back to article Disk sales up 4%: No sign of Flash or Cloud impact yet

Despite the impact of the global downturn on global markets, disk sales in the second quarter were 4 per cent higher than in the first. Research numbers from IHS iSuppli showed 167.1 million drives were shipped in the quarter ending in June, compared to 160.5 million in the first quarter. The impact of the Japanese earthquake …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    "No sign of Flash or Cloud impact yet"

    Is the Reg trying to get the word "cloud" into EVERY story this week???

  2. A J Stiles
    Holmes

    Hmm

    Even if people are storing data "in the cloud", as opposed to somewhere where they can exert some control over it, surely somebody somewhere must be buying disks to store it all on?

    1. Andrew-Winning!
      IT Angle

      I agree

      Also, what if the average storage requirements are increased by 14%? Thus, 10% of the additional storage is in the cloud?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You can have my DVDs, USB flash drive and Hard Disk Drive

    If you can prise them from my cold, dead hands.

    Cloud is just client/server computing, as it has always been, its just the workloads can now float between servers.

    Its marketing BS.

    The Reg puts the word cloud into every story because they are being paid big bucks to do so.

  4. vincent himpe

    It's simple...

    Magnetic storage is here to stay for a long time.

    4 years ago there was the push for flash disks in 'business laptops' we say 16 32 and 64 Gbyte flash storage (you can't call those 'drives') in 2.5 inch formfactor. After that it petered out until MLC came along to push SLC out of the way. But price is still high.

    Then came the Tablet boom. 16 or 32 Gbyte and no longer in 2.5 inch format. Meanwhile the demand for flash for ipod / iphone and other smartphones has eroded the price further to 2$/gbyte ( 2 years ago ). Still a steep ticket compaerd to classic magnetic storage.

    And now comes another gamechanger : the cloud. Your local machine ( whether tablet or notebook ) no longer needs oodles of storage. Just enough for the OS , some apps and some local data so you can work 'offline'. The rest is stored 'in the cloud'.

    Now, let's take a look at this cloud shall we. You used to have your colection of thousands of family pictures/ video / whatever on one drive in one computer. We shift to the cloud : these pictures are replicated on multiple datacenters , multiple drives.. ( possibly a raid system ) So your data now resides in multiple copies on multiple disks. Previously 1 drive , now many more ...

    And a lot of people start using 'mini' clouds like a home server or net disk.

    So the demand for drives is going up, while the demand for increasing flash is going down ...

    The demand for notebook disks and, to a lesser extent desktop disks, may go down ; but server storage is going up drastically. Furhtermore there is no further price erosion in flash since nobody asks for large capacity. All you need is bootvolume and temporary storage. This has an impact on the price of harddisk replacements: those prices don:t drop.. so they remain unattractive from that point of view. Also the size increase is not there. you don;t need 64 or 128 for the bootvolume and temp storage. you can perfectly live with 16 or 32... the rest will be sucked in from the cloud or even worse : streaming. There is no need to storae anything locally. click and it comes... but it comes from magnetic storage.

    And there is more. Datacenters manage the physically wear out drives. Simply because the headstack is almost nonstop in motion. These drives will need replacement ...

  5. Stefan 2

    Aren't storage sales always guaranteed to increase?

    I mean, we never really need less storage, do we? I've bought 5 drives in the past 6 months and they were the first drive purchases I'd made in more than 5 years.

    Gosh, how speeds have improved!

    Wow, I now have a 2TB drive where previously my largest was 300GB!

    4TB drives announced from Seagate today, which means I will probably bag a 3TB drive when their price curve levels out at a nice, low level.

    Everything is HD and 3D now, which takes up a bunch of storage. A 3TB drive or two will be most welcome in my household.

    That's just consumer space. Businesses are processing ever more data, seeking ever faster IO. We may have hit a bit of a bump in the worldwide economy but that doesn't suddenly mean we need less storage. Probably more, to store all the data about failed companies...

  6. 5media
    Linux

    The advantage of any similar disruption is that the cloud domain gets updated more frequently as a result of such disruptions, than usual annual updates. Moreover, the problems get fixed sooner as the cloud disruptions make big news as soon as something like this happens. I’m sure the authorities will be able to hold the services of cloud with much reliability in the future.

    http://cloudtechsite.com/blogposts/microsoft-and-google-suffer-from-recent-cloud-interruptions.html

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