Hard Drive Revenue About To Take a Double-Digit Dip 269
Lucas123 writes "Ultrathin notebooks, smart phones and SSDs are all putting pressure on the hard drive market, which is set to take an almost 12% revenue loss this year, according to a new report from IHS iSuppli. Hard drive market revenue is set to drop to about $32.7 billion this year, down 11.8% from $37.1 billion last year. At the same time, In what appears to be a grim scenario, the optical disk drive industry is expected to encounter continued challenges this year, and optical drives could eventually be abandoned by PC makers altogether."
Less demand (Score:5, Insightful)
That means prices will go down, right?
Re:Less demand (Score:5, Insightful)
That means prices will go down, right?
We can only hope. Recently HDD manufacturers seem to be coming up with any excuse possible to increase the price per unit and I could see them increasing the price just to lessen the blow of decreased sales.
Re:Less demand (Score:5, Interesting)
For a hint of where the market for spinning drives is going, look at DLP. DLP never totally went away... it just walked away from the low end, then milked the high end for years.
SSDs are getting cheaper, but for raw bulk digital tonnage and petabytes of ripped Blu-ray pr0n, it's still hard to beat spinning hard drives. Manufacturers will just quit making small drives as SSDs catch up, add platters until they can't fit anymore into a 3.5" enclosure, then revisit the past and reintroduce 5.25" hard drives, just like Quantum did ~15 years ago. At some point (probably 10-20 years from now) SSDs might eclipse spinning hard drives, but I wouldn't write them out of the picture TOO soon. We'll be buying them LONG after Joe Sixpack and his kids have forgotten what they are.
Optical media will probably be around longer, as long as Hollywood doesn't manage to kill it off, because it has one concrete advantage: longevity (as long as it's not based on organic dyes). BD-R media is likely to be around (in single, 2, 3, 4, or more) layer forms for a really, really long time.
Prices won't necessarily go up per se, but drives will probably get more expensive over time because the low end will just cease to exist, and manufacturers will try to make the drives bigger, faster, more redundant, (god forbid) repairable, or some permutation of the above, while maintaining the same price points and gradually just eliminating the lower ones until the only spinning drive you can buy is a 5.25" 500TB Western Digital Diplodicus Max with 256GB flashcache for $299.
Re:Less demand (Score:5, Informative)
For a hint of where the market for spinning drives is going, look at DLP.
For anyone else going WTF do projectors and televisions have to do with storage, he's actually talking about DLT - Digital Linear Tape which is the marketing name of the Quantum tape product originally developed by DEC. The competing format is LTO (Linear Tape-Open) which basically killed DLT circa 2005. HP, IBM and eventually even Quantum (after acquiring Seagate's tape division) make LTO products.
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Re:Less demand (Score:4, Interesting)
The anecdotes from places like Coding Horror are just that: anecdotes. Were early SSD failure rates higher up to 2011 than regular drives? I think they've gotten better as years pass. What about now though? Even the 2011 survey from Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] already put SSD reliability as already higher than regular drives.
I've had plenty of spinning drives that didn't last more than a hundred days too. Hard drive controllers fail with no warning, just like SSD ones do. I think this is emphasized as more associated with SSD failures because it's the only way SSDs die.
In the middle of 2011 Intel raised warranties to 5 years [intel.com] on the main SSD I use in my systems. In late 2011 Seagate dropped warranties to a year [dailytech.com]. If you don't care about high capacity, it's possible for a SSD to cost less per year than a mechanical drive now. That's not a glowing statement about the manufacturers thinking SSD is more likely to fail either.
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Tools whose sole purpose is frustrating RMAs are all around. I have a WD drive with 500 uncorrectable bad secots. Each time I run a scan, it gives out *one*, switches to repair, and that's it--better now. No, it isn't next scan will find the next error. Hours of work, no RMA, no working drive.
If you have a SSD where failures are total collapse, they can be more cost effective to repair, just due to the price tag. Just encrypt your data on there if you want it to resist RMA theft.
You details on the shad
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So I have a feeling when all those cheapo SSDs start going tits up there is gonna be a lot of folks that write off the tech and go back to HDDs, say what you will about HDDs they usually give you plenty of warning before going tits up.
