Disk drive shipments rebound from Thai floods | Hacker News Reader

Disk drive shipments rebound from Thai floods

computerworld.com

49 pointsck234 comments

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Once again title reversion. Compare to the original:

Hard drive production 100% recovered, but prices to remain high until 2014

Which one is more informative at a glance?

>Which one is more informative at a glance?

Wrong question. Which one are you more likely to click on?

But we're not talking about news-pushers, the problem is some kind of overzealous mod/bot on HN that has a grudge against customized story titles.

"once again..."

Care to share the secret of getting on the front page often enough to make a statement such as this?

I really appreciate it when someone takes the trouble of writing a more informative, non-sensational, non-editorialized headline like this. I often read the HN comments before reading the linked article, and a better headline sheds more light on those comments.

I really don't appreciate it when a more informative headline is reverted to a less informative one. Who does that serve?

To be honest, I slightly prefer HN's system of using the article's actual headline, as this demonstrates that HN is not trying to impose its opinion on articles.

The complaint about uninformative headlines should really be directed at the source article's editor.

Is it just me or is the date for recovery always Current Date + 1.5 years?

Anyway...I bought a SSD yesterday & feel that soon the only people who need HDDs will be people with massive media collections (ignoring servers etc). Even things like Steam libraries on SSDs are starting to become feasible.

Or people who can't shell out the money for SSDs

I think the point is that the lowest priced laptop hard drives you can find on Newegg are about $50. However, you can get a 128GB SSD for $100. 128GB is easily enough for simple use, even with a smallish music and photos library.

The $50 tier of conventional hard drives does include 500GB models, but that only benefits a different type of customer.

Furthermore if a customer is trying to save $50, and has very light storage needs, there are 60GB SSDs that can be found for $50.

>Or people who can't shell out the money for SSDs

I was talking about the SSD vs HDD decision. Not about people who don't have the money to do either.

SSDs are still considered 'luxury' items, like $1000 graphics cards. Don't forget that a 60GB SSD costs roughly the same as a 1TB HDD, and people do like bigger numbers.

People in the market for new PCs would typically start off with a HDD, before shelling out more money for an SSD.

>people do like bigger numbers.

Ah yes of course. I'm prone to seeing tech decisions from a more technical perspective only. I see what you mean though, the less technically sophisticated people probably drive more of the demand based on numbers alone.

I bought an EEE pc when they first came out and it had a 4GB SSD. I thought, no way would I fill that 4GB for this little thing. That lasted about a month. I had to put in the largest SD card I could find/afford (16gb?) to actually save all my files.

128GB may seem like enough but I am sure most people will go past that. We'll find something to eat up all that extra space.

After about a month, 128GB wasn't enough for me; I like to carry media around on my laptop, and other small things start to eat up the space. Soon I'll get a 256GB SSD, which should last a little bit longer.

There is also the hybrid approach. Every one of my machines has both a SSD and one or more HDD. Collections of files are separated by random access latency requirements.

Technically even if you only go the SSD route, you are also using an HDD - it is just that the HDD is at Google/Valve/Apple.

>There is also the hybrid approach.

Indeed. My current approach is to use hardlinks for Steam (Which is the only thing that is large & needs to ideally be on the SSD). The way I figure it, HDDs suck at small files so those go on the SSD. Media & gigabyte sized Steam files go onto the HDD & get hardlinked into the steam folder.

I wish I knew how Steam treats the gig sized GCF files though. Does it read them primarily sequentially or randomly?

Install Process Monitor and set a filter for GCF files. You'll have a log of the relevant activity. (I think it can also do CSV export but don't have Windows currently running to check.) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.asp...

To be honest... relatively high HDD prices combined with very low SSD prices make for a really interesting and progressive storage market! I'm glad to see the $/GB gap close significantly. One could make a very convincing case to buy at least a 128GB SSD with any desktop build.

Prices are already down and it definitely isn't 2014 yet. 3T is about the sweet spot right now, it's never been much cheaper than it is today. 2T is a bit more expensive than before the floodings, but a part of that is that there is simply less production of them (which has switched to 3T models).

