HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
I run a repair shop, and one of the top computer repairs we do is to upgrade a spinning disk to a SSD.
A 240GB SSD runs $60-$65 these days, and is perfectly adequate for 99% of users. For that other 1% (which I include myself in) 512GB is adequate for 90% of those.
HDD -> SSD is the single most cost-effective upgrade most people can do to breathe new life into an older computer. Going from a spindle drive to a SSD in most computers decreases boot time from ~4 minutes to ~30 seconds. Browsers load faster, videos don't stutter as much, the computer runs more silently. These are the issues most people care about.
A SSD upgrade means a 2010 MacBook Pro now has another 2-3 years of life, which is awesome news to most of the people we serve (who are often college students just trying to make it through college without their computer dying on them.)
I hope to see this chart go to 0 in the next few years as SSDs continue to decrease in price; this doesn't mean much bad news for the "PC industry", just ancient relics of a bygone age finally dying (and/or becoming super-niche for things like archiving where data transfer rates don't particularly matter.)
first upgrade: more ram
second upgrade: ssd
third upgrade: video card and monitor.
it's on track to give me 10 years of use now, if not more (i'll probably succumb to upgrade fever before then). knocking on wood. the ram and ssd were a given, but i was surprised at how much more 2d performance the video card delivered. i really just wanted 4k for the real estate, but the actual speed at which it renders everything jumped dramatically.
just did a 3.46 hex cpu upgrade. 32GB 1333 RAM sm951 AHCI pcie m2 boot drive (700MB/700MB) nvidia 1080 when it comes out.
bootcamp for games. 40" 4K Philips in os x for everything else.
Alternatively, just buy whatever's on sale for small SSDs and do a fusion-drive on it.
Perhaps I should go with a 500GB SSD and transfer the movies and whatever else is taking up space to the server. And then buy a new iMac once they put the next-gen GPUs in them.
So far I've been completly disappointed with my purchase. Compared to my 3TB HDD I've spent more money yet only see a 2x improvement in speed compared to my HDD for sequential loads. Sure it now boots much faster but that's hardly worth the money I've spent on it.
Alas, everyone still seems to recommend Samsung Evo if you want reliability (I do), and $330 for a 1TB EVO 850 is still a little more than I want to pay. (Especially when a 2TB spinning disk selling for $95 now.)
an ssd is a completely different paradigm. it's night and day, even on an old sata bus.
this shoudn't even be a question. hdd computers are completely unuseable to me now. i sat down at one the other day and i thought it had crashed and almost rebooted it, but it was just chugging the disk.
I have considered switching out both the HDD and the DVD drive to get space to build a Fusion drive, but I kinda want to keep the DVD drive; it's the only one we have in the house.
Hm. Maybe I should build a Fusion drive and add an external optical drive...
A bit more complicated than I'd like :)
That said, it might be of interest to enterprises from a few different angles (largest drive available for that form factor, easier to manage, great performance, etc). Anything that widens adoption will serve to drive prices even lower. SSDs don't necessarily beat HDDs on price per GB, they just have to get close enough that enough people don't care anymore. And as the original poster pointed out, for many that's already the case.
Because we're seeing, at the same time, a drive away from owning media and instead streaming them, and/or storing data increasingly in The Cloud® and only having a small working set locally.
All those off-loaded will have to be stored somewhere by someone, and that someone will most likely keep using spinning rust for its better price.
And if you do want to keep all your data locally (e.g. because you're living in Nowhere Innawoods and ISPs struggle to get you 6 MBit/s), HDDs can't keep getting bigger and cheaper fast enough.
That was my point; almost nobody is storing HD series anymore because people want to (and in many cases legally are only able to) stream them instead.
They never were. Why would you store a movie on a hard drive after you watched it?
Flac music can fill another 500 GB easily, more depending what you listen to..
Not a lot of people know how/can stream a properly good 1080p stream with high bitrates. oh, you want some subtitles because you're not an english native? Or you have fancy stereo/surround setup that you want to actually use? oh well, you better download some bigger version.
But if the Cloud is made up of hard drives, then hard drive manufacturers still win. Look up "Backblaze Pods" if you don't believe me.
I mean, if everyone just stores data in the "Cloud", its mostly composed of hard drives anyway. You just no longer own or maintain the hard drive.
If drives in the Cloud are, on average, utilized more efficiently (both in terms of less unused drive capacity being purchased, and existing drives being used for more of their design life and not being tossed because the device they are in is end-of-life even if the drive isn't) than traditional locally-deployed (both client and server) drives, then increasing cloud use could mean the manufacturer's still lose (in terms of year-over-year sales) even with total storage increasing, if the increase in average efficiency outpaces the increase in storage, so that annual drive sales drop.
If you're making large purchases right now, 3+TB SSDs are pricing out fast spinning disk tiers. You probably will see no 10k/15k drives in 2-3 years.
Also, have you seen case of SSD data loss due as result of not powering up for couple years?
(I've had very small sample size of SSDs not being powered up for a few years, but the few I have powered up after not powering on for years have had all their data retained. Ask me in another 15 years or so, though.)
How does that happen?
I've written a few flash storage systems (small ones, for consumer devices). If your data structures are such that you can't do an atomic commit, you shouldn't be in the marketplace.
Sudden loss of power is not an excuse.