Is that the plural of anecdote being data? That huge survey that Google released showed that SMART warning signs was a good indicator it would fail soon, but most drives still failed without warning. Not difficult if 5% of your drives show SMART issues with a 50% chance to fail, but 95% of your drives look fine with a 3% chance to fail. And that was Google who mostly run their disks 24x7, for home users who power cycle their drives more often the usual failure mode is that they work fine until a reboot and
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I think hard drives are more likely to grow "up" than to grow "out". Think 1-1.5" high 2.5" drives, or 2-2.5" high 3.5" drives.
Main reason would be speed. With SSDs becoming abundant, people will be wanting faster access even on discs. Adding more platters means more heads, and thus more raw I/O, while wider platters give higher seek times and generally slower rotation speeds as well.
Still, your guess is as good as mine.
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Then more people would buy the 2TB HDD+32GB flash cache instead of a 128GB SSD and separate 2TB HDD.
Currently there are hybrid drives with tiny SSDs as caches but they don't perform well enough to be competitive with SSDs and from what I see there's no technical reason why they can't be competitive.
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"Currently there are hybrid drives with tiny SSDs as caches but they don't perform well enough to be competitive with SSDs and from what I see there's no technical reason why they can't be competitive."
The Seagate Momentus XT, when it was new, outperformed some competing -- more expensive -- SSDs in write performance. Since then, new SSDs have overtaken it again. But don't write off hybrid drives as underperforming. As the XT showed, if designed well they can be pretty remarkable.
And don't forget improvements in technology. Even those spinning platters get higher capacities and performance every year.
Sooner or later, solid-state will shove the moving parts off the market. But that is still some year
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Idk, prices on SSDs have dropped a LOT. I mean 2 years back in Summer 2010, I got an 80GB Intel SSD for $215 and now I got a 240GB Intel SSD of comparable rank for $155 (last december, for some reason they raised the price on it now).
I feel that HDDs haven't done shit in capacity increases for some time now. If the doublings hold, I would say by 2020, we'll be seeing
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The market has been pretty stagnant for a couple of years now. Prices have remained high and capacities have not improved much. The really big drives are still relatively rare and rather absurdly priced. I am not looking forward to any new media purchases because there's simply nothing new to look forward to.
If they don't present me with a nice upgrade path, I will continue to just hold onto my old media longer.
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i laughed bricks.
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And won't be missed.
At first as the market searches for a new equilibrium. Later, at least one or 2 big name makers will exit the market. As the size of the market contracts, you'll see the price of HDDs per GB creep up a little, or at least stop going down ignoring the effect of the Taiwanese floods. But HDDs aren't going away. They'll be the cheapest highest density quickly accessible storage for m
Re:Less demand (Score:5, Informative)
"or at least stop going down ignoring the effect of the Taiwanese floods."
You could at least get the country right. It's Thailand, not Taiwan.
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made me laugh out loud - but not true. Currently it's #12 - but only after setting the search option to "last hour"
Re:Less demand (Score:4, Insightful)
I will miss them. I still like optical discs, as they make an excellent WORM media (Write Once, Read Many). This makes them good for archival storage of files that aren't huge movies, like documents. A double layer BD disc holds 50GB, which is plenty for documents, config files, code, save games, even photos or moderate amounts of music. Just because you can't fit your entire torrented movie collection doesn't make them useless. You see, I can write a BD disc, and close it. I then know that nothing can write to it again (well, practically - how many people have BD burners, and mine won't anyway), which means it's safe to use in an untrusted (or potentially infected) system. Name a cheaper storage medium which has this capability.
I also find many people dismissing optical media for movie and game distribution, and claim that these days it should all be distributed online. It must be nice to have a fibre Internet connection to your house, but back in the real world where everyone else lives the average Internet connection speed is still a couple of megabits, and that isn't improving very quickly at all. People like myself are stuck with a measly three megabits... you expect me to download a 20GB video game or a 40GB movie on that? I'd be waiting a week!
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Another thing that has a write protect tab is the Zalman Virtual Drive USB device [amazon.co.uk]. I'd be happy enough to boot from one of those on a daily basis. I already use a few USB keys with ISOs on for different scenarios.
Re:Less demand (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Less demand (Score:5, Insightful)
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My first PC in 1992 cost me £1400.
