Hard Drive Revenue About To Take a Double-Digit Dip

Lucas123 writes "Ultrathin notebooks, smart phones and SSDs are all putting pressure on the hard drive market, which is set to take an almost 12% revenue loss this year, according to a new report from IHS iSuppli. Hard drive market revenue is set to drop to about $32.7 billion this year, down 11.8% from $37.1 billion last year. At the same time, In what appears to be a grim scenario, the optical disk drive industry is expected to encounter continued challenges this year, and optical drives could eventually be abandoned by PC makers altogether."

Comments

Less demand

[fustakrakich]

That means prices will go down, right?

Re:Less demand

[8ball629]

That means prices will go down, right?

We can only hope. Recently HDD manufacturers seem to be coming up with any excuse possible to increase the price per unit and I could see them increasing the price just to lessen the blow of decreased sales.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if you cut supply.

Re:Less demand

[colinnwn]

optical drives could eventually be abandoned by PC makers altogether.

And won't be missed.

That means prices will go down, right?

At first as the market searches for a new equilibrium. Later, at least one or 2 big name makers will exit the market. As the size of the market contracts, you'll see the price of HDDs per GB creep up a little, or at least stop going down ignoring the effect of the Taiwanese floods. But HDDs aren't going away. They'll be the cheapest highest density quickly accessible storage for many years into the future.

Re:Less demand

[Dr. Spork]

Maybe. But there will also be much less investment in further density improvements. Every dying technology reaches a price minimum, after which point the price actually increases. Even though memory is cheap, a new stick of DDR costs more now than the same stick would have cost five years ago, even though the demand was much higher then. That's simply because manufacturers lost all incentive to produce DDR because of the low demand. The same thing could happen to hard drives. You'll know we're in trouble when factories start scaling back production, closing or retooling for the manufacture of something else. We're not there yet, but we soon might be.

Re:Less demand

[wisnoskij]

Actually if they do less volume prices will rise.

Re:Less demand

[Khyber]

"or at least stop going down ignoring the effect of the Taiwanese floods."

You could at least get the country right. It's Thailand, not Taiwan.

Re:Less demand

[suutar]

no, but supply will.

Re:Less demand

[Githaron]

I am more worried about traditional computers following this trend as the average Joe finds all his non-productive computer usage can be done on a tablet and gaming console. Power users, productive users, and PC gamers would left spending even more money on equipment than they already do.

Re:Less demand

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That means prices will go down, right?

That would probably be true in a competitive market.

But right now the market for hard disks is between two giants (Western Digital and Seagate) and one tiny little division of Toshiba that doesn't make much if any 3.5" models. I think we are much more likely to see oligopoly-style non-competition and thus price stability if not outright increases.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comparison is not really all that valid

The article refers to "hard drives" in general, not a specific type (IDE/SATA) or generation (SATA/SATA II)

It is not as though there is no further investment into the improvement of "memory". Certainly DDR is not being improved at this time, and hence it is more expensive than it was, but that hasn't prevented DDR3 from being improved, larger, faster and cheaper.

It's also not as though the hard drive market is going to suddenly dry up. Mobile devices may be stealing the show in the consumer market, but the growth of more and more mobile devices also has the effect of increasing the amount of storage needed in the server/cloud market.

Short of a new storage technology that will provide cost effective (/=cheap), large capacity, high performance at some scale better than hard drives, there is still plenty of need to continue to improve hard drive technologies.

Re:Less demand

[whoever57]

But right now the market for hard disks is between two giants (Western Digital and Seagate) and one tiny little division of Toshiba that doesn't make much if any 3.5" models

And SSDs. The availability of drop-in replacements for spinning-disk hard drives alters the market dynamics. SSDs are a lot more expensive, but they also offer some big benefits: lower power, faster access. The availability of SSDs is likely to impact the price of spinning platters much more than the 2-supplier oligopoly.

Re:Less demand

[colinnwn]

Couldn't remember, I knew it was a T country, and that was the first google result.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck - and this whole time I thought it was Trinidad!

Re:Less demand

[second_coming]

In comparison with what PC hardware used to cost, they are extremely cheap at the moment.

My first PC in 1992 cost me £1400.

Re:Less demand

[foniksonik]

That's how it should be. OTOH the products will be more focused so you should get more value for your money.

Re:Less demand

[Kjella]

Prices are already down and below pre-flood prices for 3TB HDDs, so I'm not sure what the fuss still is. Here's the price development on a Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB 6Gb / s, scroll down to "Full history" and you can see the whole history from pre-flood to today. The prices are in NOK so forget the absolute values but pre-flood it cost about 1000 NOK, peaked at 1700, returned to 1000 around Christmas and now it sells for 921, wiithout VAT that's about $135. Bulk storage has never been cheaper than now.

Re:Less demand

[Miamicanes]

For a hint of where the market for spinning drives is going, look at DLP. DLP never totally went away... it just walked away from the low end, then milked the high end for years.

SSDs are getting cheaper, but for raw bulk digital tonnage and petabytes of ripped Blu-ray pr0n, it's still hard to beat spinning hard drives. Manufacturers will just quit making small drives as SSDs catch up, add platters until they can't fit anymore into a 3.5" enclosure, then revisit the past and reintroduce 5.25" hard drives, just like Quantum did ~15 years ago. At some point (probably 10-20 years from now) SSDs might eclipse spinning hard drives, but I wouldn't write them out of the picture TOO soon. We'll be buying them LONG after Joe Sixpack and his kids have forgotten what they are.

Optical media will probably be around longer, as long as Hollywood doesn't manage to kill it off, because it has one concrete advantage: longevity (as long as it's not based on organic dyes). BD-R media is likely to be around (in single, 2, 3, 4, or more) layer forms for a really, really long time.

Prices won't necessarily go up per se, but drives will probably get more expensive over time because the low end will just cease to exist, and manufacturers will try to make the drives bigger, faster, more redundant, (god forbid) repairable, or some permutation of the above, while maintaining the same price points and gradually just eliminating the lower ones until the only spinning drive you can buy is a 5.25" 500TB Western Digital Diplodicus Max with 256GB flashcache for $299.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of a general purpose computer is for it to have a general purpose so that you can do whatever the hell you want with it.

Re:Less demand

[colinnwn]

No no, it is Tobago

Re:Less demand

[teh dave]

And won't be missed.

I will miss them. I still like optical discs, as they make an excellent WORM media (Write Once, Read Many). This makes them good for archival storage of files that aren't huge movies, like documents. A double layer BD disc holds 50GB, which is plenty for documents, config files, code, save games, even photos or moderate amounts of music. Just because you can't fit your entire torrented movie collection doesn't make them useless. You see, I can write a BD disc, and close it. I then know that nothing can write to it again (well, practically - how many people have BD burners, and mine won't anyway), which means it's safe to use in an untrusted (or potentially infected) system. Name a cheaper storage medium which has this capability.

I also find many people dismissing optical media for movie and game distribution, and claim that these days it should all be distributed online. It must be nice to have a fibre Internet connection to your house, but back in the real world where everyone else lives the average Internet connection speed is still a couple of megabits, and that isn't improving very quickly at all. People like myself are stuck with a measly three megabits... you expect me to download a 20GB video game or a 40GB movie on that? I'd be waiting a week!

Re:Less demand

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That is just the price history of one model in one country. In the US, I scooped up eight 3TB external drives off the shelf of Target after the price-gouging started because Target was slow to catch up with the online gougers. They were $99 each. Yes, $99 for a 3TB external drive at a regular brick and mortar department store,, not on sale. The 2TB drives were $79.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but most people do not need a general purpose computer. You're been riding on the rather accidental alignment of "entertainment computing" and "general computing", because for the last few decades entertainment computing was demanding enough to require a heavyweight general PC. Now, special purpose devices like tablets are stepping in to fill that niche, so the result will be that general purpose computers become more expensive because they won't enjoy the economies of scale they have over the last few decades from the great masses buying them any longer.

