Live data from Hacker News

Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

nexthive.com

121–130 of 223 posts

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#121

I just checked out the price of that 14tb seagate drive and you can get 2 of their 10tb drives for the same cost of 1 14tb drive. Who is buying this 14tb drive right now if it costs that much?

You can fit more terabytes in a rack, and (likely; I haven’t checked) use less power and cooling per terabyte of storage, at the cost (again: likely; I haven’t checked) of performance.

Including the cost of racks and power, this may even be cheaper.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#122
post #53

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.

By "dev machines" do you mean workstations or CI servers? There's no way you could have been burning out top of the line enterprise SSDs in 2-3 years with developer workstation usage patterns.

(I could maybe believe that you ran into trouble if you used low-end enterprise SSDs that also force themselves to go read-only as soon as the warrantied write endurance is exhausted, rather than continuing until the flash itself is actually starting to fail.)

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#123
post #26
post #22

I know that big disks are useful for a lot of people/applications. However, I topped out at 500GB about 10 years ago. That gives me plenty of headroom. Since then, I have gone from a 500GB HDD to a SSD, but my space usage hasn't really gone up. The largest disk I own is a 1TB disk in my Time Capsule (which I could probably stand to upgrade, but I don't feel like taking it apart). I think this is probably because I st…

you also do not game a lot. if you look at https://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=9339&game=R... you will see that you need 100gb for just that single game. I mean my own music library which is rather small has 250gb...

I game a bit, but play mostly indie games that are a few GB or less.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#124
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.

It's not easy to ramp up production.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#125
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.

[deleted]

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#126

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…

Semiconductor lithography is a lot more expensive than plain old manufacturing. Fabs cost tens of billions of dollars to build or expand and have limited capacity, coating a glass disc in rust is cheap.

Also, fabs have investors who want returns on their money, so they're not super keen on crashing the market either. There are not-so-secret cartels between all the major players that conspire to keep DRAM and NAND prices high.

We could certainly have the government dump a half-trillion dollars and bring up a bunch of fabs though. That's exactly what China is doing. Their economy runs on assembling the goods, not lithographing the chips (which is largely done in Taiwan or South Korea or sometimes Malaysia).

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#127
post #53

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.

oO. I think that is very strange.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#128

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.…

Interestingly enough SSDs have already outpaced the density of HDDs in the 2.5" form factor, presumably due to exactly the effect you describe. You literally can't buy a 2.5" hard drive bigger than 2 TB last time I checked. All of the thin-and-light stuff like ultrabooks is SSD only too, HDDs can't even match the dimensions you can do with NVMe (maybe something like Microdrive could) let alone capacity.

Cost is still up there but only about 2.5x as expensive as 2.5" HDDs... a 2 TB HDD is about $80 while a 1 TB SSD is ~$100-120. And there are (kinda shitty) 2 TB SSDs that are hitting $250 these days (eg Micron 1100).

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#129
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

A 1TB SSD this past Black Friday was at the lowest about $115/1TB. That's about the price a 1TB HDD was back in 2010.

I'm not sure if this was meant to refute my point somehow, but hard drives haven't come down that much in price since 2010...

Sorting by price on Newegg, if you're looking for a cheap laptop drive you can choose right now between a 320gb HDD for $28.55, a 60gb SSD for $19.99, or a 240gb SSD for $31.99.

For a 1TB drive, you're looking at $38.50 HDD vs $109.99 SSD.

Large SSDs remain fairly expensive for now, but the low end is being eaten.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#130
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By "dev machines" do you mean workstations or CI servers? There's no way you could have been burning out top of the line enterprise SSDs in 2-3 years with developer workstation usage patterns. (I could maybe believe that you ran into trouble if you used low-end enterprise SSDs that also force themselves to go read-only as soon as the warrantied write endurance is exhausted, rather than continuing until the flash itse…

It is dev workstations.

>top of the line enterprise SSDs

i wasn't precise here. It isn't top of the line enterprise SSDs (like the ones you'd use for databases and which cost accordingly). I meant the top-tier corporate enterprise vendor with top-tier hardware in the corresponding categories ( we're a BigCo ).

Post reply on HN