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Data Storage

HDD Shipments Fell Nearly 13% in the First Quarter of 2019, 18% Since Last Year (tomshardware.com) 143

Posted by msmash from the good-riddance dept.
Suren Enfiajyan writes: HDD shipments are continuing to decline. This is about all major HDD vendors with WDC with the most decline yearly -- 26.1% against 11.3% (Toshiba) and 14.4% (Seagate). Desktop HDD shipments are said to have fallen to just 24.5 million units, a drop of nearly 4 million units from the previous quarter. Laptop HDD shipments dropped more than 6 million units to hit the 37 million mark. Enterprise HDDs are said to have rebounded by nearly 1 million units, however, to around 11.5 million hard drives purchased in the quarter. Business customers essentially picked up the slack left by consumers. These shipments were likely affected by many factors. But there's also the simple fact that most people want SSDs instead of HDDs for most of their devices. Nobody wants to wait for their system to boot, their files to load, or their apps to finish routine tasks.
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HDD Shipments Fell Nearly 13% in the First Quarter of 2019, 18% Since Last Year More

HDD Shipments Fell Nearly 13% in the First Quarter of 2019, 18% Since Last Year

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  • Technology marches on (Score:3)

    by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @11:22AM (#58459598)
    Newer tech is replacing older tech. More at 11.
    • Old tech isn't always completely dying, it sometimes remains in some niches. For instance, magnetic tape.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Lonewolf666 ( 259450 )

        In this case, I expect HDDs to stay around at least until SSDs have reached cost parity in $/Terabyte. There are still some applications where cheap is more important than fast.

        • SSDs are bad for data retention when powered off. SO they are best for boot drives, programs, and data that needs to be live.

          Rotating hard disks have excellent data retention when powered off, and poorer reliability when left on, spinning.
          So they are best for backing up all the data on your SSDs (OS images, data back ups), and then powering off.

          I use internal spinning drives, but have a switch that cuts the 5 and 12V power to them when not using them bor back ups. Lowers power, lowers heat, increases driv

          • SSDs are bad for data retention when powered off.

            That is because the Flash memory does not hold the charge on its floating gate forever, and the charging state of that gate carries the binary information.
            There should be a way around that if you can power on the SSD at every once in a way and run a "referesher" tool that rewrites every byte. Which will cost you one rewrite cycle for the memory blocks that need refreshing. That is not so bad, according to Wikipedia 100,000 rewrite cycles are the norm today. The SD will die from other causes long before the

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Agripa ( 139780 )

              SSDs are bad for data retention when powered off.

              That is because the Flash memory does not hold the charge on its floating gate forever, and the charging state of that gate carries the binary information.
              There should be a way around that if you can power on the SSD at every once in a way and run a "referesher" tool that rewrites every byte. Which will cost you one rewrite cycle for the memory blocks that need refreshing. That is not so bad, according to Wikipedia 100,000 rewrite cycles are the norm today. The SD will die from other causes long before the refreshing kills it.

              SSDs should support scrubbing on read and write where if too many errors must be corrected in a block, then it is refreshed to a new location. They should also support idle time scrubbing where blocks are scanned during idle time and refreshed to new locations as needed.

              I know through tests that common non-SSD Flash storage does not do these things. Data will rot even if the device is continuously powered and many devices do not even scrub on read. The lack of idle time scrubbing makes sense in these dev

              • For this scenario, you would need periodic scrubbing on all memory, even that which still that looks good. Perhaps once a year or so. The idea is to restore that floating gate charge pre-emptively, before there is data rot.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by wwphx ( 225607 )
          For me, it's capacity over speed, cheaper is also good. I'm about to purchase a 4-6 TB disk for backup and plan on getting three more in the next year. I can't afford a tape solution and can get a spinning rust drive for about $150, give or take. SSDs aren't anywhere close to that in capacity. They're fine for primary storage in my laptop, that's it as far as I'm concerned.