Re:Less demand

[teh dave]

Whoops - forgot to mention. The other benefit WORM media has is its usefulness for storing software that needs to be trusted, such as your OS. I realise it's much faster to install an OS from a USB flash drive, but I can much more easily trust the Ubuntu disc I burned on a trusted system after verifying its integrity using the supplied sha1sum - or the offical logo'd Windows disc supplied by Microsoft with the pretty hologram embedded in the disc surface.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck - and this whole time I thought it was Trinidad!

you mean it's not Trinidad and Tobago? They seem twice as likely to be involved

Re:Less demand

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

For a hint of where the market for spinning drives is going, look at DLP.

For anyone else going WTF do projectors and televisions have to do with storage, he's actually talking about DLT - Digital Linear Tape which is the marketing name of the Quantum tape product originally developed by DEC. The competing format is LTO (Linear Tape-Open) which basically killed DLT circa 2005. HP, IBM and eventually even Quantum (after acquiring Seagate's tape division) make LTO products.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Now this thread is the top link for "Taiwanese flood hard drive".

Good job!

Re:Less demand

[daniel23]

made me laugh out loud - but not true. Currently it's #12 - but only after setting the search option to "last hour"

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

And THIS, this right here, is why their sales are falling. Before the flood I was getting 1TB drives at around $40 and 2TB drives for around $65 but since the flood prices have been close to double that so I simply haven't been buying. If the prices come down? Sure I'd be happy to add another couple of TB of storage, but I'm not gonna pay premium price just to add more space.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

Actually if anything I have a feeling HDDs are gonna have a "bounce" in a year or two as all those that got cheap SSDs get burnt when they flip the switch and find all their data gone.

The problem with SSDs is frankly they have never really licked the controller issues and as they add more space the problem just seems to be getting worse. I have honestly never seen an SSD die from the cells being used up but I have seen a LOT of SSDs that had the controller fail and take the drive out. Over at coding horror they labeled this the hot/crazy scale in that to get the hot performance of SSDs you had to put up with the crazy failure rates. While those of us who are religious about backups won't have a problem with this most folks are NOT religious about backups and WILL get bit in the ass when they flip the switch one day and just find their data gone forever.

So I have a feeling when all those cheapo SSDs start going tits up there is gonna be a lot of folks that write off the tech and go back to HDDs, say what you will about HDDs they usually give you plenty of warning before going tits up.

Re:Less demand

[jedidiah]

The market has been pretty stagnant for a couple of years now. Prices have remained high and capacities have not improved much. The really big drives are still relatively rare and rather absurdly priced. I am not looking forward to any new media purchases because there's simply nothing new to look forward to.

If they don't present me with a nice upgrade path, I will continue to just hold onto my old media longer.

Re:Less demand

[PReDiToR]

I was going to comment that SD cards have a write protect tab, but then I remembered that you flick that switch to enable CHDK on Canon cameras so the protection is only in software, not hardware.

Another thing that has a write protect tab is the Zalman Virtual Drive USB device. I'd be happy enough to boot from one of those on a daily basis. I already use a few USB keys with ISOs on for different scenarios.

Re:Less demand

[cyberjock1980]

You are also failing to consider that if it hadn't been for the flood, would likely have continued the downward slope from where they where. Just because we are at pre-flood doesn't mean the market has recovered. 3TB drives would be about $90 each right now based on the trajectory of price if it hadn't been for the flood. I haven't seen $90 3TB drives anywhere except for "1 per household" and "only 100 at this price" sales.

Re:Less demand

[greg1104]

The anecdotes from places like Coding Horror are just that: anecdotes. Were early SSD failure rates higher up to 2011 than regular drives? I think they've gotten better as years pass. What about now though? Even the 2011 survey from Tom's Hardware already put SSD reliability as already higher than regular drives.

I've had plenty of spinning drives that didn't last more than a hundred days too. Hard drive controllers fail with no warning, just like SSD ones do. I think this is emphasized as more associated with SSD failures because it's the only way SSDs die.

In the middle of 2011 Intel raised warranties to 5 years on the main SSD I use in my systems. In late 2011 Seagate dropped warranties to a year. If you don't care about high capacity, it's possible for a SSD to cost less per year than a mechanical drive now. That's not a glowing statement about the manufacturers thinking SSD is more likely to fail either.

Re:Less demand

[Kjella]

So I have a feeling when all those cheapo SSDs start going tits up there is gonna be a lot of folks that write off the tech and go back to HDDs, say what you will about HDDs they usually give you plenty of warning before going tits up.

Is that the plural of anecdote being data? That huge survey that Google released showed that SMART warning signs was a good indicator it would fail soon, but most drives still failed without warning. Not difficult if 5% of your drives show SMART issues with a 50% chance to fail, but 95% of your drives look fine with a 3% chance to fail. And that was Google who mostly run their disks 24x7, for home users who power cycle their drives more often the usual failure mode is that they work fine until a reboot and never spin up again. To add my own anecdote, over the years the disks that have died on me with warning signs has been the exceptions, not the rule.

Re:Less demand

[gman003]

I think hard drives are more likely to grow "up" than to grow "out". Think 1-1.5" high 2.5" drives, or 2-2.5" high 3.5" drives.

Main reason would be speed. With SSDs becoming abundant, people will be wanting faster access even on discs. Adding more platters means more heads, and thus more raw I/O, while wider platters give higher seek times and generally slower rotation speeds as well.

Still, your guess is as good as mine.

Re:Less demand

[rolfwind]

At some point (probably 10-20 years from now) SSDs might eclipse spinning hard drives, but I wouldn't write them out of the picture TOO soon.

Idk, prices on SSDs have dropped a LOT. I mean 2 years back in Summer 2010, I got an 80GB Intel SSD for $215 and now I got a 240GB Intel SSD of comparable rank for $155 (last december, for some reason they raised the price on it now).

I feel that HDDs haven't done shit in capacity increases for some time now. If the doublings hold, I would say by 2020, we'll be seeing SSDs overtake HDD in capacity/price.

Re:Less demand

[TheLink]

The HDD makers should do a better job of using small capacity SSDs as part of their drive caches.

Then more people would buy the 2TB HDD+32GB flash cache instead of a 128GB SSD and separate 2TB HDD.

Currently there are hybrid drives with tiny SSDs as caches but they don't perform well enough to be competitive with SSDs and from what I see there's no technical reason why they can't be competitive.

Re:Less demand

[drinkypoo]

external disks are often inexplicably inexpensive at big box stores. costco often has really great deals on them, for example, and their computer prices are usually not that fantastic.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

Hell I still find good old DVDs to be quite useful for backup purposes, you can hold a lot of docs and pics on a 4.7GB disc and I have some nearly a decade old and they still read just fine.

And I agree that the Internet just isn't very good at moving large files and if anything its gonna get worse not better as the ISPs continue to oversell capacity without laying new lines. This is why I wasn't surprised at the ISPs all jumping on board the "6 strikes" bullshit as it gives them an easy to use excuse to get rid of anybody that uses even half the bandwidth they paid for.

So I'd be quite surprised if the Xbox next and PS4 don't both come with BR drives, until we can get nationwide fiber discs are still gonna be the easiest way to get a large game to the masses.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

Exactly,I have a lot of customers that would be happy to add another couple of TB for storage and backup purposes....but not at the prices they currently want. I currently have 3TB in my system (1TB OS drive, 2TB data) and wouldn't mind adding another 2TB so I can rip my entire DVD collection and just drop them in a folder but there is no way I'm paying $100+ for a single 2TB drive, not when I paid less than that pre-flood for both the 1TB and 2TB drives put together.