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That's how it should be. OTOH the products will be more focused so you should get more value for your money.
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Yes, but most people do not need a general purpose computer. You're been riding on the rather accidental alignment of "entertainment computing" and "general computing", because for the last few decades entertainment computing was demanding enough to require a heavyweight general PC. Now, special purpose devices like tablets are stepping in to fill that niche, so the result will be that general purpose computers become more expensive because they won't enjoy the economies of scale they have over the last f
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On the other hand, these users are more likely to demand alternate OSes like Linux and Windows with less crapware. I have been thinking of starting a mailing list where PC vendors can communicate with OS vendors, which could be the beginning of a standard group.
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Actually if they do less volume prices will rise.
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Re:Less demand (Score:4, Insightful)
That means prices will go down, right?
That would probably be true in a competitive market.
But right now the market for hard disks is between two giants (Western Digital and Seagate) and one tiny little division of Toshiba that doesn't make much if any 3.5" models. I think we are much more likely to see oligopoly-style non-competition and thus price stability if not outright increases.
Re:Less demand (Score:4, Insightful)
And SSDs. The availability of drop-in replacements for spinning-disk hard drives alters the market dynamics. SSDs are a lot more expensive, but they also offer some big benefits: lower power, faster access. The availability of SSDs is likely to impact the price of spinning platters much more than the 2-supplier oligopoly.
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Prices are already down and below pre-flood prices for 3TB HDDs, so I'm not sure what the fuss still is. Here's the price development on a Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB 6Gb / s [google.com], scroll down to "Full history" and you can see the whole history from pre-flood to today. The prices are in NOK so forget the absolute values but pre-flood it cost about 1000 NOK, peaked at 1700, returned to 1000 around Christmas and now it sells for 921, wiithout VAT that's about $135. Bulk storage has never been cheaper than now
Re:Less demand (Score:4, Informative)
That is just the price history of one model in one country. In the US, I scooped up eight 3TB external drives off the shelf of Target after the price-gouging started because Target was slow to catch up with the online gougers. They were $99 each. Yes, $99 for a 3TB external drive at a regular brick and mortar department store,, not on sale. The 2TB drives were $79.
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external disks are often inexplicably inexpensive at big box stores. costco often has really great deals on them, for example, and their computer prices are usually not that fantastic.
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You are also failing to consider that if it hadn't been for the flood, would likely have continued the downward slope from where they where. Just because we are at pre-flood doesn't mean the market has recovered. 3TB drives would be about $90 each right now based on the trajectory of price if it hadn't been for the flood. I haven't seen $90 3TB drives anywhere except for "1 per household" and "only 100 at this price" sales.
Hard Drive business is an oligopoly business (Score:5, Insightful)
Not if you cut supply.
In an open marketplace, where there are a lot of competitors, cutting supply would be a commercial suicide.
But the hard drive business we have today is an oligopoly business. After the rounds of M&A there are less than 5 serious contenders in the HD manufacturing business.
Cutting supply in such scenario has become a very possible option for the oligarchs.
optical disks still cost less then usb keys in bul (Score:2)
optical disks still cost less then usb keys / sdcards in bulk.
Also HSI is not all over the place and 3g/4g caps are low.
And to install a OS a disk is nice and not a restore / recovery partition that can be wiped out by hdd failing / junk software / putting a bigger drive in your system.
Also what about building a pc you need a os install disk.
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"You can even keep them up to date with OS patches unlike burnt disks."
Someone obviously hasn't heard of nlite.
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Same here. There's even USB drive enclosures which let you select an ISO from the disk, and then present themselves as a CD/DVD drive as though that disk image were directly inserted. Far, far easier to load up a 2.5" drive with a ton of disk images, and just carry the enclosure around for system repairs, instead of a slew of optical media.
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I switched to using USB drives to install the OS of a computer a long time ago. You can even keep them up to date with OS patches unlike burnt disks. Usually installs faster too.
It's just that malware can modify the contents of the flash drive and after that, all your installs will be contaminated.
store the images on a separate HDD/NAS (Score:2)
then copy to flash right before the install. No stacks of install media needed.
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Don't know and don't care if this works for your bizarro OS of choice.
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Also what about building a pc you need a os install disk.
