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Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

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Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#191

Post by cma »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #155
thaumasiotes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> This is... exactly what everyone expects, and the assumption of every economic graph in the world? There are actually markets where the opposite holds. Basically anything with high fixed costs, because the more units sold, the less of the fixed costs each unit has to cover. But fabs don't really work like that because, while very expensive, they have finite capacity. A fab that can produce a million units costs a b…

The second fab on an identical process node is cheaper than the first.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#192

Post by thirdsun »

veridies wrote: post #188
pmoriarty wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that much data, I am curious as to how you do your backups. Do you backup off-site at all?

Not offsite, which I know I should. I use macOS, so I just have a Time Capsule set up with a giant HDD plugged into that for stuff I'm working on presently. Stuff I don't use actively I just make sure to put on two different HDDs in different places, and so I have two whole parallel sets of HDDs which I occasionally synchronize by hand. The whole system is very awkward, and I would be delighted if I really could rent…

You can. I've been using Arq [1] for years. You can select a storage provider of your choice (I use Dropbox), but Arq also provide its own cloud storage these days if you prefer to keep it as simple as possible.

After the initial upload it's feasible even with large files since it of course only uploads incremental, block-level changes. I let it run on a daily schedule during the night.

[1] https://www.arqbackup.com/

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#193

Post by calcifer »

Aloha wrote: post #184
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…

The part that makes me recoil in horror is the potential damage wrought by one failure - at what point does the rebuild time for your RAID Array start to collide with the MTBF for the drives? ;-)

We are getting there, this already happens with unrecoverable read errors (URE).

With RAID5 for example, rebuilding a 4TiB array is expected (i.e. >50% chance) to have at least one URE.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#194

Post by profalseidol »

raiflip wrote: post #131
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.

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…

> the producers have more leverage over their buyers and are therefore able to charge prices higher than the marginal cost of production.

pretty nefarious if you ask me. we gotta own the means of production! take-over these oligopolies and turn them into worker-owned-and-directed cooperatives!

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#195

Post by ksec »

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.

>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.

Moat. Or the Entry Barrier. You can't built a Fab, ignore the yield and expect it to be profitable. TSMC famously said they will never enter the NAND and DRAM market and thought of those as commodities. In 2017 that look utterly stupid when NAND and DRAM prices were sky high, while not widely reported, making Samsung Electronics the most profitable company in the world ( They own ~60% of the world's DRAM and NAND market ), even more so than Apple. By 2018, a 5% drop in World Wide Smartphone shipment trigger a knock on effect, the prices has seen been plummeting. Still profitable, just not as much as they were.

It was once thought the $100B USD from China would have solve this problem. Even if they make 50% less yield, and earned net zero margin, along with forcing Chinese Smartphone companies to use a percentage of those components, should have been enough to sustain those Chinese based NAND fab. Turns out it wasn't quite as easy as they thought. Most of the DRAM and NAND were far too inferior. 3D NAND, or Multilayer Stacked NAND along with leading edge node is a huge barrier of entry.

One reason why you keep hearing there are lots of IP theft going on.

Note: All the Apple product sold in China are using Chinese bases NAND.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#196

Post by ksec »

The HDD industry, Basically Seagate, Toshiba, and WD together are milking it for as long as possible. The Data created per year, or even growth per year far out-weight the growth of HDD capacity.

At some point later, surely NAND will offer more storage in 4U than a 40U Rack. Lower Energy, higher speed.

I have been asking this a lot, at what price point, will the TCO of NAND, where it offer superior speed, higher density per Rack and its capacity cross and it makes sense to store them all in NAND.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#197

Post by ru999gol »

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…

nobody (especially not all the ultra capitalist pigs here) would like to admit this but in reality the reason this is the case is price fixing. There are very few companies that do manufacture and hold the necessary patents to do so. You can thank the free market for it.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/30/dram_vendors_sued_a...

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#198

Post by notacoward »

Aloha wrote: post #184
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…

The part that makes me recoil in horror is the potential damage wrought by one failure - at what point does the rebuild time for your RAID Array start to collide with the MTBF for the drives? ;-)

This is why the really big storage systems use erasure coding. At scale, RAID-5 and even RAID-6 are vulnerable to these kinds of overlapping failures. Not theory; seen it happen.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#199

Post by blablabla123 »

jburgess777 wrote: post #158
blablabla123 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's the economical aspect of it. On the other hand it means the technology is established and people prefer to buy SSDs over HDs. Speaking of myself, I wouldn't consider buying an HD laptop ever again. This means companies can invest in very long-term endeavours to transform their HDD production businesses into SSD production businesses. The costs are high but the risk is low, lower or at best equally high o…

The article below has a graph showing the number of "Client SSD vs HDD units" shipped by Samsung over the last 6 years. Given current trends, the SSD shipments will very likely exceed HDD in the next 12 months. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/23/ssd_market_q3fy18/

That's interesting and thanks for the link.

I would have guessed SSDs surpassed HDDs already since 2 years on the Client.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#200

Post by objektif »

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.

Thank you very much.
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