But yeah, I agree it's a bug and shouldn't happen. So what :)
edit:
There we go: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast13/fast13...
Some more: http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html
Note that the 320 recommended by the second article had similar issues, supposedly fixed in firmware 4PC10362, but some users reported problems even on that version: https://communities.intel.com/thread/24339?start=15 (many of those complaints look like different problems, but not all).
And then it would work perfectly well again...for a while.
* there's the story I posted about the OCZ V1 drives eating paste periodically while behind redundant power.
* there was a fun problem of some OCZ Deneva 2 drives deciding that they would simply drop off the port and not come back without a cold power cycle, behind redundant power (and a related story about the drives being in such a state, and the AHCI init code on the BIOS getting confused and hanging forever, which was what actually necessitated the cold cycle).
* there was the really fun case someone I worked with came up with where they found a way to reproducibly brick a particular family of SSDs using only about a TB of IO on a 480 GB SSD. (And by "brick", I mean "call the manufacturer, it's not coming back.")
* there was the SandForce bug once upon a time which caused the affected SSDs to not show up correctly as disks under Windows when on SATL because the firmware reported an empty "version" field, and while all the other OSes tested were content with this, and Windows when not using SATL was content with this, Windows when using SATL would report the disk as an "Unknown Device" for this.
In normal circumstances an SSD is not going to lose data if left powered off for two years. [1]
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...
All in all, there is absolutely zero reason to worry about SSD data retention in typical client environment. Remember that the figures presented here are for a drive that has already passed its endurance rating, so for new drives the data retention is considerably higher, typically over ten years for MLC NAND based SSDs. If you buy a drive today and stash it away, the drive itself will become totally obsolete quicker than it will lose its data. Besides, given the cost of SSDs, it's not cost efficient to use them for cold storage anyway, so if you're looking to archive data I would recommend going with hard drives for cost reasons alone.
We've returned 25% of the laptops of a particular model because the Kingston SSDs had failed. That's across a sample in the hundreds.
For developer workstations, we get good results from Samsung drives. We run Intel enterprise class drives in servers and they're fine, don't even have to think about them.
We've pretty much stopped buying spinning drives, with a few exceptions where we need lots of capacity and don't care about performance.
I sent it out for RMA, they returned it with the work description "firmware upgraded" and no further information. It's the same drive, but it's been zeroed/factory-reset.
I have backups, so I'm not too concerned about losing data, but this episode didn't exactly make me confident in the quality of SSD firmware, especially since samsung is supposed to be one of the better manufacturers out there.
Just one anecdote, make of it what you will. Of course, I've had countless hard drives fail over the years as well, but the failure mode is very different, there's no partial read possible and it just happened all of a sudden with no indication.
I really like those SSDs! I replaced the (about three year old) Crucial M500 480 GB SSD in my ThinkPad W530 with a pair of them and have since put them in every machine I've got (with the exception of my new MacBook Pro).
Regular S3 hasn't had a price cut in a while now.
tl;dr: We're definitely still looking to buy spinning drives, but maybe they don't need to fit into a 2.5" or 3.5" PC sized slot.
(Also, the part which discusses hybrid SMR drives that allocate a conventionally recorded section on the platters for GC and hot/cold data separation purposes – would a small SSD be applicable for this functionality?)
I thought this quote from a recent James Hamilton blog post seemed like a plea for the hard drive manufacturers to get their act together... seems like he's not alone ;)
"But, leveraging an existing disk design will not produce a winning product for archival storage. Using disk would require a much larger, slower, more power efficient and less expensive hardware platform. It really would need to be different from current generation disk drives. Designing a new platform for the archive market just doesn’t feel comfortable for disk manufacturers and, as a consequence, although the hard drive industry could have easily won the archive market, they have left most of the market for other storage technologies."
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2016/03/everspan-optical-co...
Somehow misleading title. You don't buy a HDD, you buy storage capacity, and this metric is increasing, so it seems that the HDD industry is pretty healthy.
Enterprises do. Desktop users don't.
Although there's a big difference from eMMC crap and (even a low-cost budget) SATA3 SSD.
I've not finished reading the book yet, but I think there were a few predictions about what would happen to companies that dominate the spinning drive market - it would be interesting to see how closely the predictions align with reality.
So presumably this is just the shift of laptops over to SSDs rather than storage being less useful. If that is the case it would suggest that storage prices may stabilize a bit on a cents per GB basis.
Now they are $50
Something about supply/demand doesn't make sense here.
> Something about supply/demand doesn't make sense here.
Yep. It feels like there's a price-fixing investigation that runs periodically in each PC component market that finds solid evidence of price fixing and then forces the prices down.
I was trying to landmark that specific event as a measure of before and after.
I'm not calling you out; the practice has mystified me for ages and I see an opportunity to gain some information.
We absolutely need bigger drives because we will have bigger files. Think video (4k, 8k, VR, HDR), archive of operating system images for development, data to use for ML, NixOS style immutable operating systems, all the data from your personal IoT gadgets. Readily available larger storage gives us many benefits:
1. requirement for OS stack to adapt (think ZFS)
2. doing things we wouldn't consider possible at home before
3. more complete backups with history
By enabling new things for the masses, we enable the development of new stuff by people in their free time.
Let's not mix tablet/phone use of storage with that of computers with keyboard+mice.