That requirement went away like a decade ago.
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DVD is slow and bulky requiring a DVD drive to run. Even in clean storage the disks can fail, and you for any computer bakcup multiple disks are going to be required. They are not really suitable for the modern computer.
My OS and computer backups are on hard drives. I boot the computer, select the partition, and go. For backups the software automatically wipes and reloads the computer
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Talking about bulk pressed disks in bulk cost is way less then bulk USB sticks
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I still systems with SDD's system and HDD's data (Score:2)
I still systems with SDD's system and HDD's data / maybe apps based on how big the SDD is.
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That's my situation, I can't afford a SSD to hold my data. So I have a small SSD to hold the system and my home with a little bit of my data including my firefox profile and so on, a medium HDD to hold big apps, and a sizable (3TB) disk on a dockstar for the bulk of the data, which gets backed up periodically to another one just like it...
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Your sentence no verb.
Let's see (Score:3)
We haven't a major increase in HDD capacity for a long time. That means, instead of paying $300-500 for a high-capacity drive as we did when drive capacity seemed to be doubling every year, we've been paying $100-150.
So I'm shocked that revenue might be dropping.
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Where are the hybrids??? (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously. Where are they? I've got the 750 gig Seagate and I love it but it's not big enough for my games. The only other choice I have is the 1tb Revo but that's not really much of a bump and it would take up a PCIe slot, preventing me from ever running 4-way SLI. And it's almost 4x the price of the slightly smaller Seagate. Hardly a bargain compared to SSD. If I'm gonna spend $500, I may as well spend a grand and go full SSD.
I assume Apple must have some sort of exclusive deal on their 3tb hybrids
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Where are the hybrids???
Toshiba's hybrid hard drive is already in mass production (the MQ01ABDH model, in 750GB and 1TB sizes), but it's OEM only. Right now you pretty much have to buy a new Toshiba laptop to get one. Western Digital seems to have pushed theirs back into 2014.
Well, there are also the hybrid drives from Samsung that came out back in 2007, but I don't think anyone's counting those.
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The hybrids are a nice win on boot time. On many benchmarks, you'd be better off spending that money on more RAM though. Hybrid drives beat regular ones, sure, but you have to match cost and compare against having more memory.
Seagate's hybrid drives will have a much bigger win when they finally release the write caching firmware. The disappointing schedule on that has made me regret buying one of those. I would have been better off just paying for all SSD in the first place, or more RAM.
Apple's "Fusion"
Wax cylinders (Score:2)
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Low end drives are too expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
It just drives me absolutely crazy that low end hard drives are as expensive as they are, and stubbornly not dropping. Take for example these prices on Newegg for a new internal desktop hard drive:
250GB - $49.99 ($2.00 per 10 gigabytes)
320GB - $59.99 ($1.87 per 10 gigabytes)
500GB - $58.99 ($1.18 per 10 gigabytes)
1TB - $79.99 ($0.80 per 10 gigabytes)
I mean, don't get me wrong, the 1 terabytes are an attractive price on a price-per-gigabyte point of view. But there are times where you simply don't need (or want) a large drive, and a small one would do, or your budget for a larger one doesn't exist and you need a smaller drive. But the price per gigabyte is so out of whack on the low end models, it doesn't make sense to waste your money. You'd think stores and suppliers would want to dump their low end inventory for the larger capacities, but apparently they aren't in any hurry.
Re:Low end drives are too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
There's more to a hard drive than the platters.
What this pricing is telling you is that it costs about $30-40 to produce a hunk of machined aluminum, a controller board, a few connectors, some cache memory, a voice coil, a fancy motor, and a read-write head. And it costs about $5 to produce a platter, regardless of whether it was a 500GB/1TB platter that's only good enough to be used on one side, both sides of a 320MB platter, etc.
The pricing curve for SSDs will have a very long-term advantage over spinning metal in that the costs of the "mechanical" parts of an SSD are negligible in comparison to the costs of a spinning disk. There'a a very real floor in HDD pricing, because there's a lot of things inside an HDD that don't store bits.
