
Shipments of PC Hard Drives Predicted to Drop by Nearly 50% in 2019 - awiesenhofer
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14298/shipments-of-pc-hdds-predicted-to-halve-in-2019
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djsumdog
I'm one of those weird data horders that still buys high capacity drives. I
take a lot of RAW photos and videos and I prefer to buy and not rent a license
to my music (and I like using sites like Bandcamp to support independent
artists). I recently got a 14TB as a new primary, 10TB secondary, along with
similar capacity backup drives.

I hope this trend doesn't mean consumer hard drives are going to get more
expensive going forward. I keep reading about people predicting SSDs are going
to hit the same price/capacity as spinning disks, but I just don't see it with
the large >10TB volumes any time soon.

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wtallis
> I keep reading about people predicting SSDs are going to hit the same
> price/capacity as spinning disks, but I just don't see it with the large
> >10TB volumes any time soon.

To elaborate on this: $/TB varies widely depending on total drive capacity.
The fixed costs of hard drive spindle motors, actuators, etc. are higher than
the costs of an SSD controller and PCB. Adding a platter to a hard drive is
cheaper on a per-GB basis than adding more NAND flash to an SSD, but there's a
crossover point below which SSDs have cheaper price per GB and small hard
drives are no longer economical to manufacture. That crossover point has now
risen to encompass the majority of consumer use cases, but it is nowhere near
10TB and won't be anytime soon. That crossover point also seems to be moving
upward much faster than typical consumer storage needs, so we can expect this
segment of the hard drive market to continue to wither.

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the8472
> That crossover point has now risen to encompass the majority of consumer use
> cases

cheapest drives measured in price/capacity

HDDs: 2TB @ 0.017€/GB

M.2 SSDs: 2TB @ 0.1€/GB

I see no crossover point here. SSDs are not even touching the the same order
of magnitude.

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incompatible
Maybe you have to go a bit lower. Does the typical consumer use case need even
2TB?

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wtallis
Most of the consumer use cases for 2+ TB are well served by external drives or
a NAS, which aren't part of the market segment that Nidec is predicting to
crash this year. Backups and movie/photo libraries don't need to be on local
internal drives. Large video game libraries just don't account for very much
of the PC userbase. Every PC should have an SSD as primary storage, and with
512GB drives down to $50, very few PCs need any other internal storage.

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incompatible
Yeah, I just noticed how cheap the SSDs have become. I just ordered a couple
of small ones, even though I'm generally a cheapskate.

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topspin
My guess is that demand for hard drives less than 3TB+ is going to dry up and
production will end. There isn't much point in small hard drives any more; at
the same price people would rather cope with less flash storage than more HDD.

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cm2187
Agree. On the other hand there should be a long term appetite from large
capacity hard drive from datacentres. The flow of data being captured isn’t
reducing.

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antt
Not sure about that. Tape drives have always been better for long term
storage.

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TheOperator
Hard drives are very nearly dead for hot storage. I expect them to by wholly
dead by the end of 2020 because the TCO of HDDs is going to outstrip that of
SSDs because of the fundamentally lower reliability.

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mjevans
My personal, offhand, experience is that SSDs tend to fail about 2 or 3 times
sooner than a hard disk.

I'd need for SSDs to actually be CHEAPER per gigabyte for the trade-off in
expected lifetime to make sense.

PS: If your hard drives 'fail' try scrubbing (forced re-write) them every 2
years or so...

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jschwartzi
You'll need to do this with NAND-based devices as well, as NAND tends to lose
data integrity as data is repeatedly read out.

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gruez
>as NAND tends to lose data integrity as data is repeatedly read out

This doesn't tend to be an issue because the controller can automatically
rewrite the cells as needed. What is an issue is if you leave the SSD
unpowered for a few months and the cells leak enough charge to be unreadable.

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mjevans
I suspect most SSD firmware actually does automatic old-age scrubbing of
somekind within the firmware. This theory seems likely confirmed with your
offline decay theory.

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phalangion
Makes sense. SSDs are bigger and cheaper than ever. Not as much need for
spinning metal drives. Not that the need is gone, but most people can probably
get by with a single large SSD where before they need an SSD and HDD to store
media.

Still a pretty sharp drop for one year.

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woliveirajr
I remember when SDD would suffer from catastrophic failures and weren't
considered for long term storage (even in pro-home solutions).

Now we have people complaining that HDD aren't reliable (but I suspect we
still can recover data from the plates in almost all HDD kind of failure)

HDD, SDD, external HDD and some cloud: trying to have all these working
together with redundancy is my next goal.

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golergka
For my pro-home solution (audio production), Dropbox solves all my backup
needs. All my work folders are in Dropbox, and if my hard drive explodes, at
most I'd lose a dozen of minutes of work.

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Wowfunhappy
Now imagine if you were doing video production instead of audio production.
You'd need to spend a fortune to store all that in Dropbox.

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icebraining
Apparently $720/year gets you an account for "as much as you need". Not cheap,
but then again syncing isn't backing up.

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pmiller2
This is interesting, but is it really as simple as "laptops are now using SSDs
over HDDs"? I'd like to see some more detailed analysis of this prediction.

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myself248
As recently as 2 years ago, Lenovo tried to sell me a laptop with a mechanical
HDD. They actually succeeded -- their price for an SSD was insane -- but I
ripped it out and replaced it immediately.

Today a mechanical HDD isn't even an option. The new generation of the same
machine is offered only with a PCIe SSD.

That's just one point of anecdata, but I think it's a pretty stark one.

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neilv
Any idea when we'll see a 2.5" SATA drive of 8 TB, and at what price point?

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poglet
This might be what your looking for: Micron 5200 Series 7680GB

[https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0ZX7U89...](https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0ZX7U89254)