So if the prices go back down to pre flood levels, where i'm paying around $35-40 a TB? I'll be happy to pick up several TB worth of storage but right now its just not worth the higher costs and talking to customers many feel the same, they are sitting on their 650GB-1TB worth of storage and waiting for the costs come down before adding that second drive.

Re:Less demand

[foniksonik]

I can download 1.5GB in ~15 min. Via torrent. It takes longer to drive to a store much less buy and I can do it unattended. If the files are larger then that just means I do something else for a while. Eat lunch, play a game on my tablet, go for a walk, whatever - it's all better than driving somewhere and back or waiting two days for Amazon to mail it.

Re:Less demand

[yuhong]

On the other hand, these users are more likely to demand alternate OSes like Linux and Windows with less crapware. I have been thinking of starting a mailing list where PC vendors can communicate with OS vendors, which could be the beginning of a standard group.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

All I can tell you is what I've seen at the shop and my gamer customers are up to double digits on their SSDs because of all the controller failures.

And you can take that "warranty" with a BIG ASS pinch of salt, as I have found that damned near NOBODY will claim any of those warranties, why? Because they would have to send the drive back and they have no idea what third world country that busted drive is gonna be sent to or if their data will end up recovered by somebody so they don't risk using the warranty. Hell if my gamer customers would use their warranties they wouldn't have had to buy a drive for the past 3 years but they are afraid their CC numbers will end up in the hands of some hacker in China so they just shitcan 'em.

Finally as for Seagate? Ask any retailer and we'll be happy to tell you that Seagate drives over 500GB are deep fried fail right now. Go to any place system builders get their parts like Newegg and look up the Seagate 1TB and 2TB drives and you'll see post after post saying things like "Bought 10 drives, 4 DOA, 3 dead in a month, the other three are already iffy less than 3 months". If the rumors are true its the fact Seagate took the shitty ARM controllers from Maxtor and this combined with shitty firmware that gets corrupted when it gets hot leads to a condition where the drive will try to write past the end of the platter and ends up crapping all over itself.

But I'm sitting here at the shop working on systems 6 days a week and I can tell you that I can't even remember the last time I had a HDD fail on me that I didn't get SOME warning, either Windows "delayed write failure" errors or Windows corruption or rarely SMART errors. Sadly in the last few years (Since Seagate started putting out junk drives) more and more I've seen SMART used NOT to tell when a drive is failing but instead used as a way to cover up bad drives so the OEMs don't have to honor warranties. In fact I was told a couple of months ago right here by a fellow system builder that if you call Seagate trying to get them to honor their warranty they make you run the latest Seatools which just resets the SMART so it'll claim its no longer seeing errors when it is. Honestly it really wouldn't surprise me as I learned quickly enough to avoid anything over 500GB by Seagate, they really are garbage.

Re:Less demand

[Jane Q. Public]

"Currently there are hybrid drives with tiny SSDs as caches but they don't perform well enough to be competitive with SSDs and from what I see there's no technical reason why they can't be competitive."

The Seagate Momentus XT, when it was new, outperformed some competing -- more expensive -- SSDs in write performance. Since then, new SSDs have overtaken it again. But don't write off hybrid drives as underperforming. As the XT showed, if designed well they can be pretty remarkable.

And don't forget improvements in technology. Even those spinning platters get higher capacities and performance every year.

Sooner or later, solid-state will shove the moving parts off the market. But that is still some years away.

Re:Less demand

[greg1104]

Tools whose sole purpose is frustrating RMAs are all around. I have a WD drive with 500 uncorrectable bad secots. Each time I run a scan, it gives out *one*, switches to repair, and that's it--better now. No, it isn't next scan will find the next error. Hours of work, no RMA, no working drive.

If you have a SSD where failures are total collapse, they can be more cost effective to repair, just due to the price tag. Just encrypt your data on there if you want it to resist RMA theft.

You details on the shady Seagate failure weakens your point about low SSD reliabiliy. Those sound like >50% AFR models, and any decent SSD could to better. At least they telegraphed what they were going to do with the warranty drop. Saying what used to be up to a 5 year warranty, it's now 1 year, it shows product longevity is not even remotely on their priorities.

Right now I use Intel 320 Series SSD (with capacitor backup for power failure). Regular drives are WD Red: their 24x7-NAS drive, turned for early error reporting. It's the only SATA drive on the market that has even the possibility to be good.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet most of your gamer customers were using OCZ SSDs, they had the cheapest prices, but absurdly high failure rates:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html

Re:Less demand

[tlhIngan]

The Seagate Momentus XT, when it was new, outperformed some competing -- more expensive -- SSDs in write performance. Since then, new SSDs have overtaken it again. But don't write off hybrid drives as underperforming. As the XT showed, if designed well they can be pretty remarkable.

Well, the Momentus XT is still pretty cheap - for under $150, you can get 750GB of storage with 8GB of flash storage.

I use one in a HTPC that has one SATA channel available - the flash part helps the OS get moving around, while the bulk storage holds all the recordings.

Of course, I only buy SSDs from manufacturers who make flash - Samsung, Intel. Brands like OCZ and the like just slap parts together (which is why there are dozens of SSD manufacturers. To make an SSD, you just need a company who can assemble a circuit board. To make an HDD, you need cleanrooms and fine mechanical designs).

You can get very reliable SSDs - just see what Dell/Apple/Lenovo/etc use for their SSDs.

Re:Less demand

[fisted]

1TB OS drive
i laughed bricks.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

The last Toshiba 3TB disk I bought came from Shenzhen and had a Hitachi label as well, it was cheaper than the Seagate and Western Digital alternatives. I'm surprised the Chinese have not taken over the hdd market yet, but maybe they will.

Re:Less demand

[Miamicanes]

That's mostly because so many computers -- even computers that are fairly new -- don't have the slightest clue how to deal with a 3+ terabyte hard drive. We're stuck on the same plateau like we were a decade ago, when drives jumped from ~1.6gb up to 30gb almost overnight... then stagnated for at least another year or two, slowly creeping up to 40gb (with jumper to make it look like 32gb) before they started getting bigger again. Simply put, 3tb+ drives have an astronomical return rate because people install them, they don't work, and people assume they're broken, so retailers are afraid of them. To retailers, 1 and 2TB drives are commodities... 3TB drives are a return problem waiting to happen, and 4TB drives cost twice as much as two 2TB drives.

There's also the fact that modern drives have shit reliability. I've had more goddamn drives fail over the past 3 years than I've had fail in the ~25 years or so since my Amiga 2000 got its first 40mb Quantum SCSI hard drive back in 1988. I went for 10 years (~1999-2010) basically never powering down my computer and leaving it running 24/7. Now, hard drives die after 6 months if you try that. In 3 years, I've lost two 300GB WD Velociraptors, a 1.5TB Seagate, a 1TB Hitachi, and a 2TB WD. Come to think of it, every goddamn drive I've bought over the past 2 years and used for anything besides occasional backups has died after about 14-20 months of regular use (fingers crossed on the 500gb Momentus Hybrid I bought 13 months ago). And I'm not even counting my suicidal OCZ Vertex2, which mangled itself so many times, I threw it in a drawer in rage and swore I'd never soil my computer with a SSD again (at least, not for a REALLY long time).

IMHO, the biggest single problem with new drives is the fact that they die without warning, for no obvious reason, and when it happens, they take an UNHOLY amount of data down with them. A year ago, I spent almost a week in frustrated rage, on the verge of tears the whole time, because it seemed like my drives were dropping like flies & dying faster than I could cleam up the mess from the PREVIOUS drive's death. At one point, I went out and threw down almost $800 for 4 2TB drives just so I could make 4 complete backups of the files I cared about the most & hope one of them survived long enough to get me through the hard drive plague with my files (some going all the way back to middle school in the 1980s) intact. OK, maybe I overreacted, but I was really freaking out last November & feeling like I could literally lose my life's work any day. Losing 3 hard drives in 7 months will do that to you.