Re:Low end drives are too expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
There's more to a hard drive than the platters. What this pricing is telling you is that it costs about $30-40 to produce a hunk of machined aluminum, a controller board, a few connectors, some cache memory, a voice coil, a fancy motor, and a read-write head. And it costs about $5 to produce a platter, regardless of whether it was a 500GB/1TB platter that's only good enough to be used on one side, both sides of a 320MB platter, etc.
And that's just the production, you still have the same costs on packaging, distribution, support, warranty returns etc. no matter if it's a 250GB or 1TB drive you're selling. I see the same thing here with for example broadband, there's a price floor just to operate a service to you no matter if the flow is a trickle or a torrent.
Re:Low end drives are too expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
The case alone costs about $12 to buy the raw materials, cast, and precision machine. The only difference between the 250GB and 1TB version is the number of platters, quality of platters and model of read/write heads. The profit margin on the 250GB is probably about 15%, just the same as the model with the high end 1TB platters & read/write heads. Eventually you run in to a price floor, which is based on the physical reality that the drive is made from high grade machined aluminum.
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32GB - $17.98 ($5.60 per 10 gigabytes)
If you're storing just an OS image, why waste $30?
It's deserved (Score:5, Insightful)
The market is punishing the Hard Drive creators for the fact they engaged in price gouging. The popularity of SSDs skyrocketed after hard drive manufacturers took advantage of several factories being disabled. Now that people like SSDs, the popularity of hard drives is permanently diminshed.
Did you enjoy your short term gains without and long term goals? Hope you did. Bye bye in a few years, then!
Re:It's deserved (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you enjoy your short term gains without and long term goals? Hope you did. Bye bye in a few years, then!
You say that as if the company has feelings. The company didn't enjoy anything, and will feel no pain when they collapse.
The executives running the company, however, certainly enjoyed their hefty bonuses during the years they gouged the industry. They can just coast now until they get fired, and then retire to their private islands. I'm sure they've all learned their lessons.
Optical drives (Score:2)
Optical drives are on the way out? Good riddance. I'm tired of those slow, cumbersome wastes of space.
Any software that isn't delivered as a download (and most of it is these days) should be on a USB drive. And it should have been like this for years already.
Optical Drives (Score:2)
DVD-Rs are good for long term backups (Score:3)
Quality DVD-Rs and CD-Rs last a long time, have no mechanical components to wear out, or electronic parts that can get zapped. They are not even magnetic, so EM is not an issue. Except for RW media, they can not be overwritten so data can not be altered by a computer glitch or virus. Their interface to the computer can't become obsolete since they don't have one, and newer drives would adapt for the next great thing. CD-R media even lets my data be readable in the oldest of CD drives. Disks are easier to store and organize than a pile of flash drives. And CD/DVDs don't usually break when dropped, like hard drives.
Unlike teh cloudz, the data is secure from prying eyes and right under my fingertips when I need it.
I use DVD-R for long term backups all the time, and I'm a little concerned that if CD/DVD media goes the way of the floppy drive then what can I use that is just as reliable and inexpensive?
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Floppy drives are still available, mostly in the 3.25 size. But 5.25 blanks and refurb/NOS drives are still around too. There must be an inventory of many many years worth of old 5.25 drives around.
CDs, DVDs etc are still being sold in large quantity today. I do think though the absolute peak has passed. But optical drives will be available for a long time to come barring an extinction event. I think at least 30 years probably longer given the durability of the media. I have some CDs from when I bought my
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Expected? (Score:2)
This seems to be the expected result of SSD technology spreading and becoming cheaper. Your everyday user can now buy a reasonably-sized PC with only an SSD for storage. Additional storage needs can be easily addressed with memory sticks, external drives, and cheap and easy to configure and use network storage.
Optical is a bit of an odd one, but not totally unexpected. Online software delivery (no need for CDs/DVDs), downloadable music and movies, online and networked data storage, pretty much eliminate the
This is sadly bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
We are living in an Information Age. Do you honestly expect all of the Clouds to store Petabytes of data on SSD drives?
How about a high-capacity optical format? (Score:2)
I'd love to have something good enough to back up large amounts of data without burning through a stack of CDs or DVDs. Does the technology have to be driven by the entertainment industry?
suck it, hard drive market is garbage (Score:3)
The hard drive market is awful. I recently settled on a 1tb WD black drive. Because it has a 5 year warranty. For the same amount, i could get a 1 year warranty 2tb 5400 rpm drive.
