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Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

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Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#131

Post by raiflip »

projectramo wrote: post #14
pixl97 wrote: 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.

This is the Eco 101 way of thinking about it. Reality is more complicated, and more advanced economics models reality closer. Basically put, what you are describing is whats called a Perfect Market. A Perfect Market is one in which there are no barriers to enter or leave the market as a producer or consumer. However the vast majority of markets are not like this. For example, the sheer complexity and amount of money needed to start a new NAND factory is itself a giant barrier to entry. Most markets that have a high barrier of entry take on a market structure called an Oligopoly. An Oligopoly is when there are only a few producers in the market, and it is difficult to enter the market. The difficulty need not be because of anything nefarious from the producers, it might only be because the production process is complex and/or requires a lot of technical expertise.

In Oligopoly markets, because there are only a few producers, the producers have more leverage over their buyers and are therefore able to charge prices higher than the marginal cost of production.

To your suggesstion, lets say I realize this and I want to start a NAND factory that undercuts my competitors by a little bit but leave me plenty of profit, I have to first build a factory large enough to reach the economy of scales that my competitors have. Reason for that is for a period of time, the marginal cost of production decreases as sheer production increases because the process gets more streamlined and automated. However to do that I need to hire engineers who know how to make a NAND, and maybe I need permission from the Chinese communist party. Then I need to get a bank to agree to give me a loan so I can have enough money to build my factory and hire my engineers. Banks probably are not going to be too keen on lending an unknown quantity and will likely charge me a higher interest rate to compensate for that risk. Only then can I enter the market.

So as you can see while its not impossible to enter the market, its not easy either. Since thats the case, the few existing producers can, without any nefarious activity (which is not to say there isn't any, but its not required), charge prices higher than the marginal cost of production.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#132

Post by megaremote »

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…

You seem to think price is set due to cost, when this is not how it works at all. Price is set by what people will pay.

As a web developer, do you charge based on how much it costs for your to eat and pay rent for the day?

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#133

Post by wtallis »

trhway wrote: post #130
wtallis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ).

> I meant the top-tier corporate enterprise vendor with top-tier hardware in the corresponding categories ( we're a BigCo ).

So what you're probably getting is ordinary cheap consumer-grade SSDs, but perhaps with encryption capabilities actually turned on. I'd be surprised if you were getting something like the Samsung 850 PRO without specifically ordering premium SSDs.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#134

Post by notacoward »

As a professional storage-system developer, my reaction to every announcement of larger disks is something close to horror. Capacity keeps increasing while performance remains darn near constant, so the gap between the two keeps getting wider. Yes, we can use flash to absorb the I/O demand, treat disk more like tape, yadda yadda, but all of that takes significant effort. You do want your storage system to be correct despite the greater complexity of heterogeneous hardware, don't you?

Looking on the bright side: infinite job security. Yay?

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#135

Post by ipsum2 »

ericd wrote: post #102
objektif wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can vouch for dead comments to un-dead them (bring it back to life?). I've done it for the sibling comment (by twothumbsup).

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#136

Post by megaremote »

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…

Is average price that useful in this context? Surely there would be very fast high end drives that would push that cost up?

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#137

Post by bunnycorn »

notacoward wrote: post #134

As a professional storage-system developer, my reaction to every announcement of larger disks is something close to horror. Capacity keeps increasing while performance remains darn near constant, so the gap between the two keeps getting wider. Yes, we can use flash to absorb the I/O demand, treat disk more like tape, yadda yadda, but all of that takes significant effort. You do want your storage system to be correct…

I think it's a question of supply and demand.

If professionals need throughput, they will buy a couple of hard drives and array them together. Latency is generally not requested.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#138

Post by votepaunchy »

djsumdog wrote: post #43
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.

I've had a drive from every major manufacturer fail at some point. Brands don't matter, backups do. Buy hard drives in pairs and put an item on your calendar to pop the other one in once a month, sync it, and put it back in a fire-resistant safe.

> Buy hard drives in pairs and put an item on your calendar to pop the other one in once a month, sync it, and put it back in a fire-resistant safe.

Alternatively, buy one hard drive and keep a copy in Amazon Glacier Deep Archive for $1/TB-month.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#139

Post by zzzcpan »

notacoward wrote: post #134

As a professional storage-system developer, my reaction to every announcement of larger disks is something close to horror. Capacity keeps increasing while performance remains darn near constant, so the gap between the two keeps getting wider. Yes, we can use flash to absorb the I/O demand, treat disk more like tape, yadda yadda, but all of that takes significant effort. You do want your storage system to be correct…

But it was always like that for HDDs. You always had to assume no change in seek time with more capacity. And it was always wrong to treat HDDs as random IO devices with all the random writes and b-trees. At least now there is a pressure on everyone involved to do it right.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#140

Post by notacoward »

zzzcpan wrote: post #139
notacoward wrote: post #134

As a professional storage-system developer, my reaction to every announcement of larger disks is something close to horror. Capacity keeps increasing while performance remains darn near constant, so the gap between the two keeps getting wider. Yes, we can use flash to absorb the I/O demand, treat disk more like tape, yadda yadda, but all of that takes significant effort. You do want your storage system to be correct…

But it was always like that for HDDs. You always had to assume no change in seek time with more capacity. And it was always wrong to treat HDDs as random IO devices with all the random writes and b-trees. At least now there is a pressure on everyone involved to do it right.

That's a completely different issue. Yes, it's important to do disk accesses right. That was even more true when I started doing this stuff in 1990 than it is now, because disks back then didn't have big caches or fancy controllers, and RAID wasn't a thing. My point is that even if you do everything right it's getting harder and harder for a disk-based system to keep up with I/O demand. That means more and more gyrations to keep the demand away from those disk-based systems, which means more overall system complexity. In particular, more places for inconsistency to creep in. As though we didn't have enough to deal with making these things distributed.
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