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Hard Disk Sector Consolidates Amid Uncertain Future
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The WSJ reports that Western Digital will buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for about $4.3 billion in cash and stock, leaving only four key hard disk drive vendors — Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba and Samsung. The hard drive world has been seen as ripe for consolidation, particularly as the rise of tablet computers such as the Apple iPad — which don't use hard drives for data storage — is casting doubt on the future of hard disks. Compared to hard drives, solid-state drives promise greater power efficiency, performance, resistance to physical shock, and run more quietly since they contain no moving parts. But one area that solid-state drives do not improve on their spinning predecessors is in their inevitable movement towards failure. 'SSDs are going to fail just like hard drives will,' says Chris Bross, Senior Enterprise Recovery engineer at Drivesavers Data Recovery. 'Every storage device will have issues regardless of their underlying technology.'"
This isn't all that different from when Seagate bought Maxtor. Back then, after the sale, Seagate controlled 44% of the market, compared to nearly 50 percent market share which this deal has bestowed upon Western Digital.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
There will be no hard drives because we'll just store all our data in the cloud. (ducks)
For the end-user, it's great that the average lifespan of a drive is measured in years. For the manufacturers, not so good.
Since upgrading my power supplies I've had very few drive failures over the past five years. I've purchased drives to expand storage, but rarely to replace. Across 10 laptops I have replaced two failed drives in two years. On the desktops, with about twenty drives between 5 machines, I've replaced maybe two units in two years. These run continuously, are rarely rebooted, and have semi-annual reboots to replace fans and clean out the dust.
After it seems clear the rewrite count is going to hell - 5000/cell for 32 nm, 3000/cell for 25 nm, SSDs are going to have a helluva time catching up in cost/GB. People will still want huge storage disks, data centers still need storage, hard disks aren't going away. The SSDs do rock for speed and is making huge performance gains but that doesn't bring the cost down. The combination of a blazing fast 100GB SSD and huge, slow 2TB HDD seems to be the way forward.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The "hard disk sector" consolidates, hmm?
For a moment, I did a double take and thought of Stac.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
"...and to commemorate their latest acquisition, Western Digital announces a new line of ultra-green drives...a spokesman had this to say..."
"Yep, these drives are so power-conservative, they actually stop consuming power permanently 30% faster than our previous line. We're calling them 'Hitachies'"
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
'SSDs are going to fail just like hard drives will,' says Chris Bross, Senior Enterprise Recovery engineer at Drivesavers Data Recovery. 'Every storage device will have issues regardless of their underlying technology.'
I do not see SSDs playing a major role anywhere near the traditional large database especially in financial institutions. In our trials with PostgreSQL that had 17 tables, the largest of which had 23.1 million records and 9 columns on an DELL notebook, these drives failed after about week of intense read/writes!
My former boss, who was a closed source stooge blamed the DB. Others like me knew these SSDs were not yet ready for prime-time. By the way all this was about 2 years ago. Technology could have changed for the better now.
Raid is not a backup, FYI.
I'm having a tough time locating in the GP where he portrayed RAID as a backup solution?
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
The HDD death has been predicted a few too many times...
Its still the cheapest storage with easy access out there.
Consolidation is not only expected, but somewhat necessary.
I spent 15 years in the HDD industry, and some things to understand:
- It takes roughly 70 people and 6-9 months to design and develop a new disk drive.
- product lifetime has been as short as 2 months and as long as 1 year.
- typical product lifetime is 3-6 months.
- A company needs to have multiple design teams doing multiple product designs phased for phased product releases.
If the product is late, its already obolete, and will not sell.
If the product is slightly behind the times, it will not sell.
Because of the above NRE expenses are huge, so margins or volumes have got to be huge, to make any money.
Margins went to nothing many years back, so the volumes need to be huge. Thus fewer players are the results of all that.
Because of the above, dozens of companies that used to make disk drives are now long gone.
All of that said, the "death of the HDD has been greatly exaggerated"
- its cheap, high volume storage, and all in all "fairly" reliable.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
Actually, the idea of an everlasting light bulb isn't that far-fetched.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Sold to Toshiba, Oct 2009.
http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/
Raid is not a backup, FYI.
Parent said he was using RAID to mitigate failure, not to provide backup. One might use a RAID setup as part of a data backup system, but this was not described by the parent post.
And if you bought them all at the same time from the same place, chances are, when one finally dies from old age, more than one may perish simultaneously.
The likelihood of two devices failing at the same time due to old age is incredibly small, unless by "old age" you mean something like "a meteorite striking the storage system".
You can make a light bulb that never dies, never as described by lifespan of a human being. These can even be made from filament - just have it at a lower power so it glows dim red, instead of bright white. 10-9 tor vacuum would also help.
