Toshiba says Europe doesn't need 24TB HDDs, witholds beefy models from region | Hacker News Reader

Toshiba says Europe doesn't need 24TB HDDs, witholds beefy models from region

tomshardware.com

26 pointstaubek13 comments

The mechanical HDD space is weird. There have been like ten (or fifteen?) years of "HAMR/MAMR in two to three years" and one to two years of "HAMR/MAMR are actually shipping now!" - but I still don't see them in stores. These technologies only seem to barely increase capacities for now, and price per TB hasn't decreased in three years. It's not looking too good for mechanical drives.

OTOH, I got a Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB m.2 SSD for 170€ or so...

HDDs are getting increasingly squeezed between SSD and tape. In the past decade or so, HDDs have gone from in ~95% of consumer computers to probably <5% (extreme low end and extreme high end). they're still common in servers, but the reduced customer marketshare means manufacturers no longer care about getting the new tech to consumers. All their sales are to enterprise.

Storage is a duopoly. Price fixing for profiteering. Just like GPUs. There are others too but I trade them so my public list ends here.

> I still don't see them in stores

These are targeted at private cloud or DC use-cases, not really consumer use-cases. I doubt most consumers are building their own servers.

Taking a quick glance across storage reviews on one of the best visited IT related sites in my EU based country I've noticed Toshiba drives aren't that well received in comparison with widely available drives from Seagate and WD which soon will have models with storage capacity up to 26 (!) TB.

That likely has something to do with it too...

Bit of a bizarre choice. Nobody among the ~half billion in EU wants their HDDs?

> Nobody among the ~half billion in EU wants their HDDs

A 24TB HDD like the N300 would primarily be used in data center, private cloud, or HPC/ML usecases.

Europe just doesn't have the market size to justify supplying there versus fulfilling orders in NAM, APAC, and MENA [0], where majority of the growth is happening.

[0] - https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/insights/global-data-cen...

Aren't these marketed as "NAS" i.e. aimed at consumers and presumably not enterprise/data center clients?

They have the MH series for that: https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/enterprise-capacity... and supposedly 24 GB models are available in Europe.

Also Toshiba is an "also ran" alongside WD and Seagate who have 80% of the market and both sell their 24 TB NAS drives in Europe...

> Aren't these marketed as "NAS" i.e. aimed at consumers and presumably not enterprise/data center clients

It would still be targeted at MSP or an internal team use case - think like an MSP who provides file share services for local car dealerships or an ML team building their own in-house cluster.

That mid-market usecase doesn't exist at the scale to justify immediately launching the 24TB N300 in the EU market, especially as WD and Seagate already provide a comparable product as you pointed out, which makes the scope of market expansion much weaker.

It’s more important to sell them to the US.

Which would imply it is a supply problem not a demand problem

Weird headline, last time I checked the U.K. was part of Europe.

I want them :D

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