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Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

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Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#51

Post by Tempest1981 »

mkirklions wrote: post #20

Anyone 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.

Check the BackBlaze reports: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

A few Seagate models were problematic. See the 2nd table here (did you have one of those?) https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017/

I switched to HGST a few years back, after seeing the color graph on this page: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-201...

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#52

Post by reitzensteinm »

sixothree wrote: post #38
combatentropy wrote: post #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 ther…

I always thought that at some point the price/gb lines would cross. I am starting to believe this will never actually happen.

It will. SSDs counter intuitively scale down in price much better than hard drives at small sizes; there's no cost advantage to making a HDD with less storage than a single platter, or about 1/5 to 1/8 (in the case of helium drives) of the largest on the market.

Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD).

At that point, HDDs will essentially only be found in external drives and data centers. The writing will be on the wall, and R&D will slow down, starting a cycle that will lead to collapse.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#53

Post by trhway »

combatentropy wrote: post #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 ther…

Me and some other teammates switched our dev machines from SSD to HDD arrays. 2-3 years of heavy usage - huge C++ - and SSD start silently fail in various ways - from slow down at 60-70% capacity to final outright failure even to read from. Note: the hardware is top line enterprise, pretty expensive. The perf difference between sdd and hdd is imperceptible for our use case as we are cores hungry and have enough RAM.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#54

Post by projectramo »

pixl97 wrote: post #45
projectramo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Things do get more expensive as demand increases. Have you not bought enterprise SSDs up until 6 months ago? https://cdn.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/tr... This is the average price of a 256GB SSD. In May 2017 they were just above $100. Soon after that demand pushed that near $175. Just recently that price has dropped as new processes have increased inventories. > why wouldn't someone undercut the cu…

It seems you are much smarter than the rest of us when it comes to understanding supply and demand curves, but why don't you help us walk through an example, okay?

Suppose it costs -- and I am making this up -- $10 to produce the first 1000 units, but only $1 after that.

Suppose people are charging a lot of money, say $50 for a unit.

Won't you increase production to try to capture that demand.

After that, because you have increased production you enjoy economies of scale, and the price comes down.

If you are the only producer, you have no incentive to come down, but if there are other producers you will want to undercut them. In this case, you will bring down your price to gain more market share.

Please help us understand what we are missing with your shrewd understanding of supply and demand curves.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#55

Post by selectodude »

fallat wrote: post #30
lightbyte wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

What is the theoretical realistic limits for HDD storage? From the sounds of it this 16TB HAMR-enabled drive is just the first of many we will see year-to-year to continue HDD sales.

Seagate says they'll get up to 100 TB with HAMR. Curious at what point it's no longer financially reasonable to keep researching ways to increase density.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#56

Post by skykooler »

combatentropy wrote: post #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 ther…

Hard drives are cheap because, regardless of capacity, you make a bunch of moving bits and electronics, and then cover a disk with iron oxide and that holds all the data. When manufacturing SSDs, you need to make circuitry for each bit.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#57

Post by Brockenstein »

combatentropy wrote: post #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 ther…

>Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte

I think you should go shopping, because the time where SSDs cost 10x as much as an HDD is over.

When a WD Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB is $46 on Amazon and a Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch is $134.

Unless you're comparing the cheapest 1TB HDD you can find to a Samsung 970 pro 1TB or something... which really isn't a reasonable comparison imo.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#58

Post by Rafuino »

sixothree wrote: post #38
combatentropy wrote: post #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 ther…

I always thought that at some point the price/gb lines would cross. I am starting to believe this will never actually happen.

I'd expect QLC NAND to help with this

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#59

Post by pochamago »

projectramo wrote: post #54
pixl97 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things do get more expensive as demand increases. Have you not bought enterprise SSDs up until 6 months ago? https://cdn.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/tr... This is the average price of a 256GB SSD. In May 2017 they were just above $100. Soon after that demand pushed that near $175. Just recently that price has dropped as new processes have increased inventories. > why wouldn't someone undercut the cu…

It seems you are much smarter than the rest of us when it comes to understanding supply and demand curves, but why don't you help us walk through an example, okay? Suppose it costs -- and I am making this up -- $10 to produce the first 1000 units, but only $1 after that. Suppose people are charging a lot of money, say $50 for a unit. Won't you increase production to try to capture that demand. After that, because you…

That the growth of demand is outpacing the growth of supply. I thought he was fairly clear about that.
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