[HN Gopher] HDD Sales Crater, Drop 35% Year-over-Year
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HDD Sales Crater, Drop 35% Year-over-Year
Author : ms512
Score : 60 points
Date : 2023-04-15 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| superkuh wrote:
| It's crazy to me how many people will buy a computer with 250 GB
| of total storage and then end up with a series of rube-goldberg'd
| in slow/fragile external hard drives just to get close to the
| performance of a "normal" computer.
|
| SSD only pre-built commercial computer offerings have set back
| the average computer's ability to do useful work by 15 years. SSD
| are just too expensive for most people to use for useful amounts
| of storage (say, family photos+system backups). And even if it's
| a pre-built desktop the emergence of SSDs has made it somehow
| acceptable to sell a 1TB HDD in a modern computer. It's scammy.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Your information is out of date. Here is a 2 TB NVMe drive for
| US$69: https://www.microcenter.com/product/651303/inland-
| qn322-2tb-...
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I wouldn't say things were all that much better before, with
| low end machines shipping with 5400RPM (or even 4200RPM) laptop
| drives. Those things were so slow that even if their capacities
| were far more voluminous than the SSDs that ship in modern low
| end machines, their usefulness was questionable because e.g.
| sifting through a massive photo collection was miserable even
| then and would've only gotten worse as average photo filesizes
| increased.
|
| Base configs should absolutely come at least double the SSD
| capacity they currently do, though, in everything but maybe
| bargain bin Chromebooks.
| rektide wrote:
| Phones being 64 or 128GB and no SD card is same level
| absurdity. What a shitty act. Given how cheap SD cards are it's
| just such a misservice.
|
| It's indeed getting harder because some phones are literally
| now eSIM only. Before, there was near no excuse. My last
| phone's sim caddy had a SSD caddy on the other side, which just
| takes up so little extra volume & requires so little extra
| design/features.
| wtallis wrote:
| WTF are you going on about? Adding external drives has nothing
| to do with "performance of a 'normal' computer".
|
| Many people genuinely don't need more than 250GB in their
| computer; many more will never need more than 1TB. If you're
| having trouble believing that such users exist, you need a
| serious reality check about how normal people use their
| computers. Most people who buy a pre-built computer with 1TB or
| less of storage are not being meaningfully constrained in their
| ability to do useful work with that computer.
|
| And regardless of how much storage is in your computer, you
| need storage that's _not_ in the computer to hold backups. Are
| you basing your expectations for how much storage a computer
| should come equipped with on the needs for primary storage
| _and_ backup /archival storage done in defiance of all common
| sense and recommendations about where and how to store backups?
| moffkalast wrote:
| It absolutely amazes me how many people spent good money on a
| 128 GB NVMe boot drive that speeds up their initial OS loading
| a tiny bit... which represents probably a fraction of a percent
| of the total time spent waiting for disk operations in total,
| and then spend the entire time working from a slow HDD instead.
| Like congrats for spending all your budget on your garage door
| instead of your car.
| agumonkey wrote:
| doesn't surprise me much, boot/resume are part of context
| switching and it's psychologically very important; you often
| want the cost of getting in and out as cheap as possible
| xigency wrote:
| I don't know about you but when I switched over from HDD to
| SSD years back I did some crude measurements and found the
| time it took to boot into a usable environment went from >=
| 90 seconds to < 25 seconds.
|
| And it's not just booting the system that was noticeable.
| Everything became more responsive. It was like night and day.
|
| I have no problem separating my OS drive from my
| games/photos/backups. It's actually what I prefer to do. And
| I like to see that the operating system isn't so bloated it
| can't fit in 100 GB.
| TylerE wrote:
| That's not what he's saying. He's saying that the
| difference between a bog standard SSD (like just a decent
| USB3 external or whatever vs NVME) is really not that
| noticeable.
| wtallis wrote:
| NVMe has been the predominant standard for SSDs for
| several years now. Even USB "portable SSDs" are almost
| exclusively using NVMe drives internally now rather than
| being built around SATA SSDs or SSD controllers that
| natively speak USB (which is the low-end solution used
| for thumb drives).