Re:Less demand

[Jane Q. Public]

"You can get very reliable SSDs - just see what Dell/Apple/Lenovo/etc use for their SSDs."

Actually, Apple used in their early Macbook Airs a proprietary SSD stick made by Hitachi, which were notorious for failures.

The Samsung version apparently does better.

Also, OS X does not support TRIM. Apple gets good drive performance out of SSDs without it, but I suspect their system writes more often, which would make their longevity suffer.

Re:Less demand

[lightknight]

Indeed. They've come out with 4TB drives, but the prices for them are way up there -> I think it's more cost effective to buy 2 3TB drives than 1 4TB drive. And that's bad.

What more, I am not using most of the storage I currently have. It's not like how it was during the '90s, when every extra GB was something amazing. Now it's 'the next storage capacity needs to be twice the previous' at an agreeable cost for me to upgrade. Paying good money for last year's storage capacity is an annoyance, and not likely to last (SSDs are slowly creeping up there in capacity).

I think Seagate made a short-term profit at the cost of future market-share. They took advantage of a bad situation, and have aimed to extend it as long as possible, reasoning that computers need hard drives, and OEMs do not have any other options. Well, OEMs do have other options: they're called SSDs. And while Seagate was busy making a tidy profit, it also was providing a good excuse for many people to try out SSDs. And they learned that they like them.

If I have to choose a 2 TB SSD or a 4 TB HD, the SSD is going to win. All my hard drives are going to be swapped with SSDs once the capacity gets up there. And I've looked at Seagate's SSD offerings -> they are proof that Seagate is not taking the SSD market seriously.

I would consider keeping hard drives around if their capacity was around 8 TBs, or perhaps at least 6 TBs. But it looks like SSDs, which are doubling their capacity at a frightening rate, will be overtaking hard drives long before they reach that capacity. The practical upshot of this is that no one will do business with Seagate, and I can finally watch the last of Maxtor die its long overdue death. A pity since before the merger, Seagate was, from what I've heard, a decent company. But like HP & Compaq, the disease spread.

Re:Less demand

[lightknight]

Indeed. The Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD wars really damaged things so far as optical drives are concerned, with the costs for media really holding Blu-Ray back. I imagine that is due in part to Sony, which has a serious problem when it comes to licensing / pricing to remain competitive at times; they've apparently killed a number of technologies, superior ones, simply because they wanted way too much money for licensing rights.

Re:Less demand

[lightknight]

Indeed. Once people see their OS / applications on a SSD, they are unwilling to go back to a HD.

Re:Less demand

[lightknight]

And yet strangely, they can be less expensive than their internal counterparts when shopping around online. Boggles the mind.

Re:Less demand

[Joce640k]

The problem with SSDs is frankly they have never really licked the controller issues

Try Intel instead of OCZ.

Not all SSD manufacturers feel they have to put out a new controller every three weeks just to keep themselves in the headlines.

Re:Less demand

[elucido]

At some point (probably 10-20 years from now) SSDs might eclipse spinning hard drives, but I wouldn't write them out of the picture TOO soon.

Idk, prices on SSDs have dropped a LOT. I mean 2 years back in Summer 2010, I got an 80GB Intel SSD for $215 and now I got a 240GB Intel SSD of comparable rank for $155 (last december, for some reason they raised the price on it now).

I feel that HDDs haven't done shit in capacity increases for some time now. If the doublings hold, I would say by 2020, we'll be seeing SSDs overtake HDD in capacity/price.

Long before 2020.

Re:Less demand

[Joce640k]

there is no way I'm paying $100+ for a single 2TB drive

LOL! Cry me a river...

That's a couple of trips to the cinema. A tank of gas.

Re:Less demand

[ShakaUVM]

I never buy a brand new SSD because it's a total crapshoot if the controller will be homicidal or not, and for a lot of drives, flashing the firmware wipes your drive, which is a PITA to deal with.

So I wait a while, check Newegg reviews (filter down to 1-egg reviews and see if the one-egg reviews are for controller failures or something stupid, like Newegg not shipping the drive on time or whatever).

Has been working well for me.

Re:Less demand

[RoboJ1M]

Not digital linear pudding then... :(

Re:Less demand

[RoboJ1M]

Also form factor. 5.25" drives is an interesting idea, but cases are eschewing 5.25" bays.
But they do have stacks of internal 3.5" bays, maybe they will design double height 3.5" drives?

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8 user detected. ;-)

Similar situation to GP myself. 4TB of data on the server and would quite like to add to it, but I'll wait until the prices drop a bit. It's about £75/2TB at the moment, which is close to what I was picking them up for pre-flood (I think I bottomed out at about £60/2TB) but I'd rather wait for the price to drop a little more before committing.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

What's so funny about that ? I was running 1TB drive for the OS alone on my system, and had 15TB of 3TB drives + plus a couple of other drives via hotswapable bays.

I once only used 50GB partition back in the XP days, but since the HD prices were low after the 2TB drives came out 1TB is more than affordable. I've now switched to a 250GB SSD.

I don't really understand how people use anything less than a couple of TB these days.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

There'll still be professions that would want to use optical drives, mainly DVD and Bluray. I'm a photographer, and file sizes of teh images these days are immense. I need to use DVDs to backup the raw files. And I need to hold on to these files for a number of years, waiting for the client to come back and ask for new pictures etc...

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that because you only know one country starting with an A or a U ?

Re:Less demand

[Rich0]

If I have to choose a 2 TB SSD or a 4 TB HD, the SSD is going to win.

Yes, but the choice is usually between a 2TB HD ($110 right now), and a 120GB SSD (somewhat close in price), that isn't such an easy choice. For the OS it makes more sense, but for any kind of storage it does not. Even for things like video games the SSD is quite inconvenient - it clearly boosts performance but games eat data by the GB and moving applications between drives in Windows is anything but fun (you do want to play more than 10 games, right?).

Plus you can't really mix the SSD and hard drives on RAID, so you have to buy an extra drive as both your spinning and SSD arrays need an extra device. That is, if you care about your data. I guess you could always just image your OS on your hard drive and use that to restore from boot CD if you go down, but that isn't terribly convenient. (And yes, I know that RAID is not backup - but it eliminates the need to restore quite a bit in multi-disk setups and it is WAY cheaper for lower-risk data that you don't want to pay to backup.)

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

SSD controller failures are no big deal on the home desktop. Power off, remove, count to five, re-insert, power on. The controller firmware is crappy, like in a cheap home WiFi router it sometimes gets stuck and needs a physical reboot.

They're more annoying in our data centre, so we make a point of RMAing the (encrypted) SSDs anyway. This hopefully sends a clear message to the manufacturer "Hey, get some better firmware and your RMA costs would go through the floor".

Re:Less demand

[Mike Frett]

In our shop also we have a high rate of SSD failures, more so than spinning disk type. Guy down below claims they are probably from OCZ, would you be surprised if I told you most of them were from Intel?. The Computers we build about two years ago used (I think) Samsung before it was sold last year I believe, and out of the hundreds we built, we got back maybe two that failed. Those were the most reliable non-ssd drives I ever encountered. When we get a Computer in now days that has a non-SSD Hard Drive, It's usually Seagate and Western Digital that has failed. And of course, most are Windows systems filled with malware and usually no Anti-Virus, but that's a different story.

Interestingly enough, 1TB and higher drives (non-ssd) are the ones that fail 99% of the time and we inform out Customers of that. Most of them are just using the drives to store everything. We tell them they would be better off getting something like a 250GB Hard Drive and backing all their stuff up to a DVD or BR Disks. They would get a more reliable system this way. Of course as you all know, those smaller drives are very hard to find now. It's hurting people who want stability and reliability.