          I will admit that putting 16 gig of ram and a 1 TB SSD in a 2012 MacBook Pro is a staggering performance upgrade, and very inexpe

          • Have you checked out Other World Computing [macsales.com]. Just search for your computer and they will return items compatible with it. The sweet spot for SSDs is still 1TB but you can get some of the 2TB SSDs for around $300. The higher performance ones go up to $500+. I've bought a few things from there and never had a problem, even going from the US to Canada. Last year I bought 4 8TB HDDs from them for a really good price, even including the exchange rate, for my NAS.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by wwphx ( 225607 )
              Thanks for the link, that's some pretty cool stuff they have. My ultimate goal for a NAS of some sort is to rip my movie collection, which again brings up the backup problem. I need to sit down and estimate the amount of space required for such a project, but that's not even near-term, that's probably at least 2-3 years in the future, at which time my library will probably be 25% larger.

              • I got my NAS somewhere else. It's made by Synology and is very easy to set up and use. Basically just put in the drives and use the graphical interface. The drives I bought last year were upgrades. Since the system is set up as RAID 5 all I had to do was, one at a time, pull out an old drive and put in a new one. Once the system repaired itself with the new disk I just moved onto the next. It took a while to repair the system with the last couple of 8TB drives though.

                I bought that unit because I didn't want

    • Newer tech is replacing older tech. More at 11.

      I'm not making any money on buggy whips anymore.... Damn... Who could have seen that coming?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You should be selling your buggy whips in Ontario. Ontario Supreme Court precedent holds that application of a buggy whip to trespassers is the "proper" way to get trespassers off your lawn ...

    • that it's finally happening. And it's kind of happening all at once. SSD prices went from 3x-4x hdd prices to nearly the same for low capacity drives (you'll still pay a premium past 500mb though) and they did it in the course of 1 year. I paid $150 for a 500gb Samsung 6 months ago that sells for $100 now.

      • that it's finally happening. And it's kind of happening all at once. SSD prices went from 3x-4x hdd prices to nearly the same for low capacity drives (you'll still pay a premium past 500mb though) and they did it in the course of 1 year. I paid $150 for a 500gb Samsung 6 months ago that sells for $100 now.

        500MB, not mb. The lowercase notation references megabits.

        • Nearly, mb would be millibits. Megabits would be Mb.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bjwest ( 14070 )

          He's talking about hard drives and you think he's stating the size in megabits just because he didn't capitalize the unit abbreviation?

          Trying to seem smart often makes one seem dumber than that they are trying to appear smarter than.

    • So which newer tech is able to store as much data at a similar price level?

  • Is really nothing of interest happening today? Everyone gone already for the holidays?

    I mean, no kidding that sales of an item are down when there's some technology that replaces it. What's the next revelation, CRT screens are shelf warmers because of flat screens?

  • Look at the prices (Score:4, Insightful)

    by chispito ( 1870390 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @11:26AM (#58459618)
    You can get a 250 GB SSD for $30. Who would by a mechanical hard drive at this point? For 90% of consumer needs, a smaller faster SSD that costs only a few bucks more is the best option.

    • Why? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Maybe because you need 8TB of storage for the massive broadcast quality 4K video files you generate?

      • Maybe because you need 8TB of storage for the massive broadcast quality 4K video files you generate?

        Cool. That puts you in the 10%, not the 90.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        "Average people" really won't require that. Pre-made PC's and laptops struggle to sell upgrades from 2TB to 4TB with the general public and for good reason.

      • If you need that then you don't fall into the category of the average consumer or 99% of most user cases. Personally I have 40TB of storage but I don't pretend I am anything but a fringe case.

    • I assume due to the mechanisms involved having a minimum parts cost.