| z3t4 wrote:
| HDDs are cheap and last a long time. Perfect for redundant
| configurations.
| BooneJS wrote:
| I have 4 HDDs in NAS and one 12 TB drive for Time Machine. It's
| great to have 4 TB in your MacBook, but it's so expensive and I
| personally don't need to actively have more than 1 TB at any one
| time (and maybe not even half that), meaning the rest can be
| offloaded to a NAS.
| ilamont wrote:
| Can anyone give some insights into what trends are driving this
| beyond a global drop in PC shipments? For instance, longer-
| lasting hardware, shift to cloud storage, decline in crypto
| mining (see reqs https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-
| core/features/requirements), other factors?
| loeg wrote:
| Cost cutting measures by hyperscalers in response to non-zero
| interest rates.
| ms512 wrote:
| Essentially this; drive manufacturers' financial reports are
| a good source of data here.
|
| For example, WD's Q2 financial report [1] shows:
|
| Q1 2023 Cloud Revenue: $1,829M
|
| Q2 2023 Cloud Revenue: $1,224M (down 33%)
|
| Q1 2023 Customer Revenue: $679M
|
| Q2 2023 Customer Revenue: $794M (up 17%)
|
| [1] https://investor.wdc.com/static-
| files/5c73f7fb-869a-4850-bd2...
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| 0.5-1TB SSDs are cheap now. The only HDDs being bought are
| really big drives.
| TylerE wrote:
| 2TB drives are often cheaper (per TB) than 1TB drives these
| days.
| wolongong942 wrote:
| In my case i just buy used HDDs from the local PC repair shop
| for pennies, and use them for my long term storage and offsite
| backups. Shops usually swap people's HDDs out for SSDs to speed
| up their PC, so they have a ton of ~1tb ones to sell for cheap.
| I doubt people like myself are impacting the market for HDDs
| though.
| MrFoof wrote:
| HDD still has a point, but as SSD prices diminish, we'll continue
| to see it drop off.
|
| One of the main reasons is density. You can put 32 E1.S EDSFF
| SSDs in a single rack unit fairly commonly nowadays. It wouldn't
| surprise me if some 1U chassis did 40.
|
| There's also reliability. They're not infallible, but it's
| looking like AFRs for SSDs might be half that of HDDs. That's a
| _big_ deal.
|
| Of course there's also cost. Prosumer SSDs are about $70-75/TB
| now, and common PCIe 4.0 U.2/U.3 enterprise and datacenter SSDs
| are in the $90/TB range. PCIe 5.0 enterprise and datacenter SSDs?
| "Yikes", is what I'll say. Have fun negotiating with your rep on
| those. ;) Meanwhile, 7200rpm SATA HDDs can be had for $15/TB.
| These are retail end-user prices. If you're doing huge volumes as
| a cloud provider or a huge SAAS business, pricing goes quite a
| bit lower.
|
| -- -----
|
| Where do HDDs still make sense? Sustained transfer operations,
| nearline storage, and as part of a storage tier where you can
| intelligently hide the HDDs behind SSDs _(lots of solutions for
| this)_ and get SSD performance most of the time, and guarantee it
| where it matters. There 's many use cases where they just
| dominate because of their low cost, and the ability to get the
| performance required for a lot cheaper.
|
| Though compared to high-end enterprise SSDs, 7200rpm SATA HDDs
| are actually still fine for power, typically pulling 6-7W per HDD
| instead of 11-15W for fairly common enterprise SSDs. Some
| enterprise SSDs _(mostly PCIe 5, mostly E3-based form factors)_
| can pull 25W, if not 40W. Remember, enterprise SSDs don 't do
| things like SLC cache much -- they just have a MOUNTAIN of NAND
| _(plus PLP capacitors)_ you can read /write from in massive
| parallelization. There's no ingest drop-off as a result, but you
| do have to power all that NAND.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > Where do HDDs still make sense?
|
| You forgot 'cold storage'. The data on SSDs will degrade if
| they are not powered on.
| MrFoof wrote:
| Yep, though it depends on the use case. If you want truly
| cold storage that's super rarely accessed, LTO tape is really
| hard to beat on $/TB!
