HDD Shipments Fell Nearly 13% in the First Quarter of 2019, 18% Since Last Year (tomshardware.com) 143
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.
Technology marches on (Score:3)
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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.
No, rotating disks oare for archive/backups (Score:1)
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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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Java is much faster than C, or even ASSembly.
Present your evidence, sir, or else you will be branded a liar.
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Java is much faster than C, or even ASSembly.
Present your evidence, sir, or else you will be branded a liar.
It's an AC post. They have branded themselves a liar and a troll.
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Java is much faster than C, or even ASSembly
Maybe true for a very unskilled developer, but with enough skills in optimizations of low level stuff it isn't true.
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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?
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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 ...
Meh, it's still interesting (Score:2)
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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.
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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.
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It is much closer to a 1tb HHD is about the same price as a 500gig SSD.
Then you can compare SATA vs NVME and you can get a better price for a bit slower drive.
However modern drives for PC's are often more then what we need. However the speed of a good NVMe SSD is often worth the extra price, because it offers a noticeable speed improvement in your computer, often more then a top end CPU or More RAM. As for the most part the most of the slowdown on your PC is moving data from the Drive to your RAM.
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So which newer tech is able to store as much data at a similar price level?
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I buy them to use with my monster cables!
Erh... say, are you running out of news? (Score:2)
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)
Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe because you need 8TB of storage for the massive broadcast quality 4K video files you generate?
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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.
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"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.
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$40USD seems to be the cheapest possible for HDDs. (Score:1)
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
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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.
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Re:Look at the prices (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Linux distros fit comfortably within 40 GB. Mine all run about 17 GB. My data goes on my old HDD.
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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)
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.
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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
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SSDs still smaller (Score:3)
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$57 realy a significant cos even for cheap laptops?
That's nearly 1/4 of the price of the the lowest tier laptops.
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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.
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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.
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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
Gamers aren't building new PC's, for one thing (Score:2)
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).
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The GTX 1660 Ti is ok and was released recently I think.
Another simple fact (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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It would be interesting to have data regarding "disk space" sold instead of units shipped.
+1.
Came to say the same thing (Score:2)
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
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The volume of data keep growing too. 4k and soon 8k, 360, VR.
That's not consumer generated mostly (Score:2)
The volume of data keep growing too. 4k and soon 8k, 360, VR.
Most of that is in shipped discs or streamed media though.
It may slightly affect PC hard dive base sizes but the PC market is also continuously shrinking.
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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
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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
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HDD vs SSD (Score:5, Interesting)
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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).
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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.
SSDs for OS/apps, cloud for all else (Score:2)
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)
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.
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Re:SSDs for OS/apps, cloud for all else (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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)
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That cloud is made of spinning rust.
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Why not both?
https://www.seafile.com/ [seafile.com]
https://owncloud.com/ [owncloud.com]
https://nextcloud.com/ [nextcloud.com]
https://pydio.com/ [pydio.com]
For certain niches... (Score:3)
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.
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HDD HAMR/MAMR (Score:3)
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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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ssd prices have hit the affordable mark (Score:3)
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.
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Inertia and Macs. Don't forget the Macs. They still ship spinning rust by default. Nobody can understand why, but here we are.
It isn't about units shipped. (Score:2)
Huge SSD sizes are still expensive. (Score:2)
I can buy TB sized HDDs for cheap, but TB SSDs are still expensive! :(
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While I do understand your reticence to trust the cloud inherently for all computing needs, I tend to disagree in this one aspect. In my opinion, online backup is basically the killer app for the cloud, vastly superior to local backups in almost every respect.
AWS Glacier would cost you all of 40 cents per month for that 100 GB. Encrypt it locally and no person on the planet except for you can see the data. AWS-backed storage is not going to suddenly disappear on you. And of course, unlike a hard drive,
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It should be rare that you need to restore your backup data, and in that case, reliability would seem to me far more important than speed (if speed is critical, use S3 instead of Glacier). If you don't already have a local copy, then it's not really a backup. That's just "cloud storage", and comes with all the pitfalls you mentioned, because then it's your only copy, and is vulnerable.
Local storage is pretty cheap, so there's no reason not to keep your data nearby as well. Personally, I keep my data on a
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If I had the upstream bandwidth, I'd happily do that. But with my ADSL only providing 1Mbps upstream, it would take me months to upload the first backup set. For some areas of the planet, local backup is the only affordable method.