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Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

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Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#2
From the article: "In a world where SSDs have become more and more common, one might ask what the point of even developing newer and bigger HDDs is."

Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte. I'm just a web developer, but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. I know at the beginning that hard drives would be cheaper, simply because SSDs were newer, and there was R & D to amortize. But by now I would have thought that SSDs might have matched hard drives or even undercut them. Not only has it been over a decade, but hard drives themselves are using new R & D too. For example this article mentions that this new hard drive uses a new technique, called HAMR. Can the old factory machinery from 2005 be used to manufacture these new HAMR disks?

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#4

From the article: "In a world where SSDs have become more and more common, one might ask what the point of even developing newer and bigger HDDs is." Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte. I'm just a web developer, but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. I know at the beginning that hard drives would be cheaper, simply because SSDs were newer, and ther…

The fabs where NAND chips are produced are hugely expensive, and in very high demand.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#5
I don't quite recall when it happened, but at some point my reaction to announcements like this changed from, "Yay, more space!" to "Good, the size I need will be even cheaper when I upgrade 2-3 years from now."

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#6

From the article: "In a world where SSDs have become more and more common, one might ask what the point of even developing newer and bigger HDDs is." Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte. I'm just a web developer, but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. I know at the beginning that hard drives would be cheaper, simply because SSDs were newer, and ther…

I suspect it has to do with die area and yield.

Also, a hard drive head and electronics has to be made once for each platter, so its cost does not scale with the number of bits on the platter.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#7
post #5

I don't quite recall when it happened, but at some point my reaction to announcements like this changed from, "Yay, more space!" to "Good, the size I need will be even cheaper when I upgrade 2-3 years from now."

This is how I have felt recently, specifically when it came to purchasing a new phone. I would think that these super-sized drives will cater more toward creatives who have to work with large amounts of audio and video content.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#9

From the article: "In a world where SSDs have become more and more common, one might ask what the point of even developing newer and bigger HDDs is." Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte. I'm just a web developer, but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. I know at the beginning that hard drives would be cheaper, simply because SSDs were newer, and ther…

NAND demand is insanely high. You aren't just building computer SSDs, you have phones, in particular, and hundreds of other devices that use it competing for the manufacturing capacity.

Another issue with demand is IOPS. Enterprise is rarely limited by storage capacity, but instead by reliable operations per second. Pretty much every enterprise wants every SSD it can get at the right price point, which is much higher than consumers will pay. For the time being it will be worthwhile for NAND makers to sell drives to companies at a much higher price point.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#10
post #5

I don't quite recall when it happened, but at some point my reaction to announcements like this changed from, "Yay, more space!" to "Good, the size I need will be even cheaper when I upgrade 2-3 years from now."

I record and produce my own music as a hobby. Each project can easily reach gigabytes in size, and my biggest projects are eight gigabytes or so (eight drum mics, guitar, bass, vocals, and synthesizers, all uncompressed 24/96 audio, often with a number of different takes). I go through HDDs very quickly. I know that for development and most uses bigger HDDs are unnecessary, but for media production these improvements are really valuable.
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