But if you want real white light "light bulb", you can make light bulb from plasma in a sealed container exited by external electromagnetic field. The light bulb itself is just gas in a hermetically sealed glass container. There is nothing to burn out. The lifespan of the device is the lifespan of the external electrical components, and these can be decades.
Or a LED light bulb. Lasts "forever" if properly designed.
But no one wants to buy a $500 light bulb. People would rather spend $1 every year and replace any broken ones.
considering SSDs have only a limited number of write cycles, database work with heavy writes would likely be better served by RAM disks if you want ridiculously low access times and very high speeds. Something along the lines of a HyperOS HyperDrive or an ACard ANS-9010 / 9010B would likely be better suited but those solutions also have their own issues (namely a very steep price and loss of data when the battery runs out)
Just about every major drive vendor has had a similar problem at one point or another. Western Digital's original 3 platter 1.6G drives failed in droves, eventually leading them to replace all of them with a 2 platter version for free. More recently, Seagate had a bad problem with their Barracuda 7200.11 model line; are you also going to avoid Seagate?
It happens to almost everybody at some point. Do you not buy Intel products because of the Pentium FDIV or F00F bugs? DeWalt power tools used to be great, then for a while they were basically rebadges of the cheap Black and Decker stuff, and then they got better. Lots of companies seem to build a name-brand reputation, get complacent and drag their own name through the mud. The good ones pull themselves out of it and rebuild the name; it is largely about how they respond to a major screw-up than the screw-up itself.
Raid is not a backup, FYI.
I'm having a tough time locating in the GP where he portrayed RAID as a backup solution?
Duh, If you do backups you don't need Raid
*Ducks*
While SSDs and HDDs serve the same function the technologies are pretty different, so it's much easier for Intel and various RAM manufacturers to start making SSDs than it is for WD to transition to them.
Last I checked WD's SSDs were just a rebranded product made by some other company.
I guess Hitachi Global Storage Technologies have all they need to manufacture SSDs in house and I'm assuming the other HDD companies will have to make some acquisitions of their own to stay competitive.
*head asplodes*
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
Do keep in mind, though, those years figures are estimates based on the effective number of hours of runtime before they expect the bulb's phosphor to quit working as well or the start element failing in Fluorescents. It's not a continuous lifespan- it's something based off an assumption that most bulbs will be on for 4-6 hours per day tops.
With 10k hours, that equates to about little over a year of continuous duty (416 days...). If you presume 4 hours per day use, like they tend to, that's an estimated 7 year lifespan. An incandescent won't last more than a year to two under that service in most situations. Some of the first CFLs out that I'd been using just got replaced about 8 months ago. Over a decade's worth of service on those bulbs and they just recently failed. Some of them that get heavy use (6-7 hours in some cases) don't last more than 2 or so as much because the on-and-off wears out the start device in the bulb or there's cheap overall electronics that just couldn't cut it to begin with. Your mileage may vary, but the estimates are pretty close if you carefully read the packaging and realize the lifespan will vary proportionate to your usage. Some of the LED bulbs may go a better distance since their stated lifespan would be dependent on the drive electronics and the LED- the current crop of those direct replacements state 15000-30000 hours lifespan of which I'd expect most of those to live that out fully unlike CFLs because there's less start stresses on those bulbs.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Before DNS you'd give the specific route you wanted your email to travel. So instead of a simple flanders@ersys.com, you'd address it like decrwl!alberta!aunro!ersys!flanders. Since there was no reason you couldn't send email to yourself, all you had to do to gank a little extra storage was uuencode your payload and mail it to yourself by the longest route possible. Then set up a .forward file to automatically re-send the email once it made it around the loop. Some email servers would transact just once a day, so you could really add to the latency if you included a couple of those in your address path. And, yeah, people actually did this.
...that the submission should have had a different title:
Hard Disk Sector Defrags ?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
This brings up an interesting issue: will SSD manufacturers start pulling dirty tricks like shipping suboptimal wear-level algorithms and thwarting attempts to install or use third party firmware (that would presumably have better wear levelling and therefore increase the life of the drive)? It would be pretty easy for them to market "consumer" grade SSDs that break down faster than "industrial strength" SSDs. I could even see SSD manufacturers using the DMCA to try to stop hackers from distributing better firmware images (yes this is a bit of FUD, but it seems plausible).
Palm trees and 8
Sibling death in storage systems in pretty widely reported, however it's generally noted at the beginning of the bathtub curve more than the end.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Raise your hand if when you first read the article title, you thought that "Hard Disk Sector" was a literal, physical, hard disk sector.