

Disk drive shipments rebound from Thai floods - ck2
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231799/Disk_drive_shipments_rebound_from_Thai_floods_

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ck2
Once again title reversion. Compare to the original:

 _Hard drive production 100% recovered, but prices to remain high until 2014_

Which one is more informative at a glance?

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Havoc
>Which one is more informative at a glance?

Wrong question. Which one are you more likely to click on?

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Dylan16807
But we're not talking about news-pushers, the problem is some kind of
overzealous mod/bot on HN that has a grudge against customized story titles.

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Havoc
Is it just me or is the date for recovery always Current Date + 1.5 years?

Anyway...I bought a SSD yesterday & feel that soon the only people who need
HDDs will be people with massive media collections (ignoring servers etc).
Even things like Steam libraries on SSDs are starting to become feasible.

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mansoor-s
Or people who can't shell out the money for SSDs

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Havoc
>Or people who can't shell out the money for SSDs

I was talking about the SSD vs HDD decision. Not about people who don't have
the money to do either.

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yen223
SSDs are still considered 'luxury' items, like $1000 graphics cards. Don't
forget that a 60GB SSD costs roughly the same as a 1TB HDD, and people do like
bigger numbers.

People in the market for new PCs would typically start off with a HDD, before
shelling out more money for an SSD.

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Havoc
>people do like bigger numbers.

Ah yes of course. I'm prone to seeing tech decisions from a more technical
perspective only. I see what you mean though, the less technically
sophisticated people probably drive more of the demand based on numbers alone.

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STRML
To be honest... relatively high HDD prices combined with very low SSD prices
make for a really interesting and progressive storage market! I'm glad to see
the $/GB gap close significantly. One could make a very convincing case to buy
at least a 128GB SSD with any desktop build.

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tisme
Prices are already down and it definitely isn't 2014 yet. 3T is about the
sweet spot right now, it's never been much cheaper than it is today. 2T is a
bit more expensive than before the floodings, but a part of that is that there
is simply less production of them (which has switched to 3T models).

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w1ntermute
It's sad to see the slowdown in the increase of HDD sizes (and I don't feel
that it was only due to the flooding, since it was already occurring to a
degree before that). It used to be that there was some absurdly huge HDD
available for $1000, but now we don't see anything more than 4 TB, in the
$300-500 price range.

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tisme
4T is a pretty large amount of data though.

I think what will happen is that more and more funds will move to SSD research
and improvements, pretty much the same way it happened around the time that
the GMR was discovered and first marketed.

There was an apparent slowdown in drive capacity increase and then, when the
GMR based drives hit the market we were suddenly swimming in drives of 100's
of megabytes.

That tech is getting older and the whole solid state movement seems to have
the future. So this may be the last generation of storage media based on
spinning magnetic platters. SSD still has a bit of catching up to do, but the
writing is on the wall for hard drive makers.

Imagine to have to sign off on a mulit-year, multi-billion plan to create new
factories that will have no application in a future iteration of the
technology. That would be a very tough business decision. I'm happy they got
as much production capacity online as they do.

On the plus side of all this: the last generation magnetic media, at 4T or
even beyond will be sold at rockbottom prices to keep those factories alive as
long as possible.

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Klinky
Seagate has demoed HAMR a tech which might allow them to get to 60TB and may
start showing up in 6TB consumer drives within a few years. Other research is
being done on adding sodium chloride to platters and IBM is researching
magnetic storage at the atomic level. So long as magnetic storage can stay
ahead of semiconductor fabrication then it will have it's place.

As far as someone making a decision to build a factory for commodity hardware
manufacturing, that same issue occurs with NAND which is quickly seeing profit
margins plummet. E.g. a 50nm NAND plant 4 years ago is no longer competitive
today. This is probably why Intel jettisoned their NAND manufacturing.

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polshaw
From what I have seen hard drives _are_ pretty much back to pre flood prices
now in $/GB terms, there has just been 18 months of price progress gone.

Meanwhile SSDs have done a hell of a lot of catching up.

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Osiris
I don't think that's true. They have come down but not to the absurdly cheap
level they were before the flood.

As an anecdote, I purchased a 2 TB hard drive just a few months before the
flood for $60 from Newegg. Now, the cheapest 2 TB drive on Newegg is $100.

So, they have come down but still haven't recovered. This is why I haven't
been able to bring myself to buy another 2 TB drive because I know I'd be
paying a 50% premium over what I paid last time.

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ars
That's not just the flood. Hard disks are basically a Dupoploy now, so with
less competition they are raising prices.

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miahi
Is this showing that the PC death is overrated or that the HDD producer's
monopoly works as planned?

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htmltablesrules
"PC death" is a marketing fad.

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yardie
No, not marketing. Growth has been flat. The market relies on growth. From an
investors point of view if you aren't growing then someone else is so they
should divest from your company and go to something else.

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caycep
maybe it's just me but the prices still seem high and availability low...case
in point the new WD Reds are all out of stock. And all the manufacturers are
now consolidated into seagate and WD...a bummer since I liked hitachi and
samsung drives a lot.

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duked
it's just a computerworld article ... Seems like their previous deal with
slashdot is over (since it got acquired) because I see a lot of these links on
HN recently

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iwejfweoifjweif
Did computerworld have an advertising relationship with slashdot?