The market is crap. The low end drives are just piles of smoking trash, and the "high end" aka NORMAL hard drives circa 2010 are like 80 or 90 cents per GB. (wd black 2tb = $170). They they added a mid range (RED), and an ultra low end space wise 7200 rpm (blue). which position themselves in price wise right and conveniently in between green and black! used to be every drive got the best technology and cache. Now we have gay ass segmentation
And seagate, dont get me started. They have no warranties longer than 3 years, with most drives have a 1 year warranty. Yeah thanks no. Firmware bug + 1 year warranty.. PASS
good thing most computers which are not servers of some sort can get by on a single $70 ssd. The quantum leap of performance which is the solid state drive allows me to defer most mechanical hdd purchases till an age of reason returns.
Re:ok then (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes the burners are just starting to get affordable, but is it actually too late?
Back in the days of 20gig hard drives and 128mb flash sticks, DVD burners were a god send.
But now we are at 3TB hard drives and 64-128gig flash sticks plus 'cloud' storage which is better for long term archives.
Is a measly 25gig single sided going to cut it when they are just starting to get affordable?
Some people will buy them but I suspect every single computer will not have one like they used to with DVD burners.
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Optical media likely still beats thumb drives in terms of cost and are still more standard. The problem with standard is that "just about good enough" isn't really good enough. If you're even acknowledging the fact that thumb drives aren't universal, then you've already got a serious problem with the format.
It's a bit like Zip disks or MD disks.
"Almost standard" isn't quite good enough.
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Optical media likely still beats thumb drives in terms of cost
Well that depends on what you want to do with them.
If you're even acknowledging the fact that thumb drives aren't universal, then you've already got a serious problem with the format.
I'd say USB sticks are supported in a lot more places than bluray discs are.
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BD burners are good for a few things:
1. Not-so-huge data that is suited for off-line, off-site storage. Put a BD in your safe deposit box or at a friend's house, and it won't degrade like a hard drive and won't die like a flash drive. 20GB (or whatever) is enough to hold a lot of important work from an author, a musician, or many other creative fields.
2. Movies. Backing up BD movies to writeable BDs, and being able to play them in the same manner as the original, seems like a useful function. (Especia
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But now we are at 3TB hard drives and 64-128gig flash sticks plus 'cloud' storage which is better for long term archives.
Not necessarily. R/W storage has always the risk that somebody accidentally deletes the archived files. HDDs can get damaged from mechanical shocks, flash products can die from ESD zaps. I still feel that the optical disc is the king of proper long-term storage.
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And bluray never gets scratched or degrades and backing up lots of data with it takes a really small amount of space.
Oh wait....
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Have you ever tried scratching a Blu-ray disc? I have: old backup discs that are being "retired." I have taken a utility knife and dragged the sharp end across a disc and had it not leave a scratch. I have used fingernails, nail clippers, and other random sharp implements I have around my desk. I have to go across the disc several times and/or push really hard to ruin a Blu-ray.
That or snap i
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Try scratching the label side. You'll find that it's much easier and more productive to damage that side anyway since it's closer to the aluminum coating.
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I think that only applies to CDs. I know DVDs have the shiny metal equal distance between the two sides (that is how they can have two-sided DVDs). I would think that BluRay is the same.
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That's a solved problem for both DVDs and BDs.
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A hard drive is still a whole hell of a lot less bother than an equivalent stack of BD media.
Any "stack o media" approach is just a deranged nightmare scenario out of the 80s.
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Having never used a Blu-ray despite having several burners, I had no idea they were that tough. DVDs sure aren't. I've had CDs and DVDs scratched as I was removing them because the powered tray picked that moment to close. The corner of the tray's face was a sharp point that, even though made of plastic, was able to gouge a big scratch into the disc before I could pull it away. I've learned to grab the disc so that I can instantly whisk it out of the way or drop it back into the tray should the OS pick
Re:ok then (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. R/W storage has always the risk that somebody accidentally deletes the archived files. HDDs can get damaged from mechanical shocks, flash products can die from ESD zaps. I still feel that the optical disc is the king of proper long-term storage.