| Eisenstein wrote:
| If the TB is less than ~20, then the equation breaks since
| you have buy the unit in addition to the tape. So, yeah, it
| depends on use but I would argue on the consumer level most
| people aren't storing that much data. But I could be wrong.
| steveh777 wrote:
| I think it's a lot more than 20TB - contemporary LTO
| drives are on the order of $10k!
| nubinetwork wrote:
| So I just bought a 256gb nvme drive for a build, but I've been
| waiting for large capacity ssds for years...
|
| It seems the ssd market isn't interested in making large drives
| unless they are dram-less (anything cheap) or have very limited
| write cycles (eg samsung qvo).
| wtallis wrote:
| It's more accurate to say that the SSD vendors aren't
| interested in trying to market consumer drives that cost
| upwards of $1500, because there really isn't a market for such
| drives. Plenty of enthusiasts will say they would like an 8+ TB
| high-end drive, but few people are willing to spend more on
| their SSD than on their GPU.
| rektide wrote:
| I hope the HDD market can survive. I really really appreciate
| being able to buy a 20TB Exos for $400. SSDs are so absurdly
| great, but I really like being able to have a nice data-archive.
| When Covid hit and the whole PC parts market dried up, and the
| Chia chain thing was happening, there were days where I was
| thinking I'll never be able to have affordable bulk storage
| again.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Out of curiosity, I had a look at the current SSD and HDD prices
| available in a local e-commerce site: Capacity
| HDD SSD 500 GB 47 EUR 36 EUR 1 TB 41
| EUR 49 EUR 2 TB 54 EUR 89 EUR 4 TB 77
| EUR 264 EUR 8 TB 161 EUR 531 EUR 16 TB
| 313 EUR none
|
| So it seems like HDDs are still more cost effective for storing
| larger amounts of data, as long as your workloads permit that,
| but for smaller capacities SSDs now reign supreme, cost wise.
| There's also the fact that most of these HDDs that I looked at
| were 3.5" but SSDs were either 2.5" or of the M.2 variety, which
| may or may not matter, depending on what you want to put them in.
|
| I still think that an SSD for your boot drive is a no-brainer,
| but for other data storage HDDs still make sense. If the trend of
| affordable SSDs keeps up, that view might change in the future.
| grogenaut wrote:
| So I got a good deal at $121 for my 8tb wd iron wolf reds then
| wtallis wrote:
| It's also interesting to look at the trend over time for what
| capacity the price crossover point is at. Right now, it's
| around 1TB, but it's been moving steadily upward ever since
| small SSDs first started to reach "cheap" prices. Hard drive
| spindle motors, actuators, and clean-room assembly aren't
| getting cheaper, but every time flash gets denser the capacity
| of a cheap SSD consisting of a controller and two or four NAND
| dies gets bigger.
|
| When you analyze that trend in light of how many consumer use
| cases show little or no growth in capacity requirements over
| time (due to factors like cloud storage and video streaming),
| it's hard to see any long-term future for hard drives in
| consumer PCs.
| Gigachad wrote:
| For the average consumer, 1TB is more than enough storage.
| All of my photos, videos, and important documents added up
| comes out to 50GB. Everything else is just programs and games
| which can easily be deleted and redownloaded.
| TylerE wrote:
| Even on gigabit, many AAA games are over 100GB these days.
| That's big enough to get annoying. My personal system has
| 4.5TB of SSD and 8TB of HDD (Used for backups, etc), and
| that sometimes doesn't always feel like enough - and I'm
| not even doing video editing or anything.
| Gigachad wrote:
| No one is playing triple A games on a HDD anymore though.
| I did the math and found it was about the same speed to
| redownload from steam as it was to copy a game off the
| HDD.
| maccard wrote:
| I wish you were right. Based on the profiling data I've
| seen, plenty of people are... They shouldn't be, but they
| are.
| ms512 wrote:
| A decent aggregator for current HDD/SSD prices is
| https://diskprices.com/
|
| It essentially backs up the parent poster's data, just lets us
| navigate across a larger set of data.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Curiously, I just bought an hdd for the first time in years,
| after noticing I could get 22TB of storage for $300.
