back to article What the world needs now is... not disk drives

Flash goes the PC and notebook disk drive. Dramatic and persistent disk drive sales declines heralds changes at WD and Seagate as their disk drive job engine slows down. With PC sales falling and notebook/tablet flash use climbing the outlook for disk drive manufacturers on the desktop, sofa and kitchen table is looking bleak …

  1. Arctic fox

    Hilarious.

    A virtual pint, a cuddly toy and the sliding doors to whoever gets the song that the subbie was referencing here. Well done Reg, that was genuinely funny.

    1. x 7

      Re: Hilarious.

      I'll have that pint

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNA5krNq3zM

  2. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Perhaps the Utah Data Center has been completed?

    Maybe Facebook, YouTube, and the like, have started silently deleting files that nobody would ever notice have gone missing?

    Perhaps NetFlix is switching to h.265?

    Perhaps the exponential growth of capacity per drive has overtaken the rate of content generation?

    Oh, yeah. Windows 8 or higher ...

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: Perhaps the Utah Data Center has been completed?

      "Oh, yeah. Windows 8 or higher ..."

      ...and don't forget the requirements soon to be imposed on all ISPs but every government, to make copies of everything that everyone pulls down off the internet, just in case.

  3. Efros

    SSD outrageous premium

    The use of SSDs in laptops and notebooks would go faster if it wasn't for the ridiculous price surcharge the manufacturers slap onto a laptop when you add an SSD to the build. To exchange a 1TB drive in an HP for a 256GB SSD they want a surcharge of $190. A decent SSD will cost you less than $100 retail, and a 1TB hybrid notebook drive can be had for about $80 retail. Their maths don't add up. They must have a helluva lot of spinning rust in their inventory.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: SSD outrageous premium

      Laptop design would benefit massively from switching to M.2, almost as much as when they ditched optical drives.

    2. pixl97

      Re: SSD outrageous premium

      >Their maths don't add up.

      Their math adds up perfectly. Charge very little for SSDs and you go bankrupt.

      Right now they want to add SSDs to their top end lines where they might make a hundred or so profit on the laptop. But if you put cheap SSDs in the low end slabs there is very little reason to buy a $600+ notebook any longer. There is not a significant performance difference for the average user.

      I've taken countless Core 2 duo laptops and replaced the slow rust with SSDs and they become a perfectly usable box even though they are years old now. Unless significant performance increases come in the near future a laptop with a large SSD might be the last PC you buy in a decade. This kills the manufacture.

      1. Efros

        Re: SSD outrageous premium

        It is exactly what I do, and their maths adds up in terms of how they screw over the average computer user. The premium is still outrageous. The laptop I'm on right now was sold with a 24GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, replaced the SSD with a mSATA 250GB SSD and kept the HDD as a secondary drive. Required some jiggery pokery as it wouldn't boot from the installed SSD with the other drive there but all good in the end. At that time there was no option to install an SSD on HP's site, and indeed for most laptops on the site right now there is no SSD option, and all the major manufacturers are the same in that respect. The one thing that can make a low end laptop bearable to use they are reaming you to install.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: SSD outrageous premium

        Unless significant performance increases come in the near future

        For what purpose? Admittedly in the "enterprise" market where corporate IT procurement buy whatever low performing shit is cheap there's a need for more performance to counteract their cheap spec and corporate bloatware. But in the personal user space I've not seen the ghastly spinning circle for years.

        Any corporate IT types reading this may care to reflect on the contempt their users have for them. But if you want to pay me to watch a crap graphic of a spinning circle to save a trivial amount on your low spec IT hardware, you feel free.

      3. chivo243 Silver badge

        Re: SSD outrageous premium

        @pixl97

        "the last PC you buy in a decade."

        Agree 100% I have some older computers that have new life due to the addition of an SSD.

        I don't see any new laptops that jump at me as being quality products. Nothing makes me want to make a purchase.

