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Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

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Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#101
post #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.

Much more than any creatives will be the use of these for all sorts of "big data" projects, from AI training to mass-spying to science. All of these fields have a bottomless appetite for data storage that will eat up these drives like candy.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#102
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you say you stream your videos. Now imagine getting that shiny new 4k video camera and start storing raw footage even after you have edited it. Rough ballbark of 120Mbits/s ==> 15MB/s ==> 900MB/minute ==> 54GB/hour. This is why I keep adding more and more disks to my NAS.

What type of NAS do you have? I am researching alternatives would appreciate your advice.

Sibling comment is dead, but I second their recommendation of the Synology 1618+. It's been excellent in my experience. Even better when paired with a 10GbE NIC.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

This is already playing out. SSDs are cheaper than hard drives at 120GB, and that crossover point is moving upward. Sub-500GB hard drives will probably disappear from the market next year, now that 240GB SSDs are dropping below $30.

SSD controllers are cheaper than the fixed costs of hard drive motors, actuators and clean-room assembly. Adding an extra platter gets you more incremental GB per dollar, but getting that first platter working is much more expensive than the minimum viable SSD.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#104
post #9

Earlier 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.

> By that logic things should get more expensive, not cheaper, as the demand increases.

This is... exactly what everyone expects, and the assumption of every economic graph in the world?

The stupidest, most basic supply-demand model is:

Prices fall with falling demand and/or rising supply.

Prices rise with rising demand and/or falling supply.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#105
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We produce and process more data in a few days than we did in a year even as recently as a decade ago (and, by "we", I mostly mean companies that want to store every detail of every human life for analysis in order to maximize profits). So far, the increasing need for storage has kept pace with the ability to store it.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#106
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."

Yea I remember going up from a 3TB to 6TB, using the old one as a backup and climbing up that chain every 2~3 years .. 8TB, etc. Currently I have a 12TB for primary and a 10TB for backup. Once I go over 10TB I'll probably look at what's current available. It'd be nice to see 100TBs eventually. I honestly think a set of those could last for over a decade.

I'm curious as to why your backup drive is smaller the your primary. For most people the other way around would be desirable.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#107
post #84
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. those are cherrypicked numbers because 1TB is at the very low end for HDD sizes. compare with a more typical HDD size (3TB or 4TB) and you'll see the differences become more obvious.

I don't know about you, but 500-1000 GB is more than enough for my SSD needs, so the comparison at 1TB is much more relevant to me than at 4TB.

Wasn't the parent discussion about a new high-capacity HDD and the per-capacity cost of HDD vs SSD? I don't think that people satisfied with under 1TB are relevant to that topic.

In that market, people are comparing a pile of disks in an array to a pile of solid state storage needed to replace its capacity. The bulk price of storage inverts when it is cheaper to store hundreds of TB on huge SSDs rather than on huge HDDs. That would be the death of HDD, since nobody really wants spinning disks in their datacenter.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#108
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I game a lot, but none of the games I play even approach half that size. not all games are bloated, disk space eating messes.

it actually depends. you can either have a game with extremly fast loading, which means that assets won't be compressed a lot or you can compress them and go for file size, you can even reduce the quality. it always depends on your target audience. but still modern games for pc/mac are around ~10gb per game which would limit your installed game base by a lot. (also working with docker (pc, mac not linux) or vms in ge…

Depending on the storage and the compression, loading compressed assets and decompressing them in ram can often be faster than loading uncompressed assets.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why not use FLAC? It gets 50-70% compression and is lossless.

Offhand I actually don't know of too many DAW programs that can record the individual tracks in FLAC format. Reaper does. Checking the Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hardware_and_software_...), it looks like Cakewalk Sonar does as well. But that leaves a lot of major players (Protools, Logic, Cubase, Ableton Live, FL Studio, etc.) that cannot.

It's not something I personally would do because (as others imply) IMHO the CPU trade-off is not worth it. Usually I use a blend of plug-ins (which take up no space) and recorded hardware, consequently the amount per track ends up being more like 100-600MB and not gigabytes. This is rather manageable.

However, I will note that sample based software synthesizers and sample packs can be huge these days, even despite in many cases lossless compressing being applied to the sample library. Omnisphere 2 for instance comes with a 60GB+ sample library (and that's before you add the add-ons like Moog Tribute). At the current extreme end, orchestral sample company Spitfire offers a string library (https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/hans-zimmer-strings/) that is 183GB in size and a sampled piano that's a whopping 211GB compressed (https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/hans-zimmer-piano/).

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#110

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.

Backblaze reports always have Seagate with significantly higher failure rates. I suspect they just RMA them all since failures don't actually affect them too badly.

I sold my Seagate stock a while back, so I have no horse in this race, but I needed to point out that _outside the notoriously bad 3tb line that one year_, Seagate’s reliability has been on par or better than Western Digital’s in every single Backblaze report I have ever read. I challenge you to prove to me that the Backblaze data says Seagate is worse than WD outside of that line.
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