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No Cheap Replacement For Hard Disks Before 2020

Posted by timothy on from the we'll-see-in-10-years-about-that dept.

siddesu writes with disappointing news to anyone who'd like to see solid-state storage dominate in the near-term future. "A new study of storage technology by the former CTO of Seagate predicts that hard disks will remain the cheapest storage technology in the next decade and probably beyond."

7 of 346 comments (clear)

  1. So that means that by 2015... by John+Hasler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...10 TB drives will be $10? More likely, 100TB drives will be $100 but you won't be able to get anything smaller. And they'll still crap out after a couple of years.

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    1. Re:So that means that by 2015... by dgatwood · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Pretty much. And the Seagate folks are forgetting the fixed costs in their estimates. There are a lot of fixed costs that go into manufacturing hard drives. That's the reason prices on HDs aren't dropping. Instead, capacity is increasing, giving the perception that storage is getting cheap. It isn't, though, unless you really expect to use all of that 1 TB capacity. The average computer user uses maybe 1-200 gigs. For them, the effective price of HD storage hasn't changed significantly in about five years.

      The price of SSDs is going down because most of their cost can still be reduced by economies of scale. At some point---probably within a couple of years---the price of a SSD will drop to the point where you can get a 256 GB drive for $100. At that point, it doesn't matter how big the hard drive vendors make their drive capacity; they're through. Most people will buy the much more reliable SSDs over the larger HDs once the price is about the same. At that point, the tables will turn, HD manufacturing will be relegated to power users, and hard drive prices will skyrocket. I'd give them five years. At most.

      Their statement reads like a press release by a company that sees the writing on the wall and is trying to keep stock prices propped up as long as they can. Just saying.

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    2. Re:So that means that by 2015... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's getting better, but I'll wait a few more product generations before using them in SQL servers. With HDD crashes, at least the data can be professionally recovered to some degree. But what about SSDs? If the controller dies and/or a PSU fries every chip, I'm afraid all the data would be lost forever!

      The backup strategy that you are using on your database server is to have your data professionally recovered after a disk crash?

  2. Define 'cheapest' by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you mean 'lowest cost per GB' then you're probably right. If you mean 'lowest cost per IOPS' then you're already wrong. And if we're talking 'lowest cost for something of adequate capacity and a low power consumption for a laptop' then you're also probably wrong too. When flash drives drop below about $1/GB (and it's already close) there will be little advantage in mechanical disks for most users. It doesn't matter if the disk is bigger if you're only using 10% of the capacity, and it's slower than the alternative and uses more power.

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  3. Re:Huh? by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful

    you still have to conceive of a way to produce it in mass quantities to drive the price below that of established spinning disks.

    Nope! Roast beef costs more than bologna, yet people chose to buy it every day. SSD drives don't need to be cheaper because they are better - silent, far less prone to shock damage, and ohhh so much faster. Morever, HDD's, though cheaper per megabyte for huge-sized drives, will be more expensive for the smaller sizes people actually need. You can get a memory stick for, what, $10? HDD's never touch that because of their complexity. Well before 2020 a 250 GB SSD will be $20, and will have ample capacity for most users, and will be cheaper than any HDD. Granted, a 50 TB HDD will still be cheaper than a 50 TB SDD, but most people won't care. About that time, HDDs will become specialty products, further crippling any remaining cost advantage.

  4. Re:Huh? by epine · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At the rate we're going, by 2020 Windows will probably need 500GB for a base install

    Only if you install the Federation Font Pack and the holographic tridi layout engine. And that's supposing the SETI program makes an immediate break-through, like tomorrow, and Perl 7 ships on time.

    We've already passed the visual resolution where porn becomes gynaecology. Even lust has resolution limits.

    Or maybe Google decides it saves bandwidth to send out the entire public Internet encoded as a single quantum particle, but for some reason people don't disable their Mozilla page cache.

    Extrapolation is a valid exercise, but works better accompanied by graphs and data points rather than historical fat jokes. The last time Windows hung over its pants like a muffin top, I had a 6GB hard drive. Seagate hasn't sold anything smaller than a military surplus tent awning for years now. Hard to believe, times change.

  5. Re:Huh? by Eil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So these people can predict the future now?! Really, you never know what is going to happen for sure.

    If you want to see what's going to happen in regard to mechanical vs solid state hard disks, you don't need a crystal ball. Just look at the transition from CRT to LCD displays. It wasn't so long ago (seems like only a few years) that LCD monitors were horribly expensive and that fact (combined with their other drawbacks) made them an unattractive option for most people. I can recall many, many people right here on Slashdot saying that they would never give up their enormous, power-hungry, failure-prone CRT displays. Now, you can't even buy a CRT computer monitor because LCD quality caught up and surpassed CRTs for most purposes while price plummeted. The same will happen with mechanical disks and SSDs. Maybe it'll happen faster, maybe slower, but it will happen.

    Keep in mind also which company this "prediction" is coming from: Seagate lived a long and prosperous career engineering and manufacturing mechanical hard disks. They are a huge company whose entire operation is based around the concept of shipping hunks of metal with rotating platters inside. Since an SSD is just a bunch of memory chips duct-taped together, the memory companies (Transcend, Crucial, Corsair, Samsung, etc) were the first ones with SSDs on the market. The SSD thing likely hit Seagate by surprise and they can see that their run won't last long. It's not too late for them to start transitioning to manufacturing memory chips, but doing so would be brutal for many reasons. To start with, their decades of mechanical drive development experience, manufacturing facilities, engineers, trade secrets, R&D, etc are mostly about to be worthless. If they start selling this stuff off now while it's still fairly valuable, shareholders are going to do a huge "WTF?" and walk off. Second, the memory companies have a few years head start. Even if Seagate could enter the market and compete with them, the company would be leaving their position as a market leader to be a market newcomer, taking cues from everyone else. (Cue the sound of their last few shareholders stomping out.)

    Basically, unless Seagate can buy up a few of the leading memory companies making SSDs right now, they're screwed. Until (or unless) that happens, all they can do right now is appease their shareholders and put their executives up on stage to have them parrot the lie that their business is going to be viable for a good long time yet. Oh, and frivolously sue all the SSD manufacturers on broad patent infringement grounds.