        Can a large downturn in sales possibly drive quality and performance up?

        1. Efros

          Re: SSD outrageous premium

          Yeah, this laptop was purchased about 2 years ago, its predecessor (a six year old lenovo Ideapad) looked as if it was going to fail through physical problems rather than electronic. The hinges were extremely loose and the video connection was getting a bit iffy. Bought a new one, the old one is actually still going strong its new owner eventually had to replace the video cable and managed to tighten the hinges. As far as performance is concerned the old one is still up to everyday tasks, I wouldn't try video editing or photoshopping on it but it still outperforms the low to midrange crap that is on the market just now, largely due to an SSD and a crapload of RAM.

    3. JeffyPoooh
      Pint

      Re: SSD outrageous premium

      So keep the $190. Spend the $100. Reinstall a clean OS onto the new SSD. Purchase any sort of $10 adapter to interface the HDD to the laptop, use for Backup Images. Use the leftover $80 for a nice dinner.

      Win - clean install.

      Win - SSD.

      Win - Backup HDD.

      Win - nice dinner.

  4. John 104

    Look for Rising Prices

    I can see this only ending poorly for consumers who need larger storage and for enterprises as well. With less demand, inventory will shrink and prices will go up.

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Look for Rising Prices

      Thatt'll depend. If the inventory shrink only occurs at lower capacities, which makes sense, then while prices may go up, so will capacity (that's the one place rust still dominates--bulk storage fields where capacity trumps performance). Meanwhile, demand for nonmechanical storage is rising and pressuring price drops. Have you seen how cheap flash sticks are these days (yes, I know, relatively bad example here, but it shows the trend).

  5. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    Two questions

    The article makes a case that spinning platters will disappear from smaller (person-facing) machines in the near future, but what about the rest of the market? Will we be reading, in a couple of years time, about how spinning rust is going the way of mercury delay lines because some slow but capacious form of flash now actually matches even the largest drives on cost and knocks it into the sidelines on performance?

    And, separately, does this actually matter to the business prospects of existing drive manufacturers, since they are the ones mostly likely to be offering those products anyway?

  6. AJ MacLeod

    Good riddance

    The sooner we're rid of what has become the least reliable component in computing, the better. It's annoying how slow the likes of Dell are in offering basic SSDs as an option on their run of the mill business desktops - if they would do so the HDD figures would soon dive even further...

    1. Chemical Bob

      Re: Good riddance

      "The sooner we're rid of what has become the least reliable component in computing, the better."

      You mean the user?

    2. DropBear

      Re: Good riddance

      Actually, I think HDDs are at least a magnitude more reliable; I honestly can't recall when was the last time I had even a bad sector on one, let alone any more major meltdown. Most of the time it's a gradual process and the rest of the stuff outside the section that went bad can even be recovered easily - just plug it into anything, mount, read, done. SSDs, on the other hand seem to be basically guaranteed to suffer sudden catastrophic failure within a few years, when their internal firmware juggling the silicon drops the ball for any one of a million reasons and chances are you'll recover nothing after that.

  7. x 7

    the problem is that modern hard drives are too reliable.

    they used to start dying after two years, and by four years were 90% gone.

    now 90% will last five years or more

    1. AJ MacLeod

      Too reliable? Not in my experience. In fact the trend is definitely downwards and has been for a long time. I can think of several properly old HDDs which still spin away happily if required (we're talking almost 30 years old.) yet I regularly replace laptop and desktop hard drives only to find them full of bad sectors and throwing read errors a year or so later. (Despite the marketing, I don't find enterprise drives any more reliable either.) There is no component which I find DOA more frequently than hard drives, and that's regardless of brand.

      I can only imagine that the (admittedly quite impressive) storage density now achieved leaves far less margin for error - the old drives are physically the same size or even larger but only stored a tiny fraction of the data the new ones do.

