Falling PC tide strands Seagate's disk drive boats. Will WDC follow?

Dunno about that, ever since my first 40MB Conner I never had a HDD that wasn't continuously lacking free space. Photos are one thing - depending on you megapixel count, quality settings, potential RAW usage and cataloguing software habits (which might store all 184234 edited versions along the original) - but if you're recording any videos these days (in HD, natch, unless you're a 4K nutenthusiast...) you're definitely going to appreciate space. Then even without resorting to shadier (albeit ubiquitous) media procurement methods, if you just try to legitimately backup your 200-ish strong DVD collection you gonna need all you can get - SSDs are an unknown notion in that game...

Re: "spare "unused" storage capacity"

Not to disagree with you on a general basis, but personally I have never felt that I had any unused disk capacity before I slotted in my first 3TB disk.

The only reason I now have more than 20% unused space is because time has curtailed my disk needs - and I now have a NAS on which I can store over 5TB of data I was previously sticking in 3 different PCs over 14 (comparatively) tiny HDDs.

Before that, I was continually having to free space up by destroying existing data (sometimes said data was given the luxury of a backup before deletion if it was important enough to me). It was a major nuisance, and the space-shuffling always annoyed me until I found a new, temporarily stable situation.

Now I revel in seeing over 50% empty space in my partitions. I install new things without even thinking about disk space for a nanosecond. I am finally constraint-free. I am content.

Re: OT but you started it

The water goes in and out. Something about time and tide, apparently.

Re: Welcome to a mature market

We also appear to replace drives because they break quite a lot more.

I have an old 750GB drive from some years ago which was starting to make the increasing clicking sound that used to indicate that it was a good time to consider a replacement. So I replaced it.

Then the replacement had pretty serious problems with running increasingly slowly to the point of not being operable, so I replaced that only to have this replacement roll over and die more or less immediately. Fortunately I have seperate drives for the OS and data, otherwise the windows reloads would be pissing me off pretty severely.

As it is, i've just given up and put the 750GB drive back in, on the basis that it seems likely to last longer in service than a new replacement will do. Roll on either smaller and more reliable HDD's again, or larger and cheaper SSD's. :/

Re: Is SSD really the reason?

HDDs are the most reliable capacity medium at the moment. And honestly there is no reason to run a multi-terabyte NAS on SSD for the average user.

That said, if you are using your NAS/SAN for both storing large files and doing a lot of random IO on small files, you should look at ZFS with an L2ARC. I use the FreeNAS distro for this, and the ssd acceleration really helps.

> with five 4TB drives (16TB net)

Sounds dangerous. Raid5 style systems shouldn't be implemented on larger disks due to the much larger chance of multi-disk read errors on full rebuilds. (and BeyondRaid is a type of raid5 unless you have the Pro unit)

Re: Is SSD really the reason?

> SSDs are still wincingly expensive

NewEgg is selling a PNY 960GB drive for US$200. I wouldn't wince at that.

Re: It's not just SSD speed!

It used to be true that a laptop drive couldn't take that kind of treatment, but most of them today will withstand 100G while operating. But your point that the SSD is more reliable in a more dynamic environment is a good one.

Problem with SSDs taking over the storage world is that there isn't enough FAB capacity to replace all the rotating rust being built out there, at least not for the next 5-10 years (given current growth projections for storage and flash fabs coming on line). Look at the details of the numbers on rotating drives sold; total hard drive sales were around 500 Exabytes in 2015 (http://www.anandtech.com/show/10098/market-views-2015-hard-drive-shipments), with the average disk size increasing from 1TB in 2014 to 1.4 TB in 2015 - with the per-unit cost staying approximately the same. Probably not a huge monetary growth industry, but the growth in storage demand will keep HDDs in the market for quite a while.

Total shipped SSD capacity in 2015 was somewhere around 40 Exabytes (hard to find trustable numbers on this), with the SSD penetration being primarily desktop/laptop (for all the reasons you suggest).

SSDs are getting much greater adoption in enterprise (server) environments these days (density is one of the big reasons; there's talk about 30TB 2.5 inch SSDs before the end of 2017) but there still just isn't the fab capacity to replace rotating drives for all storage yet. Seagate is behind in this particular race to flash, and may be ageing out of the race as a consequence; WDC made a smart move in picking up SanDisk, now to see if they can leverage that to stay ahead of the game. (BTW, Samsung has something over 50% of the SSD market, and virtually none of the rotating disk market; arguably they made the best move to flash of all the HDD manufacturers).