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HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

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Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#21

Post by tadfisher »

jstx wrote: post #16
wtallis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't be seeing these charts go to 0 in a few short years. Hard drives are at 2.7¢/GB while SSDs are at 21.9¢/GB, and that gap won't be closed with just one or two generations of NAND even if hard drives don't get any cheaper. We will increasingly see parts of the hard drive market killed off by SSDs, as the market for low-capacity 2.5" drives has been. Hard drives are shifting from being mainstream storage to arc…

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/samsun... Think again

An $8,000 drive only serves to prove this point.

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#23

Post by r00fus »

m_eiman wrote: post #18
beachstartup wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have a 2009 mac pro. first upgrade: more ram second upgrade: ssd third upgrade: video card and monitor. it's on track to give me 10 years of use now, if not more (i'll probably succumb to upgrade fever before then). knocking on wood . the ram and ssd were a given, but i was surprised at how much more 2d performance the video card delivered. i really just wanted 4k for the real estate, but the actual speed at which…

I have a 2010 iMac that's unbearably slow at the moment, and since I suspect that the hdd is the reason I'm considering upgrading to a 1TB SSD (since I don't want less storage space).. But including installation, that's roughly $400. And spending $400 to prolong the life of an iMac with a fairly crappy GPU seems a lot. But on the other hand a new iMac (with a non-Intel GPU) is $2000 or more. Hard decision!

Would that $400 investment increase your resale price somewhat (probably not 1:1, but you will get utility out of it).

Alternatively, just buy whatever's on sale for small SSDs and do a fusion-drive on it.

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#24

Post by executesorder66 »

rincebrain wrote: post #12
pcurve wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.)

> mechanical failure.

How does that happen?

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#25

Post by discodave »

boulos wrote: post #13
discodave wrote: post #8

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.

You might be interested in our recent blogpost, white paper and Eric's USENIX keynote: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Google-seeks-ne... . 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.

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...

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#26

Post by creshal »

jstx wrote: post #16
wtallis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't be seeing these charts go to 0 in a few short years. Hard drives are at 2.7¢/GB while SSDs are at 21.9¢/GB, and that gap won't be closed with just one or two generations of NAND even if hard drives don't get any cheaper. We will increasingly see parts of the hard drive market killed off by SSDs, as the market for low-capacity 2.5" drives has been. Hard drives are shifting from being mainstream storage to arc…

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/samsun... Think again

Equivalent cost of a spinning rust setup would be less than $500.

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#27

Post by MichailP »

executesorder66 wrote: post #24
rincebrain wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> mechanical failure. How does that happen?

Crushing the SSD disk or whole laptop :)

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#29

Post by beachstartup »

m_eiman wrote: post #18
beachstartup wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have a 2009 mac pro. first upgrade: more ram second upgrade: ssd third upgrade: video card and monitor. it's on track to give me 10 years of use now, if not more (i'll probably succumb to upgrade fever before then). knocking on wood . the ram and ssd were a given, but i was surprised at how much more 2d performance the video card delivered. i really just wanted 4k for the real estate, but the actual speed at which…

I have a 2010 iMac that's unbearably slow at the moment, and since I suspect that the hdd is the reason I'm considering upgrading to a 1TB SSD (since I don't want less storage space).. But including installation, that's roughly $400. And spending $400 to prolong the life of an iMac with a fairly crappy GPU seems a lot. But on the other hand a new iMac (with a non-Intel GPU) is $2000 or more. Hard decision!

get a smaller one for your OS + common apps and a used nvidia gpu from a newer mac.

an ssd is a completely different paradigm. it's night and day, even on an old sata bus.

this shoudn't even be a question. hdd computers are completely unuseable to me now. i sat down at one the other day and i thought it had crashed and almost rebooted it, but it was just chugging the disk.

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#30

Post by beachstartup »

ulfw wrote: post #10
avidwriter wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2009 Mac Pro 2.66 quad here. just did a 3.46 hex cpu upgrade. 32GB 1333 RAM sm951 AHCI pcie m2 boot drive (700MB/700MB) nvidia 1080 when it comes out. bootcamp for games. 40" 4K Philips in os x for everything else.

So what is "Mac Pro" in this now? The case and the power supply?

well the cpu, ram, storage, and video card were never made by apple anyway. the case, motherboard, and other various hard bits and (maybe most importantly) operating system are still apple.
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