      The interesting part is that WD decline versus Toshiba and Seagate. Toshiba has been VERY competitive with their prices the past year or so, despite their major financial scandal and selling off their flash division. Their drives also have the best reliability rate comparable to HGST, then Western Digital, then Seagate (who might be edging out WD on some drive models, but were bad enough between the 500GB to 4TB era that I am reluctant to t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      250G isn't enough for my Steam directory and that's with being a rather casual Linux gamer.

      Win10 by itself seems to want more space than that.

      Although this does point to the price floor on technology in general. Drives (or anything else) only get so cheap. They don't get any cheaper even if you could get away with "using less" of something.

      • Steam supports putting your games in multiple locations [thewindowsclub.com] (and moving them between locations). Just create Steam libraries on the SSD and your HDD. Put the games you're currently playing on the SSD. Move the games you haven't played in a while but might want to occasionally fire up to the HDD.

      • Re:Look at the prices (Score:4, Informative)

        by chispito ( 1870390 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @01:27PM (#58460324)

        250G isn't enough for my Steam directory and that's with being a rather casual Linux gamer.

        Win10 by itself seems to want more space than that.

        Although this does point to the price floor on technology in general. Drives (or anything else) only get so cheap. They don't get any cheaper even if you could get away with "using less" of something.

        Windows 10 requires about 64 GB to comfortably host the OS and updates/windows.old. If 250 GB is too small for you as a gamer, it is NOT Windows that is the limiting factor. A 500 GB SSD can be had for as little as $50, by the way.

        • Linux distros fit comfortably within 40 GB. Mine all run about 17 GB. My data goes on my old HDD.

    • For HDDs, the best price/capacity relation is between 2 TB and 4 TB, with about $30/TB. So if you need lots of capacity, the HDD is still cheaper. Personally, I need about 1TB for my collection of movies and music. Slowly growing...

    • Re:Look at the prices (Score:4, Informative)

      by Wolfrider ( 856 ) <kingneutron AT gmail DOT com> on Friday April 19, 2019 @01:42PM (#58460420) Homepage Journal

      2TB NAS drives are ~$80 on amzn right now.
      4TB NAS have come down to ~$112-120.
      8TB NAS drives are ~$220-250, and
      10TB NAS drives are ~$285 and up.

      --Get a matched-size pair of any of those, mirror them with ZFS+compression, and you won't have to worry about data loss. And data-transfer speed will likely saturate your home gigabit net.

      --"Reliable" SSD prices get pretty insane as they scale upward (2TB Samsung Pro SSD is ~$500); and anything beyond MLC technology hasn't been proven for long-term reliability yet. Yes, you can now get a 1TB M.2 drive for ~$110, but it's 3D QLC tech _and_ kind of hard to mirror them depending on your motherboard.

      --If you need multiple TBs of data storage and don't have a business-sized budget, HD is still the best way to go. For the desktop single-drive mindset tho, SSD is getting more budget-friendly - but it's still wise to have frequent bare-metal backups to spinning media so you can recover in a decent amount of time.

      REFs:
      https://www.amazon.com/s?k=1tb... [amazon.com]

      https://www.newegg.com/Product... [newegg.com]

      --BTW, I'm a firm believer in mirroring any drive above 1TB. The higher they go, the more data you'll need to restore when it dies.

      • --Get a matched-size pair of any of those, mirror them with ZFS+compression, and you won't have to worry about data loss. And data-transfer speed will likely saturate your home gigabit net.

        Any modern HDD can saturate gigabit ethernet with sequential data. It's the small file (4k) data which is the Achilles' heel of HDDs. Platter drives are limited by the seek speeds - they have to wait for a randomly located sector to rotate under the read/write heads, which for a 7200 RPM drive typically takes 1/240 sec

    • The thing that keeps me from abandoning spinning rust entirely is the different failure modes with SSD's. On a HDD, the controller is often the culprit, and switching those out means the data on the platters themselves can still be retrieved. A SSD failure more often than not means that the data is irretrievable.