Most of the time we see a dual boot system with Win/Nix, Customer says they use Linux but boot to Windows to play a Game. We are very helpful here and inform the customer about Steam and various less visible ways to get Games on Linux. If they all moved to Linux, we would lose half our business since most of our money comes from cleaning infected XP/7/8 Systems. Lately we've been getting into Phone/Tablet repair also, what a mess that is, Manufacturers just don't want to cooperate there.

A lot of Repair Businesses are dying because Companies today want the customer to buy a NEW product when the old one breaks, and give Hell to Repair shops who try to get parts. This hurts Customers, Jobs and it hurts the environment. And from my POV, It's getting worse. Planned obsolescence is in full swing and it only benefits Corporations and their micro-second traders. If you want my opinion, company's have lost their way and this type of behavior is destine for failure and is likely to cost Jobs, economic disasters and even lives when resources get low and Big Corp lobbies for War. =(

Re:Less demand

[drsmithy]

Also, OS X does not support TRIM.

OSX has had TRIM support since 10.6.something.

Re:Less demand

[drsmithy]

Indeed. They've come out with 4TB drives, but the prices for them are way up there -> I think it's more cost effective to buy 2 3TB drives than 1 4TB drive. And that's bad.

By simple maths one would expect two 3TB drives to cost more - you're getting 50% more space.

Even that aside, it's completely normal for the newest, biggest drive to cost more per GB than the previously biggest drive.

Re:Less demand

[AmiMoJo]

The problem is the way SSDs fail. HDD controllers are interchangeable between similar drives and allow data recovery. SSD controllers are usually soldered to the same PCB as the memory chips and can't be swapped. Additionally they encrypt the data on the memory chips and the key is stored securely inside the controller IC, so even if you did swap it your data would be lost.

Of course HDDs have other issues but it seems you have more chance of getting your data off a dying HDD than you do with an SSD. Obviously backup is the key in both cases but having worked in a computer repair shop I can tell you that only about 0.1% of people actually do it.

Also, SSDs do die in other ways. I have an Intel SSD that wore out the flash memory. They rate it for 14TB of writes and I got close to that in about 8 months on my desktop, after which it started quietly corrupting writes.

Re:Less demand

[M1FCJ]

Using DVDs for backup is already more expensive than buying a 2-3TB disk and storing that.
And disks are faster. DVDs as backups are dead unless you want to store very small amounts of data (4.7GB? Who cares about 4.7GB any more?)

Currently I'm buying USB3 ext storage disks and moving my DVDs onto them. It is cheaper, takes less space and works faster.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

...At some point (probably 10-20 years from now) SSDs might eclipse spinning hard drives, but I wouldn't write them out of the picture TOO soon. We'll be buying them LONG after Joe Sixpack and his kids have forgotten what they are.

10 - 20 years? Your timelines are laughable.

20 years ago we were dialing up to the Internet at 28K and still using 3.5" "floppies".

10 years ago we were handing out large 512MB thumb drives, and a 120GB HDD was rather huge.

Today we're walking around with 512GB on our keychains (at eSATA/USB3 speeds), terabytes sitting on your desk, and free broadband wireless with every McOrder.

It will hardly be 10 - 20 years before I can buy very large SSD drives with plenty of room for pr0n left over.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

20 trips to the cinema. Or 2 full tanks of fuel (or 3 if I were lucky enough to get US fuel prices) - and since fuel is such a major expense, that's nothing to sneeze at.

However, 2TB is still quite a good return on $100, so GP's complaint is going overboard.

Re:Less demand

[Visserau]

The Vertex 2s had an insane failure rate according to the guy at the shop. 2 RMAs later, I'm on a vertex 4 which hasn't presented issues for me (or others that I know of).

Re:Less demand

[halltk1983]

Internal heat is going to be a problem.

Re:Less demand

[halltk1983]

Are you using the RAID class drives designed for that type of usage? And making sure that you're giving plenty of cool air across them?

Re:Less demand

[CAIMLAS]

No, it means prices will go up.

At least in the long term. Short term, we will probably see a glut of already-manufactured product on the market that retailers, wholesalers, etc. will start slashing prices on to move out the door. We'll see 10-20% sales, maybe.

Then, when the supply is a little less thick, the price will 'stabilize'. Then it'll start going up, just as we've seen with every other 'old' media format (I'm thinking IDE drives in particular, as it's a recent memory).

First, we'll see the availability of inexpensive SATA drives disappear, then we'll see the variety decrease. We'll see the price edge closer towards that of 'Enterprise' drives, while said Enterprise drives also move north in price. And since they're basically the same drives, with only geeky consumers wanting them for their massive porn and/or whatever collections, we'll see the prices more or less merge with the 'enterprise' disks only being marginally more expensive but the consumer disks losing pretty much anything resembling a warranty.

Basically, what we're looking at here is the possible death of the consumer hard drive market. The prices could turn around, but since 256 SSDs probably aren't far off from being put in consumer products, and we still haven't gotten to the point where the average consumer needs a 250GB hard drive, I see no reason why we'll ever see $100 "high capacity" hard drives again.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped buying Seagate decades ago when "sticktion" was a problem.

Re:Less demand

[CAIMLAS]

SSDs actually aren't all that much more expensive, particularly for "just another drive" drop in replacement.

Consider: the low price for SSDs on newegg is around $50 (give or take $10 depending on brand, etc.). That'll get you a 30GB SSD, which is more than enough for pretty much anything you would want to install or produce on a low end system, like a laptop. The cheaper replacement hard drives at 350GB or so all fall in that price range and offer astoundingly bad performance, even for hard drives. Worst case scenario, you're probably spending $15 more than you would on a hard drive for a 60GB SSD. (Until about a year ago, my 'download dump' drive was a 100GB drive and I don't recall ever having it get full. 60GB can take a while to fill.)

Jump up to the $100 price point and, for an even greater number, the more expensive hard drive offers no benefit in increased capacity; the increased capacity of the SSD, however, is going to likely be enough for even a great number of people who save media on their machines. (You know, that 5% who still bothers with anything other than Netflix/Amazon/etc.)

The scenario is different if I'm looking for something for media storage/pirating, but for all intents and purposes, that's not going to really be all that necessary. I now have 3 systems in use with "hard drive failed, SSD replaced" and I know a local repair guy does SSD replacements exclusively at the low end (because it offers the most bang for the buck, particularly when you consider that the performance on laptop drives is horrrrrible).

Re:Less demand

[tibit]

Why would you send it out anywhere? Get a stock of various popular SSDs, get some reflow equipment, and replace bad chips with good ones. I don't see what's the big problem, if it's truly the dead controller chip that causes the issues.

Re:Less demand

[Arancaytar]

In the short run, definitely. If production is scaled back, in the long term prices may increase since the production cost will scale less.

Re:Less demand

[halltk1983]

Moving applications is easy. NTFS supports symlinks now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link I moved all my games I don't play regularly to the spinning disk drive. If I get an itch and want to play one more than a couple times, I'll move it back.

Re:Less demand

[tibit]

Cool air doesn't make any difference.

Re:Less demand

[michrech]

I have a 4u rack mount case at home (got it from a NewEgg daily deal with a mainboard and a HDD -- sold the mainboard on eBay and paid for the entire bundle). It has 8 5.25" bays. I have WHS2011 with StableBit's DrivePool installed running in that case. It'd be awesome if 4+TB drives were made in a 5.25" form factor so I could stuff a bunch in there and quit messing with these silly 3.5"5.25" adapters. :)

Re:Less demand

[gman003]

10.6.8, to be precise, although some introductory work was done in 10.6.6. Although by default TRIM is only used on Apple-sold SSDs, but there's a trivial work-around to enable it on commodity drives.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Tobacco, moron.

