
HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low - jseliger
http://anandtech.com/show/10315/market-views-hdd-shipments-down-q1-2016
======
ericabiz
As far as I can tell, this doesn't include SSDs. Spinning drive shipments are
down -- I say GOOD RIDDANCE!

I run a repair shop, and one of the top computer repairs we do is to upgrade a
spinning disk to a SSD.

A 240GB SSD runs $60-$65 these days, and is perfectly adequate for 99% of
users. For that other 1% (which I include myself in) 512GB is adequate for 90%
of _those._

HDD -> SSD is the single most cost-effective upgrade most people can do to
breathe new life into an older computer. Going from a spindle drive to a SSD
in most computers decreases boot time from ~4 minutes to ~30 seconds. Browsers
load faster, videos don't stutter as much, the computer runs more silently.
These are the issues most people care about.

A SSD upgrade means a 2010 MacBook Pro now has another 2-3 years of life,
which is awesome news to most of the people we serve (who are often college
students just trying to make it through college without their computer dying
on them.)

I hope to see this chart go to 0 in the next few years as SSDs continue to
decrease in price; this doesn't mean much bad news for the "PC industry", just
ancient relics of a bygone age finally dying (and/or becoming super-niche for
things like archiving where data transfer rates don't particularly matter.)

~~~
pcurve
is SSD reliable? With no moving parts, it ssd should be more reliable, but
that's not apparently the case. What's your experience?

Also, have you seen case of SSD data loss due as result of not powering up for
couple years?

~~~
rincebrain
Close to 100% of the SSD failures I've seen have not been from being left off
for a few years, nor from actual flash media failure, but from firmware bugs
or, occasionally, mechanical failure.

(I've had very small sample size of SSDs not being powered up for a few years,
but the few I have powered up after not powering on for years have had all
their data retained. Ask me in another 15 years or so, though.)

~~~
executesorder66
> mechanical failure.

How does that happen?

~~~
mirimir
I had my first computer fire, last year. One of the contacts in an SSD power
connector delaminated, causing a short. The SSD was toast. Or at least, the
power connector had melted. The power supply was toast. But with a new power
supply, the machine itself is fine :)

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tempestn
Unfortunately for those of us who run home servers or NAS, prices and
technology of large drives have also stagnated. I recently had to replace a
few years old 4TB drive that had died. I was looking forward to grabbing an
8TB or something for the same price, but no. In fact, I ended up buying
exactly the same model #, for only about $50 less. (I looked up the original
receipt to check!)

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discodave
AWS, GCP and Azure must be making hay getting cheap drives from manufacturers
who want to grow revenue / move units.

Regular S3 hasn't had a price cut in a while now.

~~~
boulos
You might be interested in our recent blogpost, white paper and Eric's USENIX
keynote: [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Google-seeks-
ne...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Google-seeks-new-disks-
for-data-centers.html) .

tl;dr: We're definitely still looking to buy spinning drives, but maybe they
don't need to fit into a 2.5" or 3.5" PC sized slot.

~~~
discodave
Thanks!

I thought this quote from a recent James Hamilton blog post seemed like a plea
for the hard drive manufacturers to get their act together... seems like he's
not alone ;)

"But, leveraging an existing disk design will not produce a winning product
for archival storage. Using disk would require a much larger, slower, more
power efficient and less expensive hardware platform. It really would need to
be different from current generation disk drives. Designing a new platform for
the archive market just doesn’t feel comfortable for disk manufacturers and,
as a consequence, although the hard drive industry could have easily won the
archive market, they have left most of the market for other storage
technologies."

