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Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

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Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#61

Post by magila »

mathgeek wrote: post #54
magila wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's every reason to expect the PPU of SSD's to continue trending downward Not really. The big driver for cost reduction in SSDs was process shrinks, but the latest processes are actually more expensive per-transistor than older ones so that ship has more-or-less sailed. You've got 3D NAND but that's even more expensive to manufacture so the cost savings are marginal at best. It remains to be seen if XPoint will…

To my point, this is still the same argument that has been made time and time again with regards to storage. Short term upticks are easy to see in historical SSD pricing, even when looking at the longterm trend. Source: http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm

If you think this is the same you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the industry. Moore's Law as we know it is dead, shrinking the node size isn't cutting costs like it used to. A lot of people are still in denial over this, but it's going to have major repercussions in the IC industry.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#62

Post by iscrewyou »

lightedman wrote: post #8
fapjacks wrote: post #2

Couldn't shake that Maxtor curse. Good riddance, I say. I'm involved in the Seagate class action over bad drives, but like many other class actions I've been involved in, I seriously doubt I'll see much of the thousands of dollars I've sunk into drives Seagate sold me knowing they had atrocious failure rates. Perhaps a five or ten dollar consolation check like usual.

Drop out of the class-action, file your own suit, and demand whole remedy.

Can you do that? Can't the judge say that you have to drop the individual suit and join the class action because they are similar complaints?

I have no legal experience and I'm thinking completely from the point that the judge would want his job to be easier.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#63

Post by lightedman »

iscrewyou wrote: post #62
lightedman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drop out of the class-action, file your own suit, and demand whole remedy.

Can you do that? Can't the judge say that you have to drop the individual suit and join the class action because they are similar complaints? I have no legal experience and I'm thinking completely from the point that the judge would want his job to be easier.

Nope, you can chose to not join the class-action (or remove yourself form it) and pursue your own legal matter in court. The judge might try to fold your case into the class-action, but only if that class-action falls within their circuit's jurisdiction.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#64

Post by j3097736 »

comboy wrote: post #51
simooooo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a ram disk for your browser cache

I don't know how exactly it works under Windows, but at least under Linux such optimizations usually don't pay off much since most used pages are already kept in the RAM anyway.

My HDD on Linux barely has any disk access and is perfectly usable, meanwhile windows just loves trashing it for minutes, even with page file & unneeded services disabled.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#65

Post by sandworm101 »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #46
ksec wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but when you are looking at Petabyte scale system, unless those data are Hot and IOPs are concerned, HDD still wins given it is 10x cheaper. And NAND has already hit the curve where it isn't going to get cheaper every year. NAND price is actually on the rise. Smaller Node is now actually more expensive, multiple layer are hard to yield. So relatively speaking the 10x gap between HDD and SSD wont change in the nex…

It is not 10x cheaper, it is only cheaper to purchase initially. It is cheaper to power (NAND is more energy efficient than an electric motor), it is cheaper to maintain (solid state media does not suffer mechanical failures), and it is cheaper to use (each query on an SSD takes slightly less time than on spinning media). It's only 10x cheaper if you ignore those facts. Now, how you value those factors may vary. Also…

I think you overestimate the cost of electricity over the expected life of a drive. These arent space heaters. Pennies per day, adding up to perhaps tens of dollars difference between the two options.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#66

Post by germinalphrase »

castratikron wrote: post #45
Taek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy HDDs for $20 / TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.

You are correct in that hard drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit of storage than solid state drives. Then again, tape drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit storage than hard drives. When was the last time you saw a tape drive?

The film industry commonly uses tapes for digital storage of their media. I've been told (but don't know this myself) that government uses tape for long term data storage as well.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#67

Post by Taek »

vidarh wrote: post #24
Taek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy HDDs for $20 / TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.

It's not that simple. How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year? How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)? How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload? SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you're not getting the right picture.

A spinning disk iirc draws something like 15w. That's essentially true whether you've got a 1TB drive or an 8 TB drive. And it's only that high while the drive is spun up.

They are bulkier, but ultimately an SSD is going to need space and servers too.

It's not a competition at this point. SSDs are good if you need low latency or high IOPS, HDDs are good if small delays and low IOPS is acceptable, and tape is good if you don't mind waiting several minutes to get the data.

TCO drops significantly from SSD to HDD, and significantly again from HDD to tape. And a large, modern datacenter will frequently have massive amounts of all three.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#68

Post by runeks »

tracker1 wrote: post #56
vidarh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple. How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year? How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)? How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload? SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you're not getting the right picture.

Funny, the 8TB drives I was looking at for a new NAS in a few months are around $300... I'm still debating between a 4 or 5-drive nas... but lets say, including the cost of the nas device I'm paying around $2k for 24TB of reduntant storage solution. 24TB of ssd storage alone will cost me over $6k, let alone the cost of a more expensive base NAS box, meaning 7-8K. That's upwards of 4X the cost. That's the difference b…

So if we're at only 3x the cost for SSD, how many years until HDD cost parity is reached? 5 years? This seems like a sensible guess to me.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#69

Post by tw04 »

vidarh wrote: post #24
Taek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy HDDs for $20 / TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.

It's not that simple. How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year? How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)? How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload? SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you're not getting the right picture.

> How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)?

The maintenance on enterprise storage is generally a percentage of purchase price. So it's actually cheaper.

>How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year?

4.5 watts idle/8 watts max for a spinning drive vs. 4.5 watts idle/11 watts max for a large capacity SSD (15TB Samsung). The power consumption thing was a much better story comparing 3.5" 15k RPM drives. 7200 RPM drives it's basically a wash unless you're talking about relatively small capacity SSDs.

>How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?

That's really the crux of the issue. SPINNING drives are not dead. FAST spinning drives are dead. 10k/15k drives are going to see the end of their useful life in the modern datacenter far faster than anyone predicted 2 years ago. Outside of legacy systems I would expect sales of 10k RPM drives to fall off a cliff if not completely disappear before the end of 2020.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#70

Post by mynewtb »

adamconroy wrote: post #32

Not a surprise to me, their HDDs are junk. I've had two burn out in work machines and one personal external burn out. I never buy their gear anymore

I've been using seagate drives exclusively for the past 8 years with no unusual failures. I will always buy seagate.
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