
Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants - damncabbage
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11037/seagate-to-shut-down-one-of-its-largest-hdd-assembly-plants
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shiftpgdn
My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with
petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time
dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don't think mechanical
disks are long for this world.

For our next storage expansion it's ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and
going to an all flash/SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with
mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don't
have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical
failures.

~~~
Taek
You can buy HDDs for $20 / TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless
SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.

~~~
vidarh
It's not that simple. How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB
per year? How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)? How does the
low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?

SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price,
you're not getting the right picture.

~~~
ksec
Yes but when you are looking at Petabyte scale system, unless those data are
Hot and IOPs are concerned, HDD still wins given it is 10x cheaper.

And NAND has already hit the curve where it isn't going to get cheaper every
year. NAND price is actually on the rise. Smaller Node is now actually more
expensive, multiple layer are hard to yield.

So relatively speaking the 10x gap between HDD and SSD wont change in the next
5 years or so.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
It is not 10x cheaper, it is only cheaper to purchase initially.

It is cheaper to power (NAND is more energy efficient than an electric motor),
it is cheaper to maintain (solid state media does not suffer mechanical
failures), and it is cheaper to use (each query on an SSD takes slightly less
time than on spinning media).

It's only 10x cheaper if you ignore those facts. Now, how you value those
factors may vary. Also, I have been involved in enough purchasing decisions to
know that while capex is easy to approve and opex is hard, the initial number
is surprisingly important.

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ksec
I see, may be you should tell Blackblaze to switch over to SSD for their
business model?

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LeifCarrotson
Backblaze is in the backup industry, where fetch times don't really matter.
When you have customers sensitive to app response time buying stuff, or
engineers limited by how many times they can go through the edit-test cycle in
8 hours and "test" relies on how fast your media responds, then it matters.

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fapjacks
Couldn't shake that Maxtor curse. Good riddance, I say. I'm involved in the
Seagate class action over bad drives, but like many other class actions I've
been involved in, I seriously doubt I'll see much of the thousands of dollars
I've sunk into drives Seagate sold me knowing they had atrocious failure
rates. Perhaps a five or ten dollar consolation check like usual.

~~~
lightedman
Drop out of the class-action, file your own suit, and demand whole remedy.

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iscrewyou
Can you do that? Can't the judge say that you have to drop the individual suit
and join the class action because they are similar complaints?

I have no legal experience and I'm thinking completely from the point that the
judge would want his job to be easier.

~~~
lightedman
Nope, you can chose to not join the class-action (or remove yourself form it)
and pursue your own legal matter in court. The judge might try to fold your
case into the class-action, but only if that class-action falls within their
circuit's jurisdiction.

~~~
fapjacks
I would _love_ to know more about this, but I'm completely ignorant about the
process. I've put a couple thousand dollars into these specific models of HDD
which have _all_ failed within three years of purchase (including the
replacement drives which failed during the warranty period). I am really tired
of joining class action suits only to find that I get a check for a couple
bucks afterwards. Especially because I've lost thousands of dollars in these
cases (e.g. Bank of America), and getting a five or ten dollar check is just
completely demoralizing. I would be willing to spend out of pocket to sue on
my own (within reason), but I have no idea how to start that process or where
to go to even research it. Do you know what kind of lawyer should I contact?

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lightedman
How many thousands are we talking? Depending on the state, you might be able
to just walk this into small claims court. Some have a $5K limit, some have
$10K, find out what your state's limit is for small claims. If your lost
amount of money falls within that range, you don't need a lawyer and lawyers
are not allowed in the courtroom for such cases generally speaking. Walk to
the court house, file your paperwork with the court, have someone NOT related
to the case serve the person you're suing and have them sign the appropriate
proof of service paperwork, which the court clerk should give to you. After
that, it's just waiting for the court day to be declared, both parties are
notified by the court of that, and then you go into the court room on that
date.

Usually, big companies don't show up in small claims, so they default, and you
can simply file a lien on them and get your money back either by cash or by
equipment. You get to literally walk in to their building, with cops by your
side, and start taking stuff until the lien is settled. Or you can walk to
their bank with the court order, and have it yanked directly from their
account. I've done both. It's fun.

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fapjacks
It makes perfect sense when you say it, but I hadn't thought of it that way.
This _does_ sound like fun. Thanks!

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lightedman
Walk right in and take the CEO's computer off his desk while waving the lien
in their face. Nothing more effective. EVER.

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buzzybee
Still using a HDD here. Would like to transition, but holding out for better
price/capacity ratios. It's really clear that it's the bottleneck for everyday
use at this point; I recently went to 16GB RAM which stopped a lot of Windows
swapping behavior, and now the major pain points are bootup, storage-intensive
tasks, and bloated web sites.

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simooooo
Use a ram disk for your browser cache

~~~
comboy
I don't know how exactly it works under Windows, but at least under Linux such
optimizations usually don't pay off much since most used pages are already
kept in the RAM anyway.

~~~
j3097736
My HDD on Linux barely has any disk access and is perfectly usable, meanwhile
windows just loves trashing it for minutes, even with page file & unneeded
services disabled.

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adamconroy
Not a surprise to me, their HDDs are junk. I've had two burn out in work
machines and one personal external burn out. I never buy their gear anymore

~~~
tracker1
I had 10 out of 12 go bad on my freenas box a few years ago, will _NEVER_ buy
seagate drives again.

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happycube
This plant should've been closed down when they bought Maxtor - it was a huge
part of Seagate's quality drop in the late 0's.

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bogomipz
I liked the exploded diagram, I wouldn't have guessed a single HDD was the
product of 6 different countries.

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chx
While slightly costly, you can buy a 4TB 2.5" SSD in a normal thickness drive.
You can not do that with a HDD, the only 4TB 2.5" HDD I am aware of is a 15mm
thick one which does not fit in, well, pretty much anything, not laptops, not
most bays, nothing, they are only usable as an external drive (but it's useful
that way, I have one). I believe this is the first time the capacity crown
goes to an SSD at any given time (at least in the consumer space -- in the
server space the 16TB 2.5" Samsung SSD and the 60TB 3.5" Seagate are both out
of this world but so are their prices too).

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tw04
I take it you don't deal with enterprise storage then. 15mm is the size of
basically every enterprise 2.5" drive sled. That's the form factor of all 10k
RPM 2.5" drives. The only thing the drive you described DOESN'T work with are
laptops. Pretty much anything else it's a perfect fit.

The laptop drive thickness is the abnormality for the rest of the storage
world.

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codebook
If you go to enterprise storage, then you can get 16TB SSD though. It is not
comparable.

~~~
tw04
What exactly isn't comparable? A 5TB 15mm 2.5" NL-SAS drive is about $250. The
"16"TB (it's 15.3TB) SSD you reference is about $10k. The cost per TB of NL-
SAS is SIGNIFICANTLY lower, and still absolutely has a place for bulk data
storage that doesn't have performance requirements.

Ohhh, I get it, you're now modifying your original post to look like you were
aware of enterprise storage. Got it.

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mrb
Self-contradiction:

 _" [the factory's] closure will significantly reduce the company’s HDD
output"_

...but a few sentences later:

 _" the plant no longer makes products"_

How can a plant that no longer makes products would reduce the company's
output if closed?