  • SSDs still smaller (Score:3)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @11:29AM (#58459634)
    Most cheap laptops now cone with just 32gb storage which most of which is taken up by Windows bloatware instead of 160gb hard disks in the past.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      That is a bit on the stingy side esp considering a 250GB evo 860 costs 57 on newegg (probably cheaper in bulk). is $57 realy a significant cos even for cheap laptops? I suspect that the drive to smaller local storrage is to drive $cloud_service but I might be wrong
      • $10 extra profit on 100,000 laptops is a million. Plus, yeah, the OS makers (M$, Google) want used to cloudfuck their data so they can make money mining it and reselling it.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          ar laptops really that price sensitiive now, would a $10 bom increase really make a difference? hmm don't know how much of a difference a $10 bom increase would make when we get to MRRP, any ideas?

      • $57 realy a significant cos even for cheap laptops?

        That's nearly 1/4 of the price of the the lowest tier laptops.

    • Those 32GB laptops have eMMC storage. That's like having an SD card as primary storage. Those are not SSDs as most people understand. A 160GB spinner would probably be better than eMMC.

    • Most cheap laptops now cone with just 32gb storage which most of which is taken up by Windows bloatware instead of 160gb hard disks in the past.

      Strange claim so I checked. Fired up local electronics store for laptops. 400 results. Filtered for laptops under 300 EUR, 15 results. Filtered on 32GB drives, 10 results, filtered out Chromebook, 2 results.

      Sorry I'm not seeing it. There clearly are 32GB devices out there, but they seem to run ChromeOS. Of the 5 that were filtered out initially one was a Windows 10 with 64GB (IMHO equally useless so we can add that to the other 2) and the rest had 1TB HDDs.

      • There's your problem right there, you filtered out the Chromebooks. Put a real Linux on them (7 GB typically), an SD card for storage, do anything you want.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by btroy ( 4122663 )
      Err - I think you're talking about the Window 10 competitors to Chromebooks equivalents. Most low cost laptops that are intended for traditional use are coming with either a 120GB SSD or a 500GB or 1 TB HDD.

      Regardless, I know a lot of people who are looking at the 500GB SSD for lt $80 and saying that's enough for me.

      I had a lot of hope for the Seagate SSHD, but the price is still not that competitive with the 500 GB SSD, even for the 1 TB. I tried it in one W10 Desktop. The performance wasn't much

  • They're sticking to their rigs from the previous generation because the prices for the RTX cards are ridiculous. And, with the exception of the $1,200 2080TI, you can still find comparable performance cards in the GTX line (a GTX 1080TI can still be found for cheaper than a RTX 2080 and offers comparable performance, for example).

  • Another simple fact (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mridoni ( 228377 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @11:31AM (#58459652)

    But there's also the simple fact that most people want SSDs instead of HDDs for most of their devices

    There is also another simple fact: hard disk capacity is so high - for the average consumer - that the market for replacement or backup units (both for internal and external units) has obviously decreased. If you have a 2TB drive and you use your PC to play a couple of games, browse the web and write some e-mails, you're not going to run out of space very soon. And the fact that many people have started streaming media files instead of storing them locally (yes, I know, data ownership, but it's a different subject...) just makes this more apparent.. It would be interesting to have data regarding "disk space" sold instead of units shipped.

    • It would be interesting to have data regarding "disk space" sold instead of units shipped.

      +1.

    • There is also another simple fact: hard disk capacity is so high - for the average consumer - that the market for replacement or backup units (both for internal and external units) has obviously decreased.

      I agree, and would add two additional factors - camera megapixel rates have kind of stabilized and not really grown much in recent years, even as hard drive capacity kept expanding - also with more people using phone cameras instead of dedicated cameras, storage needs have slightly declined.

      Hopefully peopl

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The volume of data keep growing too. 4k and soon 8k, 360, VR.

    • If you have a 2TB drive and you use your PC to play a couple of games, browse the web and write some e-mails, you're not going to run out of space very soon.

