 2.5" 2TB HDs for backups and the like, but they are still priced at ~$100. Too expensive... Plus, there has been little progress with hybrid HD/SSDs, which would be a great solution for people who don't want to mess with multiple drives. In fact, all I see is rebranding the same drive with slightly modified firmware and selling it as "NAS" or "workstation" or "IP camera" or "NAS pro" or "Storage" etc.
They have been milking us for too long. Time to start innovating.
Michael Bay - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link
Hybrids have almost died by now for the reason of cost. Little logic in buying a hybrid if you can just get a proper SSD for comparable money.Arbie - Saturday, May 14, 2016 - link
What a great article! It reads like an MBA project. Even more impressive - by, um, a lot - if English is not Anton's first language. Efforts like this keep the shine on Anandtech (and remind us of what we lost in X-Bit Labs). Thanks.poohbear - Sunday, May 15, 2016 - link
so guess that would explain why Western Digital's stock is at its lowest ever @ $36 a share!piasabird - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
Part of this is that the current computers have CPU's that are so fast and dependable that it may be taking longer before someone wants to purchase a desktop with a hard drive in it. The computer market is very diverse with many options like video game consoles, Roku, Tablets, Phones Phablets, so there is just less demand for a desktop computer.Summersnow - Saturday, May 21, 2016 - link
This is classic disruption. SSD started from the bottom in terms of capacity. HDD guys thought that was a toy and that HDD will forever be much cheaper $/GB.Problem is once SSDs hit a good enough capacity for $30 per drive oem price, that's the end of HDD. I believe the good enough capacity for 2.5" is 256GB. $30 is around the corner.
HDD has a floor cost. HDD cannot be produced for lower than floor cost by cutting capacity but flash can continuously shrink and deliver lower cost per GB in forseeable future. 2.5" HDD floor cost is probably $25. By the time ssd hits sub $20 for 256Gb, HDDs will have no choice but to give up. All entry level notebook PC models will go for ssd 256GB. HDD TAM will see a sudden huge drop when that happens.
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
That stinks they're getting rid of people.One thing I never understood is why Seagate and Western Digital did pounce all over the SSD (emerging) market 10 years ago. Obviously some of the skill-set involved would overlap, it was obvious they'd become more popular. I guess Seagate's maybe done some enterprise drives? I'm not even sure... but I don't get why they're not one of the biggest names in SSDs...