There's not much chance of accidentally overwriting a disconnected external HDD clearly labeled BACKUP either. I take it you've never tried to restore a large amount of data from optical media? I have and they do get unrecoverable CRC errors, but what's almost as bad is the read speed of old discs. My drive would spin up, down, read and re-read so a single disc could take an hour to read. Even on good discs I say you'd be lucky to restore 4 DVDs/hour, and it takes 200+ to restore a single 1TB HDD. And unless you have a disc robot that means you'll be glued to your computer for days changing discs every 15 minutes.
If you want more security, the best way is more copies. With HDDs you could have triple backups with far less effort than making one DVD backup set. If you have the bandwidth make multiple online backups, don't trust one backup service. Of course in theory you could have supervirus wiping all your disks and logging into all your backup services and deleting all your files, but that's why you have a disconnected HDD. And if you're robbed blind or the house burns to the ground they'll all go unless you've taken one offsite, but your online backups will still be there. The chance of both on- and offline backups disappearing at the same time is practically none.
but do you really want to download and store 25g (Score:2)
but do you really want to download and store a 25g+ movie and that's just one movie.
Re:ok then (Score:4, Interesting)
non-LTH BD-R has a HUGE advantage over any hard drive: you can throw it in a drawer, forget about it for the next 25 years, maybe even let it bake in a hot, humid Florida garage for 5-10 years, and end up with something that's likely to still be readable. There are so many things that can go wrong and break with a normal hard drive over the span of 25 years, the likelihood of ANY hard drive actually working even 10-15 years down the road after years of disuse and questionable storage is basically "nonexistent", and depressingly low even if you've kept it in a 70 degree room with low humidity the whole time.
DVD-R used organic dyes and isn't likely to be a reliable long-term storage medium, but the ORIGINAL (non-LTH) BD-R discs are about as close as you can get with modern media to "carving it in stone". There's even a company (Milleniata?) who makes discs that are basically BD-R media burned to DVD geometry (you need a supported BD-R drive to burn them), and a likely shelf life of a hundred years or more (especially if you burn 2 or 3 copies, and store them in different locations, so you can scrape the bits from all 3 and take advantage of error correction to reconstruct an intact copy decades from now).
VHS has been dead as a consumer format for more than a decade, but there are STILL companies selling new VCRs. What vanished were the cheap consumer models. What remains are heavy-duty pro models designed mainly for recovery and restoration work... and it's a market that's slowly growing as desperate consumers realize they no longer have the players for their old high school band/cheerleading/football tapes their parents made years ago, and they go looking for solutions (or people who can do it for them). Best of all, the patents have all basically expired, so now a smaller company with the ability to machine metal & plastic parts actually CAN step in to take over a market that companies like Sony & Matsushita lost interest in years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
VHS has been dead as a consumer format for more than a decade, but there are STILL companies selling new VCRs. What vanished were the cheap consumer models. What remains are heavy-duty pro models designed mainly for recovery and restoration work... and it's a market that's slowly growing as desperate consumers realize they no longer have the players for their old high school band/cheerleading/football tapes their parents made years ago, and they go looking for solutions (or people who can do it for them). Best of all, the patents have all basically expired, so now a smaller company with the ability to machine metal & plastic parts actually CAN step in to take over a market that companies like Sony & Matsushita lost interest in years ago.
Umm, there is no such market. Any new VHS VCR you can buy is found in a DVD combo deck and is utter garbage. All the best SVHS and DVHS decks (made by JVC and Panasonic) for digital transfer work have long since been discontinued. JVC also managed to keep the VHS patents fresh when things like SVHS ET (SVHS recording on standard VHS tapes) and later the Digital VHS format.
Re: (Score:2)
non-LTH BD-R has a HUGE advantage over any hard drive: you can throw it in a drawer, forget about it for the next 25 years, maybe even let it bake in a hot, humid Florida garage for 5-10 years, and end up with something that's likely to still be readable.
Perhaps, but will you be able to easily get a working bluray player in 25 years?
Re: (Score:2)
No usb what about input like keyboards / mouses? (Score:2)
No usb what about input like keyboards / mouses? and all the other USB stuff.
Wired is better for desktops and on a laptop a wired mouse is harder to lose. Wireless = haveing to deal with batteries