Re:Less demand

[BlackSnake112]

Really? The controller is what is dying on an SSD? I may have to look at an SSD again. The SSDs that I have seen in long term use are the ones that you plug in like RAM. Not the hard drive ones. Those last about 3 years and then the performance starts quickly dropping. Swap out the SSD and everything is good again. I have tried rebuilding on the old SSD but the size of the SSD shrinks. Which says to me the SSD is going bad. Due to this I have stayed away from SSD drives for important systems. Drives will fail at some point. I get that. I usually have 5-8 years on regular old hard drives. I usually replace then after 5 years. I have yet to have an SSD make it past 3. That is for personal systems. The work systems the warranty determines replacement. Getting close to that date and replace the part.

I was looking at using a SSD. I was hoping the SSD would last longer. The companies that are using 100+ SSDs have an advantage. Those are not single SSDs they are RAID 5, 6, 51, 61, etc. They can lose one (or more) and still be up. RAID 1 on my home machine might be worth it. I have seen the drives in a RAID set fail together before. We got a bad set of drives. Still I have seen that 9 times. It is really sad when you watch all the drives fail in a few hours of each other. For the cost of RAID 1 SSD I can have 4 or more regular drives. So load and boot times are faster. Using the slow hard drive my system is at the log on screen in 20-30 seconds now. I am usually waiting on the SSD people to load in games. That could be server lag and what not, but it is consistent. I am thinking of waiting for more long term use numbers to come out. SSDs are what 5-6 years old now. The life numbers should tell the tail in a year or two. The early SSDs did not have a good life expectancy from what I read and saw. How will the later ones be? I am hoping they will be better then spindle drives. The technology says they should. We will see.

Re:Less demand

[BlackSnake112]

Why is it that the 250 GB single platter drives sold out so fast? The reviews was saying they were fast drives and reliable. More heads means more chance of one of them going out of alignment and killing the drive.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

ummm, because you have fast internet..... Most people don't.. Also bluray games can be up to 50GB, and that would be 8+ hours with your fast internet connection.

Also many people have low bandwidth caps so even a 1.5 gb download could eat up an entire months worth of internet

Remember what works for you doesn't work for everybody.

Re:Less demand

[ArcadeMan]

You mean like their last stunt, flooding a huge area just to increase hard drive prices? Talk about lame.

Re:Less demand

[8ball629]

No. Ever since that disaster (2 years ago?), prices decreased but they never returned to normal. It just seems like manufacturers never let the prices return to their normal rates after being forced to hike them up due to the floods. It's almost like they were given a second chance at re-pricing their goods after knowing what consumers were willing to pay.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't quite believe the 5.5 drives making a come back. Computers get faster and faster and whatever is used for a drive must keep up with the rest of the machine. At a certain speed discs simply come apart. The faster they spin the more noise they make. That gets even worse as people want their PCs to be in ever smaller casings. My thinking is that units the size of a cell phone will acquire enough power to replace personal desktops completely and that even SSD drives will be thought of as too bulky and a sort of stumbling point that one sort of has to tolerate. Disc type drives may become the type of product that only a small percentage of the public would seek to purchase. That might mean that very high quality and very low costs would be basic to survival of those that create spinning media.

Re:Less demand

[Rich0]

Yeah, since I don't actually store anything valuable on my windows box I might just do something like that in the future.

For my server that stores important stuff like photos/etc I need RAID (plus selective backups). If I have to re-install windows and a bunch of games it won't really bother me that much.

But who knows - maybe on my linux server I'll set up an SSD for the OS with daily backups to the RAID. That really wouldn't be that painful to recover if the SSD dies - recovering a few dozen GB of data isn't that bad especially if it is in the form of a disk clone.

Re:Less demand

[tlhIngan]

But right now the market for hard disks is between two giants (Western Digital and Seagate) and one tiny little division of Toshiba that doesn't make much if any 3.5" models. I think we are much more likely to see oligopoly-style non-competition and thus price stability if not outright increases.

Hard drive manufacturing is difficult and expensive. You need clean rooms and specialized equipment to make platters. For a product that contains some pretty damn precise mechanical equipment, you can acquire them for under $100, retail. It's also highly commoditized, so it's no wonder competitors get gobbled up - high volumes, low profit, high barriers to entry.

Contrast this to build an SSD - all you need is a supply of flash chips (Digikey), controllers (Digikey), a circuit board (lots of vendors) and some other parts (all of which can be had from Digikey). Just ship 'em off to your favorite contract manufacturer and out comes back SSDs. It's not quite that simple, but you don't need any clean rooms or other special equipment - your friendly contract manufacturer would have all the required machines because it' used everywhere by everyone.

So that really limits how high HDD prices can go - because building an SSD is really easy compared to an HDD, and we see it in the market today where it seems everyone and their dog is making SSDs. Of course, most are crap and the entire industry is due for a shakeup where the crap guys die and the good ones gain success. Especially since modern SSDs are so fast that speed is meaningless (will you notice if an SSD gives you 500MB/sec or 450MB/sec?), so reliability is where it's at.

Re:Less demand

[pak9rabid]

Not to mention that most SSD's are being sold by companies that don't have much (if any) presence in the HDD market at all (Intel, Samsung, Corsair, Crucial, Kingston, etc), making them direct competitors to the likes of Western Digital & Seagate.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

It's seems almost as if they suddenly had a bunch of large, unanticipated capital expenditures that they now have to pay off, which means higher prices to maintain the same profits they had before the disaster.

Hmm... As a matter of fact, it seems almost *exactly* like that's what's going on.

Re:Less demand

[hobarrera]

Optical media will probably be around longer, as long as Hollywood doesn't manage to kill it off, because it has one concrete advantage: longevity (as long as it's not based on organic dyes). BD-R media is likely to be around (in single, 2, 3, 4, or more) layer forms for a really, really long time.

Optical media is already dying. High end notebooks (including ultrabooks) no longer include optical media.
Most desktops I've seen around don't have optical media.
I've 7 computers at home, of which only one (very old) laptop has a dvd drive.
At the office, only iMacs have optical drives.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

No, lower supply only increases prices if demand remains the same (or increases).
If demand is lower *and* supply is decreased as a result, prices will remain about the same.

Of course, as we see with memory, when demand gets low enough, it consists pretty much solely of the people who will pay a *lot* to keep a particular system running, and prices go up with both supply and demand at its lowest, simply because producing a tiny amount of something is much more expensive per unit than producing a metric fuck ton of it.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

It's seems almost as if they suddenly had a bunch of large, unanticipated capital expenditures that they now have to pay off, which means higher prices to maintain the same profits they had before the disaster.

Hmm... As a matter of fact, it seems almost *exactly* like that's what's going on.

Thank you, Mr. Obvious. I guess that explains why the *per unit* cost is still ~1.5x what it was 2.5 years ago. When you compensate for improvements in technology and the cost of raw materials decreasing your assessment makes a lot of sense!

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

That is why I've been moving into HTPC and security system installs, I already found out dealing with the phone and tablet companies simply aren't worth it. We have one guy in town that works on phones and when I went to ask him how he managed to deal with the asshole companies he simply opened his back door and there he had a giant heated garage, bigger than my shop, full of NOTHING but cell phones. he has to do that just so he can get the parts...fuck that noise.

And I gotta second the Samsung, I have all my systems running on Samsungs because of how low the failure rates were. If you can find any Toshiba or Hitatchi drives those are both damned good too, in fact I'd take a refurb by any of those 3 companies over a brand new 1TB Seagate any day of the week. I've been seeing the same thing when it comes to the 1TB and 2TB drives,, Samsunbg, Toshiba, and Hitachi work well, WD are hit or miss, Seagate is made of fail.

