Seagate Announces 16TB HDD • Hacker News Board

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#141

Post by combatentropy » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:21 PM UTC

Brockenstein wrote: post #57

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 i…

> I think you should go shopping

Sorry, you're right! I had quickly searched for a few multi-terabyte drives. But at around 100 GB the two kinds are close.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#142

Post by trhway » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:24 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #133

trhway wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

we've got various models through the years, yet still a notch higher - the 850 PRO has TBW at 300x-500x capacity where is the ones we've been getting got TBW around 1000x, and i think the earlier hardware was even close to 2000-3000x.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#143

Post by wtallis » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:24 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #98

reitzensteinm wrote: post #52

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.…

"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)." Reliability and mean time between failures figure in to the equation as well -- at both the low end and the high end. Data centers don't want to be swapping out…

> Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did.

> And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me.

I'm pretty sure you're cherry-picking the data you're willing to look at. It's definitely not true that any datacenter ever avoids SSDs due to worries about drive failure rates. These days, high-end consumer or enterprise SSDs are warrantied to survive more writes than it is physically possible to send to a hard drive during the same 5-year span. Flash memory write endurance stopped being a serious concern by the time consumer SSDs reached capacities that made them sufficient for use as the sole storage device in a mainstream laptop.

Controller/firmware bugs are the only source of SSD failure that you have a non-negligible chance of encountering in the wild, but the rate of such failures is very small, especially if you stick to the major reputable SSD brands. And that's in the consumer market where the vendors aren't specifically validating each SSD model with your specific servers before you put anything into production.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#144

Post by notacoward » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:26 PM UTC

bunnycorn wrote: post #137

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.

> a couple of hard drives > Latency is generally not requested.

That might be your experience, but it's not mine. I'm on a team that runs one of the three or four largest storage infrastructures in the world. In aggregate, those few account for a significant fraction of all the disk drives sold - enough that we have to account for possible market distortions in our planning. So I think our experience is relevant too.

In my world, the professionals very much do care about latency. Yes, the systems are built for massive throughput, but that throughput has to be within a certain latency. If latency goes too high, we get calls in the middle of the night. To keep that system-wide latency low, we deploy many racks' worth of equipment at a time, or shift load between similarly sized parts of the system.

For us and our peers, this capacity/performance gap is a huge issue. Has been for years, and it keeps getting worse. Those concerns might not apply to everyone, notably you, but they are quite real.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#145

Post by PuffinBlue » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:33 PM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #128

reitzensteinm wrote: post #52

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.…

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…

> You literally can't buy a 2.5" hard drive bigger than 2 TB last time I checked.

You can get them for sure[0] and they're not really that expensive at all. That particular one gave me about 95MB/s write speed on large files.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/...

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#146

Post by donatj » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:34 PM UTC

zrav wrote: post #94

donatj wrote: post #92

If it's anything like their 8tb offerings it's unreliable rubbish.

Statistics with representative sample size disagree. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2018-hard-drive-failure-rates...

I don't know if you're looking at the same list I am, because the large Seagate disks on here have some of the highest failure rates outside WDC.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#147

Post by reitzensteinm » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:43 PM UTC

PuffinBlue wrote: post #145

paulmd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You literally can't buy a 2.5" hard drive bigger than 2 TB last time I checked. You can get them for sure[0] and they're not really that expensive at all. That particular one gave me about 95MB/s write speed on large files. https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/...

Those are 15mm drives though - unlikely to fit inside a laptop (7mm is thin, 9.5mm is standard).

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#148

Post by Sharlin » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:51 PM UTC

Brockenstein wrote: post #57

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 i…

1TB HDDs are expensive per GB though. The sweet spot is at 4 or 6T these days.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#149

Post by Rafuino » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:55 PM UTC

opencl wrote: post #90

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.

The whole NAND industry is suspected to be engaging in price fixing/collusion[1]. They've already been caught doing it in the past and paid out a $300 million settlement over it back in 2006. [1] https://bit-tech.net/news/tech/memory/samsung-micron-sk-hyni...

What a weird article. The latest brouhaha is about memory, not storage. The website shows a NAND SSD though as the main picture... strange... and incorrect.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#150

Post by opencl » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:57 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #97

opencl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole NAND industry is suspected to be engaging in price fixing/collusion[1]. They've already been caught doing it in the past and paid out a $300 million settlement over it back in 2006. [1] https://bit-tech.net/news/tech/memory/samsung-micron-sk-hyni...

That article is about DRAM, not NAND. Any article that talks about SK Hynix as a major player but doesn't mention Toshiba is clearly not about flash memory.

Ah yes, my bad. The lawsuit in that article is indeed specifically about DRAM. A lot of the reporting on this mixes them up for some reason. But the DRAM and NAND industries are largely the same companies and both have been under investigation for price fixing recently.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261330-china-investiga...