      1. Charles 9

        And at the same time you have people who swap in SSDs only to come back a short time later due to catastrophic controller failures, so at best the situation is rather inconsistent.

      2. jason 7

        Yeah HDD reliability has nosedived since the flood about 5 years ago. I think they dropped manufacturing tolerances a few % to get more product out the door and didnt bother to up them again after things got back to normal.

        One other thing I would say as a IT repair guy is that if you have a reasonably new (3 years or fewer) Toshiba HDD in your laptop, you really do have a ticking timebomb there.

        1. x 7

          "if you have a reasonably new (3 years or fewer) Toshiba HDD in your laptop, you really do have a ticking timebomb there."

          that was always the case...

          it used to amuse me that the more expensive Tosh laptops always had Hitachi drives....

    2. Adam 1

      At least HDD usually get the click of death a few days before they totally go. SSDs just throw you a surprise party when they feel their duty cycle is up.

      1. Seajay#

        There's a well known paper from google on this.

        http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

        TL;DR it's really tricky to predict drive failures, don't rely on that click of death, don't rely on SMART, don't rely on drive temp or anything else. Just make sure you've got good data redundancy and throw them away when they break.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just bought 5 4TB drives

    for my NAS. Running raid 5.

    Replaced 5 1TB drives.

    There is still a place for spinning rust or rather there will be until we can get large SSD's. By large I mean 4TB and over and not costing two arms, legs and both kidneys.

    Cloud? Yeah right. My photo archive is 3.6TB and growing between 250Gb and 500Gb a year.

    Do I really want that in the Cloud? Look what happened to 1-2-3 REg and Rackspace this week....

    My Nas is backed up to smaller spinning rust drives.

    1. P. Lee

      Re: Just bought 5 4TB drives

      And when you start looking at high-capacity systems and adding RAID, you can easily get to the point where SSD's saturate your network link long before you've got the capacity you want. In more recent systems, there may also be a problem getting enough ports (SATA3 or PCIEx) if your drives only have a few hundred Gig each.

      SSD's are great for client-facing and speed-critical (e.g. VM-serving) systems etc but there's no reason at all to move a media collection to SSD. There's usually little reason to put backups on SSD unless you need to backup while a system is down. That MythTV database.... you're probably better off with a bit more RAM than faster disk. Maybe run two instances, one off a ramdisk and the other off spinning rust. The ramdisk version is the one you access, the spinning rust just sync's off it.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Just bought 5 4TB drives

        "There may also be a problem getting enough ports (SATA3 or PCIEx) if your drives only have a few hundred Gig each."

        Never heard of sata or sas expanders?

        1. P. Lee

          Re: Just bought 5 4TB drives

          Well you could, but why would you pay more to buy more kit to obtain more performance than you can use?

          If you have 8 SSD's and it's in a NAS, You'll need 40G links before you start on the expanders.

  9. Unicornpiss
    Happy

    A V8 engine's a good start for me...

    The article didn't seem to mention (or maybe I missed it after a long day) the vastly increased reliability of SSDs over all but Enterprise-grade spinning rust, especially if you're considering WD's "Black" series or Seagate's "Momentus Thin" series, which IMHO might make reliable doorstops on a good day, but only if you mirror them.

    Mechanical drives have pretty much gone the way of the CRT and CD, at least for consumer devices. And I for one won't miss them. Since we've been replacing laptop drives with SSDs (mostly offerings from Crucial), we have gone from the "Monday morning disease" of 1-3 hard drive failures each week to exactly 3 SSD failures over the last 2 years, and these were Hynix and Lite-on offerings that shipped with Dell Ultrabook PCs, the lowest bidders I'm sure. I won't bother belaboring the point of how much faster they are as well.

  10. energystar
    Linux

    Nah!...

    Copyright killed the 'spining' industry. Sold my very old 3TB when realizing that codecs never where going to be... 'fixed'? My power rig is also dusting somewhere around here. Who need ground-up PCs today? In order to do WHAT?