I usually tell my customers to get 2 drives though, one internal and one external so that if one fails they have a backup. Not sure about the BR discs as I haven't seen any long term studies on how good the dye lasts. DVDs work well for small files and I have plenty of those pushing a decade old that still read, but as I learned when DVDs first came out you'll get some really shitty companies cashing in (Staples brand anyone?) so I tend to be more cautious when it comes to backups. The WD green drives make for decent externals and their 1TB failure rate isn't nearly as high so that with a Caviar blue internal is usually enough for my customers.

Oh and my customers did NOT buy OCZ as some have suggested, I'd never recommend that trash, most bought Kingston and Intel, the failures rates were just as high. They just haven't figured out how to deal with the controller issue yet and until they do I just can't recommend an SSD for anything you'd care about if you lost it. But you are right we shops are dying out pretty quickly, we've gone from 6 in my area to just 3 and I bet the old guy in the middle of town will be closed down soon enough. They are just not selling replacement parts and everything is so proprietary that if you don't keep a warehouse full of damaged units for spare parts you can give it up. This is why I stopped fixing laptops and instead simply offer to move their data over, the price of replacement screens has gotten so high that unless its a $1500 laptop its just not worth fixing. Damned shame as the landfills are gonna be filled to the brim with this junk, but what can you do?

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

And? I have a triple boot and don't want to mess with multiple partitions for software installs on those 3 OSes.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

Why would the controllers failing make you want to look at SSDs again? And all I can tell you is what I see here at the shop and we don't get much call for the SSDs that plug in like RAM, that's enterprise stuff and we deal with mostly SMBs and home users. But what I have seen is that it doesn't seem to matter who makes the drive, Kingston, Samsung, Intel, avoid OCZ like the plague because like Seagate over 500GB they are just trash, but no matter who makes the drive with the MLCs you are looking at VERY high drive controller failure rates.

The worst part is the way the drives are designed, if a controller dies on a HDD? you can swap the board with one of the same model and usually get the data off. with the SSDs however not only is the controller soldered to the PCB but they have the data encrypted and guess where it keeps the key to decrypt? You guessed it, in the now dead controller.

Some have suggested I tell my customers to encrypt everything but how much overhead does that add? Kinda pointless to go SSD if you are having to use a chunk of the performance gains just to be prepared for a drive failure. So far I haven't found any benches on using encryption on an SSD and after seeing so many failures I don't currently have any in stock. Like most of the other shops I have been buying up 400GB-500GB drives since these hard drives have the least amount of failures but they are getting harder to find, as is the Samsung, Hitachi, and Toshiba drives, all of which were quite good even up to 2TB.

And as far as RAID? Good luck with that, frankly from what I've seen less than 5 drives you really aren't improving your odds and with RAID 1 it seemed like they were more likely to have both drives go tits up then not. Of course when you look up how much it'll cost to run RAID with 5 SSDs you'll have a heart attack, not exactly the most cost effective way to do things. If you were my customer and wanted to go SSD? Get yourself one or even 2 HDDs in external enclosures, preferably by different manufacturers or at least different batches and then BACK UP RELIGIOUSLY because while that SSD may be greased lightning it WILL fail on you, oh and if you don't want to send a drive full of your data to some third world country you probably should take the hit and encrypt, otherwise kiss the warranty bye bye.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

You can get a 100 pack for $22, that is 470GB for $22 or around 22c a disc, where can I get HDDs for that price? And the problem is its damned hard to find decent 2TB drives, the Seagates are just trash and the WDs I've found to be hit or miss. If I could find Samsung or Toshiba drives at a decent price I'd be right there with ya but ATM the only drives they have at affordable prices are the Seagates and the only reason they are so cheap is the word has gotten out about the high failure rates. go to sites system builders use like Newegg and see the reviews of the Seagates, you find rows of 1 star ratings where guys bought 5-10 drives at a pop and the whole bunch didn't even last a year.

at least with the DVD once its been burnt and checks that is it, keep it in a cool dry place and it'll be good 9 years from now. You'll be lucky if your drives even make it past warranty if they are Seagates and you are rolling the dice if they are WD. I hope you have enough space to have backups for your backups friend.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

Bimbo Newton Crosby, you nailed the problem right on the head. I only shop at Steam sales as Valve has spoiled me to low price gaming and even just buying the best deals from the Steam sales and the THQ Humble Bundle I ended up with something like 150GB+ worth of games, my game folder is getting awfully close to 500GB and I've only been using Steam a little over 2 years.

So for those of us that like to play games the size of SSDs quickly becomes an issue, you look at the sweet spot on SSD prices and its still at 64GB although 128GB are just now starting to get a decent price. if things continue at this pace it'll be a good 6+ years before we see a 500GB SSD under $150 and of course by then the next gen consoles will be out and the graphics (and file sizes) will have been cranked up another notch.

I'm just glad I managed to score myself 4TB worth of Samsung drives (1TB OS, 2TB data, 1TB external) before the flood, those 3 drives cost me less than $120 all told. If they drop their prices back to pre-flood levels? I'll be happy to add another 2TB internal and 2TB external but right now SSDs are just too small for anything but my netbook. Hell I can't even justify switching my netbook, it has 8GB of RAM and so once the OS is loaded it all runs from RAM and having a 320GB HDD lets me keep plenty of movies and shows on it if I'm stuck somewhere and bored. I'd need at least a 256GB SSD to be a decent replacement and those are still pretty crazy on the prices.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Manufacturers will just quit making small drives as SSDs catch up, add platters until they can't fit anymore into a 3.5" enclosure, then revisit the past and reintroduce 5.25" hard drives, just like Quantum did ~15 years ago.

As I understand it, neither of the bolded items is likely to happen. More spinning mass makes it harder to control vibration, which is more and more important as recording density increases. This makes high platter count and/or 5.25" platters difficult.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

I have honestly never seen an SSD die from the cells being used up but I have seen a LOT of SSDs that had the controller fail and take the drive out.

No you haven't. There isn't anything special about SSD controllers which could make them more likely to physically fail than HDD controllers. They're both just chips. Not especially super high tech chips at that, and SSD controllers don't even need to interface to any sensitive analog circuitry either. (Not that that's likely to make HDD controllers less reliable, mind you.)

What you're almost certainly seeing in 99% of cases is buggy firmware. SSDs must spread erase/write cycle wear evenly across every location in the media to ensure long life, so SSD controllers run vastly more complex firmware which maintains a vastly more complex data structure on the media. Bugs in this firmware can easily produce the appearance of a dead drive even when it is possible to recover it to like-new status (not necessarily easy for you to do so, mind, but easy for the manufacturer and/or anyone who reverse engineers how to send the relevant nuke-and-pave-the-media command to the controller).

The solution: Buy SSDs from vendors who can pass the stringent testing required by certain big brands. For example, Apple is known to be very picky in their internal qualification testing of storage devices (not just in the SSD era I might add). You can't get SSDs fully identical to what Apple ships (they like customized form factors and firmware), but if you pick SSDs based on the same controllers you know the vendor passed a high bar for firmware reliability. (The best SSDs Apple's shipping right now are Samsung 830 series, which is disappearing from retail, but 840 series that replaced it is very similar.)

Over at coding horror they labeled this the hot/crazy scale in that to get the hot performance of SSDs you had to put up with the crazy failure rates.

Hurr hurr hot wimmenz are always crazy so that's why this comparison is totally witty! No, sorry, it's not, it's misogynistic, and the quality of the idea isn't significantly improved when used to discuss SSDs. Jeff Atwood is terrible in so many ways.