      For a bit of gaming sure, but for hobbies and such things are getting ever more hungry for data. 2TB isn't much. My 512GB SSD is full and I only have 2 games on it. (Hitman 2 clocks in at 110GB now). Like taking videos? Every mobile phone now does 4K video. Got $300 to spend on a GoPro? They default to 80Mbps video now. A good afternoon of skiing and 1/4 of your 2TB HDD space has been taken up. That's before you even begin to consider what a typical Adobe Premier cache folder looks like while you're working

      • For your NAS (and many NAS builds), the HDDs used are classified as enterprise drives I think. Fewer people are buying general purpose HDDs. For example I would use WD Red or Seagate IronWolf drives for my NAS. I don’t really have a use for WD Blue, Green, Purple, or Velicoraptor.

        • Not even remotely. There's still a big difference.
          4TB WD Red: $119.
          4TB WD Red Pro (Also not an enterprise drive): $169.
          4TB WD Gold (Enterprise drive but with significantly lower performance than Red Pro): $169
          4TB WD Re (Not Red, but Re) SAS drive with pathetic 32MB cache: $269

          The WD Red, Green, Blue, Black and Purple drives are still classed as consumer drives.

          The VelociRaptor branding is gone. Those are now WD Black. WD Black and WD Blue are also the labels applied to their SSDs, so chances are you do have

    • Also I wonder what kind of HDDs companies use in most consumer backup devices. Many that I’ve seen use enterprise storage variants like WDC Red and Seagate IronWolf which would explain it why the enterprise HDD numbers have gone up a bit. Consumers are still buying HDDs but for specific use cases.

  • HDD vs SSD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @11:37AM (#58459684)
    I use both, and still buy both. I use HDDs in my data server, where I need high capacity at lowest cost. Boot-up time is not a factor, since it runs FreeBSD (and ZFS) and I boot it only once every three or four months. On the other hand, pretty much all the rest of the drives I use are SSDs, since speed is more important than inexpensive capacity. The recent lowering of SSD pricing has made the decision to use SSDs everywhere (except the data server) all the more easy to make.

    • Boot-up time is not a factor, since it runs FreeBSD (and ZFS) and I boot it only once every three or four months.

      Given the disk space requirements of the OS, I opted to throw a 64GB SSD in under $30. That way you get the speed you need and storage for all your data needs (I think it's a bad idea to run the system root on a raidz pool with your data, it hammers your flexibility).

      • I think it's a bad idea to run the system root on a raidz pool with your data

        I agree. I don't run the system root on the data's RAIDZ pool. I use a separate disk. Spinning rust, not SSD. I used a disk I had already. While it is true what you say the SSD would be faster, I really do not need the speed on the system disk. The data's RAIDZ pool is totally separate from the FreeBSD disk, i.e. root. /usr, /var, /bin, /sbin, /etc, et alia are on the system disk, not the RAIDZ data disk array.

  • It seems to me SSDs have plenty of capacity to support OS and apps, with room for modest storage of photos and videos as well. For everything else, including large photo and video libraries and backups, cloud storage fills in the gaps.

    Of course there are use-case exceptions like content creators and professional uses, but as a general rule SSDs + cloud storage handles the vast majority of consumers' needs.

    • Re:SSDs for OS/apps, cloud for all else (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @12:05PM (#58459866)

      Comparing cost of HDD to cloud...

      Even the cheapest of cloud vendors will charge 4x the cost of an HDD in a year. Meaning you could buy all your storage, *throw it all away and replace it every 3 months* and still be matching the price of the most aggressive cloud vendor.

      Yes, there's more to cloud storage than that and the comparison is lopsided in terms of redundancy, but it's worth keeping in mind that owning your storage not only delivers better performance on the site, but is cheaper by a *WIDE* margin.

      • You're conflating price with cost. HDD storage is dirt cheap. Management of it is not, both in terms of price and expertise. Cloud provides redundancy, including multi-site, and anywhere-access. Of course the average /.'er can set up his own solution including WAN access but I was speaking to the 99% consumer case who neither has the expertise nor desire to manage his own storage solution.