[http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2016/03/everspan-optical-
co...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2016/03/everspan-optical-cold-
stroage/)

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fasteo
>>> Despite the drop in HDD unit shipments, both sequentially and year-over-
year, total capacities shipped by the two leading makers of hard drives
increased in Q1

Somehow misleading title. You don't buy a HDD, you buy storage capacity, and
this metric is increasing, so it seems that the HDD industry is pretty
healthy.

~~~
bluedino
>> You don't buy a HDD, you buy storage capacity

Enterprises do. Desktop users don't.

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dividual
Spinning disks still have their uses though. For example, they're ideal for a
low-to-moderate amount of disk activity, and they last longer. Just make sure
you schedule a daily defragment. Spinning disks are also great for 'cold
storage' of files. I wouldn't store anything worthwhile on an SSD though
because of their fail-rate. SSDs of course have their use cases too, but there
are many trade-offs to using them exclusively for _everything_. I know people
who exclusively work with SSDs naively thinking they're a progression from
spinning disks. Not actually the case!

~~~
greedo
Daily defragmentation on a disk with "low-to-moderate" use? Maybe that's still
a Windows thing, but on my Linux systems and OSX I haven't defrag'd in ages.
(Actually just once on OSX when I was grasping at straws with a disk issue).

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Aelinsaar
I'd love to see a graph with the same scale, charting the state of SSD sales.

~~~
dragontamer
Especially if the SSDs from iPads / tablets are included.

Although there's a big difference from eMMC crap and (even a low-cost budget)
SATA3 SSD.

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khuknows
I find this even more interesting because a large chunk of the book "The
Innovator's Dilemma" is about disruption in the storage industry.

I've not finished reading the book yet, but I think there were a few
predictions about what would happen to companies that dominate the spinning
drive market - it would be interesting to see how closely the predictions
align with reality.

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ChuckMcM
I find this pretty interesting. Places like NetApp, Google, and Amazon can
consume a lot of disk drives, and their customers don't seem particularly
inclined to stop storing stuff.

So presumably this is just the shift of laptops over to SSDs rather than
storage being less useful. If that is the case it would suggest that storage
prices may stabilize a bit on a cents per GB basis.

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ck2
Before the "floods" you could get a WD Blue 1TB for $30 sometimes after
rebate.

Now they are $50

Something about supply/demand doesn't make sense here.

~~~
simoncion
Uh, the floods were real, killed real people, and damaged real property. No
need for the scare quotes.

> Something about supply/demand doesn't make sense here.

Yep. It feels like there's a price-fixing investigation that runs periodically
in each PC component market that finds solid evidence of price fixing and then
forces the prices down.

~~~
ck2
Sorry, the quotes were a bad use of markup, I didn't mean to sound like the
floods weren't significant.

I was trying to landmark that specific event as a measure of before and after.

~~~
simoncion
Why did you choose to use double-quotes for emphasis rather than italics or
underlining?

I'm not calling you out; the practice has mystified me for _ages_ and I see an
opportunity to gain some information.

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venomsnake
With stagnating broadband speed and lack of ultra high quality content out
there it is hard to fill a drive.

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zby
Maybe we don't need bigger drives? For installing software disk size has been
irrelevant for some time - we always have space for software. Maybe after we
have always space for films - then there is no other thing to fill up the
disks?

~~~
cm3
Where do you store videos and music you work on? Where you do you store
containers or vms or build artifacts for software development? Prices of SSDs
have to come down at least 5 times to be in any way comparable (10x actually
to match $/GB but 5x would be huge).

We absolutely need bigger drives because we will have bigger files. Think
video (4k, 8k, VR, HDR), archive of operating system images for development,
data to use for ML, NixOS style immutable operating systems, all the data from
your personal IoT gadgets. Readily available larger storage gives us many
benefits:

1\. requirement for OS stack to adapt (think ZFS)

2\. doing things we wouldn't consider possible at home before

3\. more complete backups with history

By enabling new things for the masses, we enable the development of new stuff
by people in their free time.

Let's not mix tablet/phone use of storage with that of computers with
keyboard+mice.

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theandrewbailey
The graphs tell exactly when those floods destroyed all those drive factories
in Thailand: decline in shipments and spike in average price.

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coob
HDD is to 2016 as DAT Tape was to 1996.

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clitmouse
i'm phasing out my laptops' hdd-with-bad-sectors by putting those into desktop
and call them fud = fuck-u-drives