It's sad to see the slowdown in the increase of HDD sizes (and I don't feel that it was only due to the flooding, since it was already occurring to a degree before that). It used to be that there was some absurdly huge HDD available for $1000, but now we don't see anything more than 4 TB, in the $300-500 price range.

4T is a pretty large amount of data though.

I think what will happen is that more and more funds will move to SSD research and improvements, pretty much the same way it happened around the time that the GMR was discovered and first marketed.

There was an apparent slowdown in drive capacity increase and then, when the GMR based drives hit the market we were suddenly swimming in drives of 100's of megabytes.

That tech is getting older and the whole solid state movement seems to have the future. So this may be the last generation of storage media based on spinning magnetic platters. SSD still has a bit of catching up to do, but the writing is on the wall for hard drive makers.

Imagine to have to sign off on a mulit-year, multi-billion plan to create new factories that will have no application in a future iteration of the technology. That would be a very tough business decision. I'm happy they got as much production capacity online as they do.

On the plus side of all this: the last generation magnetic media, at 4T or even beyond will be sold at rockbottom prices to keep those factories alive as long as possible.

Seagate has demoed HAMR a tech which might allow them to get to 60TB and may start showing up in 6TB consumer drives within a few years. Other research is being done on adding sodium chloride to platters and IBM is researching magnetic storage at the atomic level. So long as magnetic storage can stay ahead of semiconductor fabrication then it will have it's place.

As far as someone making a decision to build a factory for commodity hardware manufacturing, that same issue occurs with NAND which is quickly seeing profit margins plummet. E.g. a 50nm NAND plant 4 years ago is no longer competitive today. This is probably why Intel jettisoned their NAND manufacturing.

From what I have seen hard drives are pretty much back to pre flood prices now in $/GB terms, there has just been 18 months of price progress gone.

Meanwhile SSDs have done a hell of a lot of catching up.

Indeed, the SSD that I bought a year to go at 180 Euro (Vertex 3 128GB) is now around 90 Euro. Yesterday I bought a 256GB SSD at 175 Euro. 256GB is probably enough for most regular users, and in about a year the price will be well below 100 Euro. There will be little incentive to buy a hard disk once the general public becomes more aware of the speed of SSDs.

I don't think that's true. They have come down but not to the absurdly cheap level they were before the flood.

As an anecdote, I purchased a 2 TB hard drive just a few months before the flood for $60 from Newegg. Now, the cheapest 2 TB drive on Newegg is $100.

So, they have come down but still haven't recovered. This is why I haven't been able to bring myself to buy another 2 TB drive because I know I'd be paying a 50% premium over what I paid last time.

That's not just the flood. Hard disks are basically a Dupoploy now, so with less competition they are raising prices.

Is this showing that the PC death is overrated or that the HDD producer's monopoly works as planned?

"PC death" is a marketing fad.

No, not marketing. Growth has been flat. The market relies on growth. From an investors point of view if you aren't growing then someone else is so they should divest from your company and go to something else.

PC death is still here--at least of a fashion: it's a mature market, and people aren't replacing them on short timescales anymore. Instead of 1-3 years, replacement timescales became 3-5 years, and at this point it's probably 5-7 years. Desktops have largely been supplanted by laptops, and the new hotness is in the phone and tablet space.

> Instead of 1-3 years, replacement timescales became 3-5 years, and at this point it's probably 5-7 years.

I don't think that's true. Laptops are still being replaced every ~3 years, from what I've seen. The difference is that a lot of those frequent upgraders are Mac users, and all the new Mac laptops use SSDs.

maybe it's just me but the prices still seem high and availability low...case in point the new WD Reds are all out of stock. And all the manufacturers are now consolidated into seagate and WD...a bummer since I liked hitachi and samsung drives a lot.

it's just a computerworld article ... Seems like their previous deal with slashdot is over (since it got acquired) because I see a lot of these links on HN recently

Did computerworld have an advertising relationship with slashdot?

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