        • Re:SSDs for OS/apps, cloud for all else (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Junta ( 36770 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @12:51PM (#58460120)

          As I said, there's more nuance to the cloud situation. That nuance cuts both ways.

          On the one hand, yes they do more than 'put your stuff on disks'. On the other hand, this eager push to cloud empowers a very small number of companies and draws all our eggs to a few baskets. I find it a worrisome reversal of the 20th century trend of decentralization.

          For example, there could be investment in decentralized efforts where the population is empowered, yet their data is protected through a more distributed architecture, and one that doesn't incur recurring costs that justify a monthly payment. However economically IT companies are full tilt on only investing in developing technologies that keep users having to rent and produce recurring revenue and explicitly taking any potential for independence away and forcing lock in at all costs.

        • It's very easy to set up your own file server and access things from anywhere. You just need to shell out a bit more and get a NAS from a company like Synology. You just install the hard drives, use the graphical tools to configure the drives, and you're done. There are apps already installed for managing files, an iTunes server, an audio station, apps to back up to external sites, and media server. There's lots of third party stuff (Plex, Transmission, BitTorrent Sync). For more advanced users you can set

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Agripa ( 139780 )

          You're conflating price with cost.

          Do not forget the cost of accessing Cloud based services. Internet transfer rates and latency are poor compared to a LAN. Upload bandwidth tends to be very limited. ISPs may limit or charge extra above a transfer cap. The later makes Cloud storage close to useless for much of the US except for trivial applications and there is every indication of it getting worse.

      • What is this "on the site" you speak of? Kidding of course, but the key problem with hosting your own data is also requiring a beefy internet connection. ADSL2+ users need not apply with a 1Mbit upload.

    • Right, because, as a personal user, I want to upload all of my personal photos to someone else's fucking computer. But yeah, the AVERAGE user is probably a mouthbreathing skell who'd be OK with that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        The average user has a bunch of family photos on their phone that they never back up. Being able to click a button and have those get automatically uploaded to some server somewhere where a professional will actually do backups is a fantastic idea.

  • Ze clooooouds... (Score:3)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @11:51AM (#58459772)
    Who needs storage when you can store all your personal files in the cloud like a good citizen?

  • For certain niches... (Score:3)

    by whitroth ( 9367 ) <whitroth@5-cen t . us> on Friday April 19, 2019 @12:23PM (#58459946) Homepage

    Let's see: personal computers don't need that much storage, and a lot of folks are storing in the cloud.

    You don't need the storage. Real servers, on the other hand... how do you think the clouds store data? Not on SSDs.

    Where I work we buy h/ds. At least NAS-rated h/ds. We haven't bought smaller then 10TB h/ds in a year or more, and we're paying, depending on rating, $140=$300.

    So, yawn, let me know when business-grade, not the cheap consumer-grade, SSDs go anywhere in that range for under $500.

    • I see people snapping pictures on their digital cameras like crazy, where the heck do they keep them all? They must take gigabytes of photos per outing, and dropbox only gives you 2Gb free. Furthermore, Dropbox could close its doors tomorrow so you have to have at least two services. Or you have to have a local copy anyway.

  • HDD HAMR/MAMR (Score:3)

    by t00le ( 136364 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @12:51PM (#58460108)

    With the advancements in 3d / 4d NAND / NVMe the transition you are seeing has been known publicly for years. The next two or three quarters will seal the fate of the traditional HDD companies, which hopefully planned for the decline with products in place for the transition.

    Whoever wins the HDD HAMR or MAMR battle will likely own a good piece of the continuously shrinking HDD market. Ther loser will be in trouble unless they have a contingency plan.