|
| My use case is penalty a bit particular, though... It's really
| just for localized copies of large datasets that exist elsewhere.
| So it's totally ok if the drive dies, since the data lives
| somewhere else. I doubt most people have a real need for that
| much localized data these days.
| exikyut wrote:
| * * *
| flatiron wrote:
| Personally I just find it easier to push everything to the cloud
| and not deal with RAIDZ and failing disk drives. Maybe I'm just
| old.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| I have 50 TB useable in my home server. This requires a total
| of 6 drives (raidz1) for let's say $300 each.
|
| Upfront storage = $1800
|
| Power consumption (for the entire server) = $20/month
|
| If we bundle storage into the first year's cost, it comes out
| to about $2000.
|
| On the other hand, if you use Backblaze B2, storage alone would
| cost $3000 per year. If you're downloading content regularly
| (media), it adds up pretty damn quickly.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| I can get 18TB (Toshiba MG09ACA 512e) for 260EUR (tax
| included) which would put me at usable 90TB. The cheapest
| drive starting at 10TB is a DC HC520 12TB SAS for 185EUR
|
| I've considered building a NAS for years but I don't know why
| I just don't do it. Maybe its just the fear of the storage
| noise which increases a lot on high capacity drives.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Ah a fellow TF2 player :)
|
| To be honest, the noise isn't too bad with a good case. I
| use a Define R5, but I hear the Meshify also has great
| noise suppression.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Depends how much data you have. Cloud storage can be incredibly
| expensive if you work with audio and video.
| [deleted]
| lockhouse wrote:
| Modern OSes practically require an SSD. The difference in
| performance is particularly noticeable on Windows. HDDs are great
| for local backups still.
| mirker wrote:
| OS needs less than 100GB, though, so mixed drives seems more
| cost effective.
| wolpoli wrote:
| HDD is losing economy of scale. I wonder when will HDD become
| completely uncompetitive at any size in terms of $/TD.
| redder23 wrote:
| Should that not be reflect in the price? Maybe I should w8 a
| while, I kind of plan of buying a HDD but not sure what size.
| loeg wrote:
| It is very much reflected in prices.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| And everyone's data losing bits on all those ssd's.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| I had a Crucial SSD with a silicon bug in ~2013 and haven't
| chosen them for storage since then. Gave them a lot of money
| for RAM before that though.
| TylerE wrote:
| I've had far fewer (read: zero) issue with the dozen or so SSDs
| I've personally had over the past decade or so. The same is not
| true for hard drives. Having no moving parts really eliminates
| a lot of failure modes.
| mastax wrote:
| The 14TB HGST Ultrastar DC HC530 drives I bought in server builds
| eighteen months ago (delivered one year ago) have gone down from
| $330 to $200 in that time period. Pretty amazing. 16-20TB drives
| are starting to lose their premium as well[0].
|
| SSDs may have dropped even further. I had to unsubscribe from
| /r/buildapcsales[1] because I couldn't stop buying the SSD deals
| that popped up. I wanted to avoid juggling multiple storage
| drives in this machine, but now all my M.2 slots are full. Stuck
| one in a cheap USB enclosure to make a damn good flash drive.
|
| QLC drives are starting to approach HDD prices. Here's an extreme
| example. Two months ago $100 was a good deal for a 2TB QLC
| drive[2]. Now you can get them (in limited circumstances) for
| $45[3].
|
| [0]: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-
| drive/#f=2&s...
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/
|
| [2]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/111b8n8/ssd_...
|
| [3]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/12fv841/ssd_...
| kevviiinn wrote:
| If you're willing to get used you can get 14tb for 115 on eBay
| or 16tb for 160, one hell of a steal for a homelab IMO and it
| complements having some ssds for fast storage as well for some
| services
| blihp wrote:
| While spinning rust was destined to lose the majority of the
| market to flash, I think the hard disk companies accelerated the
| move with the SMR fiasco. It got me moving more things to SSDs
| sooner than I had planned.
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