As a person who doesn't know much about HDD technology, I always wonder: what were the advances that allowed this particular bump to happen?
That is a great question :-)
Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
11–20 of 223 posts
Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
#12For general file storage spinning disk HDD are still better cost, but there is a decreasing need for general file storage for the average person. For most people one terabyte is more than enough and it may as well be an SSD that is also their boot drive.
Personally I'd love to replace my multiple 2TB drives with 8TB drives if the price comes down a bit.
Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
#13As a person who doesn't know much about HDD technology, I always wonder: what were the advances that allowed this particular bump to happen?
From TFA:
>The Exos 16 TB hard drive using HAMR technology is now the world’s biggest HDD in terms of capacity overtaking the 14 TB Barracuda Pro.
>HAMR, which is the acronym for heat-assisted magnetic recording, to be precise. This replaces the regular PMR, perpendicular magnetic recording, found in most HDDs. To the average consumer, this doesn’t mean much at all. However, Seagate believes that HAMR is the key to making significantly larger capacities readily available shortly.
Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
#14From 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…
By that logic things should get more expensive, not cheaper, as the demand increases.
To put it another way, why wouldn't someone undercut the current suppliers and sell at just above their marginal cost and take over the whole market.
Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
#15I 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…
[deleted]
Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
By that logic things should get more expensive, not cheaper, as the demand increases. To put it another way, why wouldn't someone undercut the current suppliers and sell at just above their marginal cost and take over the whole market.
Because factories for that are hard and very expensive to build?
Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
By that logic things should get more expensive, not cheaper, as the demand increases. To put it another way, why wouldn't someone undercut the current suppliers and sell at just above their marginal cost and take over the whole market.
You need excess supply before you can try that. The question is can anyone raise prices and still sell out. This is a complex question (and often the answer is yes in the short term but you shouldn't because your customers might invest in an alternative and not buy at all in a couple years)
Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
#18From 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…
AFAIK, HAMR is just about using heat to allow for more targeted writes. Write density increases but the actual disk composition doesn't change, just the write head.
Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
#19From 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…
> Can the old factory machinery from 2005 be used to manufacture these new HAMR disks?
Probably yes, for everything except the heads. These HDs are built upon many decades of investments in manufacturing capacity.
Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
#20Anyone have an opinion about Seagate? I had one of their HDD and it died on me within a year.
Not sure if this was a 'one-off' or other people had issues with their quality.
Similar issue with samsung on SSD.