  • Drives are larger? (Score:3)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @12:53PM (#58460122)
    For my large file storage I used to have to buy eight hard drives, now I buy four larger ones. Presumably this analysis is adjusted by drive size? Otherwise of course you're going to sell less bigger drives, in addition to the SDD preference as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      That wasn't the case in the past. As bigger hard drives became available, they got filled up, and the number of drives sold, even as capacities exploded.

      Home storage is hitting maturity. Small pictures, audio, big pictures, video... the only new storage hog recently was 4k video, but most people just stream that from Netflix.

      • My family pictures alone are 100Gb, you're telling me people store that much in the cloud?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Sure. Apple will sell you 200 GB of cloud storage that your phone automatically syncs to for four bucks a month. For non-technical people that's a great deal.

          • I guess non-technical being the key word. They don't realize they're paying much more than they have to or should.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Absolutely. But the vast majority of the world is non-technical, and most of them have no idea that you even can back up a phone, never mind that you should.

              $4 a month for 200 GB is actually pretty good. I've seen universities charge up to $5000 / year / TB.

              • Generally between all my music and everything I want to do I need around 3Tb and I paid around $200 for that drive, so for $400 I can get 3 Tb of redundant storage. I would just be paying $4 a month for my photos, not everything else I need to do. You're telling me 3Tb of cloud storage would cost $60/month? The drives pay themselves off even before they are off warranty! Add to that the fact that cloud storage isn't the greatest for video encoding and things like that.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

                  No, you can usually get a couple TB of cloud storage for $50-$100 a year, depending on what features you want. The pricing isn't linear.

                  Cloud storage is absolutely more expensive than the raw cost of drives. It's not insanely priced though, if you trust the provider to actually take care of your data better than you do. For the vast majority of people, having someone else do the backups is absolutely worth it.

                  I have a couple drive arrays at home for the big stuff. But I also have some cloud storage, some fr

                • The prices in Canada are
                  50GB: $1.29
                  200GB: $3.99
                  2TB: $12.99

                  So 3TB would be closer to $19.49 a month based on the 2TB rate.

                  In the US the rates are
                  50GB: $0.99
                  200GB: $2.99
                  2TB: $9.99

                  So you would be looking at $14.99 for 3TB.

    • Otherwise of course you're going to sell less bigger drives

      Why of course? The world hasn't stood still. Every idiot's phone is a 4K camera. A cheap GoPro generates video at 80Mbps. A copy of Alien I have sitting on my drive is 56GB for the 4K version.

      For all the size increases we've had in HDDs for some reason I don't have any additional % free space than I used to.

      • Personally I haven't gone 4K and I'm not excited to. Didn't notice a difference when I went 1080p and quite honestly I miss my 540p Hitachi projection TV. It had a certain film quality that LEDs don't have no matter what the resolution. But yeah, I guess if you're into that kind of pain your space use would have gone up.

  • ssd prices have hit the affordable mark (Score:3)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Friday April 19, 2019 @01:48PM (#58460462) Journal

    It's pretty simple -- (a) SSDs have become affordable in reasonable sizes, and (b) with people relying more and more on "the cloud", having large amounts of local storage is less important.

    So, with SSD price per megabyte coming down, and storage requirements also coming down, the streams cross at some point and mechanical disks (which are still quite a bit cheaper) become unattractive.

    And that's not *even* considering drop resistance, lack of mechanical issues, smaller packaging, lower power and heat, and blinding speed.

    Except in applications where you need lots of really cheap disk and you have power and cooling to spare, mechanical disks are a dead technology, continuing only on inertia.

  • For HDD manufacturers it isn't about units shipped it is about exabytes shipped. Focusing on units shipped misses the way the industry is driven. Consider that manufacturers are constrained by the number of heads and platters they can produce in their factories. These heads and platters can be configured into drives in multiple ways. High capacity drives require more heads and platters, low capacity drives require fewer heads and platters. Major HDD customers prefer large capacity drives so the drive ma

  • I can buy TB sized HDDs for cheap, but TB SSDs are still expensive! :(

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