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Nah!...

      By what do you mean by "fixed"? And what codecs? H.264 is a well-documented and mature codec with plenty of reliable implementations out there. H.265 is on its way as well but is still a bit young for most specs.

    2. energystar
      Holmes

      Re: Nah!...

      'Very Well Made' trans-codings become -curiously- 'Not so Well Made' years down the road. Have not taken the time to test if this problem is -in any way- related to the Great UEFI.

  11. Androgynous Cow Herd

    Why hate the media?

    Cpapcity prices for flash media are still far higher than rotating rust. It the enterprise space the big fight is currently whose data reduction techniques (compression, deduplication) yield the best results, which generates plenty of fodder for el reg press release articles, but the reality is that (proper) databases don't dedupe, and most rich media will neither compress or dedupe at all. Video surveillance alone is an enormous and sadly growing market where flash makes no sense at all. Flash is superior in some ways, HDD is superior in others - it just depends on the problem you are solving.

    So far as laptops, I do agree using platters instead of flash in there is silly given the use case for most laptops....better battery life and faster boots are key criteria for portables...but in the larger world of enterprise and Datacenter storage, rotating media still has some legs.

  12. Alan Brown Silver badge

    "until and unless enterprise and cloud capacity disk drive demand rises enough to offset the PC and notebook decline."

    Enterprise is rapidly transitioning to SSD in all but the biggest sizes - but then again I put a half dozen 4TB SSDs in _one_ machine a couple of months ago and I don't think that will be the last occasion.

    As for the price premium - that's falling fast - faster when you factor in the size of big spinny drives (3.5") vs their SSD replacements (2.5") (== much higher density) and the vastly reduced power consumption.

    And no, Seacrate and Western Dogdytil are not going to keep customers by switching to SSD - after years of market abuse customers are ready to jump ship. OEMs might keep buying if the price is right but they don't have to worry about long term reliability. Everyone else does.

    1. Charles 9

      The prices are ONLY falling fast in the small capacities. The larger ones (especially at the multi-TB levels you mention) carry a price premium ratio of around 5:1 or more, and there's no analogue to them at the consumer end.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        "The larger ones (especially at the multi-TB levels you mention) carry a price premium ratio of around 5:1 or more, and there's no analogue to them at the consumer end."

        Look again.

        The pricing for PM863s is slightly under linear (double capacity slightly less than double price) and a 4TB PM863 is about 3 times the price of an _enterprise certified_ Hitachi 7k 4Tb drive (which are about 400 quid for my Nexsan Satabeasts, not 100 and some change)

        It's at the point where I'm happy to eat the 25% premium and put SM863s in my domestic equipment for the smaller sizes - a 25% premium on enterprise spinners over consumer is unheard of.

        1. Charles 9

          YOU look again.

          "The pricing for PM863s is slightly under linear (double capacity slightly less than double price) and a 4TB PM863 is about 3 times the price of an _enterprise certified_ Hitachi 7k 4Tb drive (which are about 400 quid for my Nexsan Satabeasts, not 100 and some change)"

          So 1200 each. In case you haven't noticed, that's a pretty hefty chunk of change for 4TB, and your mileage may vary in regards to longevity. We've already heard plenty of stories of sudden catastrophic controller failure.

          Plus you didn't note my last sentence:

          "and there's no analogue to them at the consumer end."

          I just recently bought a pair of 5TB USB externals for $350 (two to provide a mirror) and a 4TB SATA internal for $150. Please show me a 4TB SSD for less then $750.

        2. Captain Obvious

          I agree with the other poster

          4 TB SSD drive model you suggested is us $2K for the cheapest. I can almost get 20 4 tb Seagate drives for a total of 80 GB with PLENTY of backup. SSD's will NEVER take over spinning rust UNTIL the price is truly MAYBE a 10% differential. I would buy them if they were say $150 - not $2K.

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