back to article Spinning rust supply chain seizes up after BIG disk demand spike

Storage analyst outfit Trendfocus says that the hard disk industry has just posted its best growth in seven years, but that it comes with its own problems. The firm classifies Q3 2016 as having delivered the industry a “strong rebound in demand”, thanks largely to demand for nearline storage. But the disk-counters says …

  1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    5-7 years.

    1. Replacement cycle starts.

    2. The desktop sales have finally started picking up a bit - they were severely depressed by Win8/Vista. They are again - replacement sales.

    So there will be some rust shipments to match (a lot of the replacement will end up with flash).

    1. Version 1.0 Silver badge

      Exactly - that was my first thought too - and those ISP's have to store all your data somewhere so they are going to need disk farms and of course, All Disks Must Die. Some will be replaced by flash but the majority will not, form factor, interface requirements etc will keep at least another round of purchases relying on spinning rust.

      1. JustNiz

        >> All Disks Must Die. Some will be replaced by flash but the majority will not

        Flash dies too, its just that no-one notices because it doesn't fail all at once, it gets smaller over time as cells die. Flash has FAR less write cycles than spinning disks.

        I just bought 32TB of spinning disk storage for about $1000. I'll take flash more seriously when the same storage as flash wouldn't cost me as much as a new luxury car.

        1. Alan Brown Silver badge

          " Flash has FAR less write cycles than spinning disks."

          For the vast majority of applications, that much storage (the 32TB you fingered) is write once, read never, which means that flash limited to 1000 or fewer write cycles is fine. And if you're concerned about it you can use some sort of hierarchical filesystem manager.

    2. Alan Brown Silver badge

      We aren't placing desktops with spinners in them anymore.

      SSDs are cheap enough that they've eaten the sub-1TB end of the market and they'll inexorably start closing in on the larger sizes.

      Large, slow QLC SSDs will still be more reliable then spinners, which means 5+ year warranties vs 12 months on consumer drives. It doesn't take many warranty claims to eat a retailer's margins so they'll start putting these in as a self-defence measure.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not all applications require flash

    Why buy flash for apps that don't need it?

    Just not economical to do so.

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