So I have a feeling when all those cheapo SSDs start going tits up there is gonna be a lot of folks that write off the tech and go back to HDDs, say what you will about HDDs they usually give you plenty of warning before going tits up.

Except when they don't. Which is rather often in my experience with bad HDDs.

Also, literally the only reason there were problems with early generation SSDs was industry-wide immaturity. Lots of the early drives simply didn't get anything like the kind of validation testing that was standard practice for HDDs. It was a gold rush and many of the participants chose to forgo seriously attempting to sell to OEMs in favor of pursuing quick market share lead through retail channels (see for example OCZ). As SSDs mature and vendors who can't get the volume contracts with major OEMs are shaken out, average reliability will go up.

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

The Seagate Momentus XT, when it was new, outperformed some competing -- more expensive -- SSDs in write performance.

You do not understand the actual implications of those results.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd

The Momentus XT's flash memory is used exclusively as a read cache. For writes, it behaves identically to a conventional HDD, because it never writes data direct to cache. Instead, it monitors read requests to detect frequently accessed sectors, and based on that information copies sectors it thinks will be frequently read in the future to the flash-memory cache.

The scenario where its write performance beat SSDs was sequential write loads. But that's only because older SSDs tended to have poor sequential write performance, easily beaten by any HDD, not just the Momentus XT.

And don't forget improvements in technology. Even those spinning platters get higher capacities and performance every year.

They get higher sequential performance. Random performance, not so much. In consumer drives, that's stagnant at best, and if anything is regressing. (One of the two knobs for increasing recording density is to reduce track pitch. Doing so makes it harder to settle on the destination track during a seek, which translates to seeks taking more time.)

Re:Less demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Apple used in their early Macbook Airs a proprietary SSD stick made by Hitachi, which were notorious for failures.

Others have corrected your TRIM remark, I'm correcting this. Early MacBook Airs used Toshiba SSD controllers, which didn't have notoriety of any sort. Toshiba had never attempted to sell into the retail channel at all, only to OEMs like Apple, so their controllers weren't well-known to the public back then.

They still aren't, really, because they still don't show up in any retail drives. The only group I've ever heard of which is aware of Toshiba as a SSD vendor are people who return their new MacBook Airs till they get a Samsung SSD instead of Toshiba. But that's for performance reasons, not reliability. The Samsungs bench a bit faster, and some people obsess a bit too much about getting the best. I've never seen one single hint that the SSDs Toshiba supplies to Apple are anything less than highly reliable.

(I have no idea whether you're right about Hitachi SSD controllers being notorious for failures. But given how much misinformation you've been posting here, and your general history on slashdot, I wouldn't be surprised if that's bogus too.)

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

Well I won't know if you'll see this or not, its the first of the month so my little FOSSie stalker managed to get a few mod points, personally I think its funny as shit that he sits there foaming at the mouth and just waiting for the day he can get a mod point but whatever.

But its obvious you haven't looked at how these controllers actually work so in the interest of saving you some grief if you ever run into this problem I'll explain how they work. you see not only is there a "data map" that is held ONLY in the controller chip so that when you try to switch chips it doesn't know what is data and what is empty, but these chips also have a form of data encryption on them so some third party can't just snatch the chips out of an SSD and recover the data. Guess where the key for the encryption is at?

so while some have had luck in taking each individual chip out and managing to descramble the data unlike HDDs you can NOT simply swap controllers, all you get when you do that is 2 dead drives instead of 1. Frankly what they need to do is have a read only ARM controller as a backup so that if the main controller fails it'll put the drive in "read only" mode and allow you to recover the data. if any company were to do this frankly they'd make money hand over fist as they'd have the first "fail proof" SSDs but right now if the controller goes? You are SOL.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

10 trips to the movies here or 2.4 tanks of gas in my little Ranger, but you are missing the point in that the failure rate on the $100 2TB has been crazy high so you will end up having to pay a LOT more if you don't want to play Russian roulette with your data.

The only 2TB drives I've seen with a very low failure rate has been the Samsung and the Toshiba, the Samsung will cost you $175 when you can find one and the Toshiba is $100 but you have to crack the external to get the drive out.

So honestly most of the 2TB drives you see out there at a decent price are the Seagates and frankly they are junk, youre more likely to have it die inside of 6 months as not.

Re:Less demand

[tibit]

If it was only the data map held in some integrated FLASH, this could be reverse-engineered and copied. With encryption, it's way more effort -- still doable, but you definitely need to microphotograph and reverse-engineer large parts of a controller. That's not anymore in the realm of being worth it for someone fixing people's computers. Only dedicated amateurs (very dedicated ones) could pull it off, or a larger data recovery shop with some money to burn.

I'm waiting for someone to get fed up and develop an open-hardware controller as a replacement (using an FPGA)... probably not worth it, but someone could do it for the heck of it...

Re:Less demand

[tibit]

BTW, I don't see if you consider me a stalker, as your first paragraph is somewhat cryptic, but I just happen to run into your comments. I don't seek them out. Seriously. I do agree on quite a few bits, probably more often than not.

Re:Less demand

[kyjellyfish]

Will this affect pricing of solid-state drives?

Re:Less demand

[Common Joe]

I'd like to add that I've seen downloaded HD movies at my friend's apartment. They are pixelated pretty badly. Hell, it could be argued that my DVD version of the movie looked better. (He certainly didn't download 40 GB or 50 GB.) If I want to see a high quality movie, then disks are my preferred medium.

Re:Less demand

[pnutjam]

.1% seems high, probably more like .01%, or .001%

Re:Less demand

[pnutjam]

Smart almost never tells me a drive is failing. However, if I see a smart log with a bunch of entries and I swap the drive the end user usually indicates a significant performance increase.

Re:Less demand

[pnutjam]

I have used truecrypt full disk encryption on pretty junky low power laptops and noticed essentially no overhead. Most of your overhead would be CPU related, not disk.
You can find multiple people online who all seem to agree that any overhead from full disk encryption with truecrypt is unnoticeable. Give it a try. When you do the install you are forced to burn a disk or make on ISO you can use to remove the encryption if you are unhappy.

Re:Less demand

[halltk1983]

I'm sure the fact that my employer buys rackmount servers with powerful fans to pull air across the drives by accident, then.

Re:Less demand

[bill_mcgonigle]

We can only hope. Recently HDD manufacturers seem to be coming up with any excuse possible to increase the price per unit and I could see them increasing the price just to lessen the blow of decreased sales.

When they slashed their warranties a couple years back, they effectively doubled the price of a large lot of drives. So, that's a starting point for talking about lifecycle prices.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

Sorry, didn't make myself clear. I DO NOT consider you a stalker, you actually use a UID and will post a counter-argument if you disagree with someone, i have NO problem with that.

No what I'm talking about is a FOSSie, or FOSS zealot if you prefer, that has been following me across the net for awhile now. he used to use various UIDs at sites until most of them got banned for...well stalking, he got so bad at one point that on a thread where we were discussing differences between file systems he left no less than 16 posts just saying "Die you fat fucker die!" over and over again, needless to say kinda freaked out a few of the other posters as it was so out of left field and had absolutely nothing with file systems, but I'm used to it. about every 3 months one of his sock puppets will get mod points and you can ALWAYS tell when its him, as he goes out of his way to pick posts that have nothing to do with anything important and therefor are only at +1 or +2, he doesn't want to shoot his wad on the +4s and +5s you see.

If you were a subscriber you could see my posting history where every 3-4 months like clockwork you'll suddenly see a bunch of +4s and +5 surrounded by 0s, this is my little stalker friend. The only time he takes a break from stalking me is when he goes to stalk another user, which he claims are ALL ME even though its obvious we have different professions and sometimes aren't even from the same country. for about 5 months he went after APK, again claiming he was me (even though he and I had a 3 month argument about best security practices until we just agreed to disagreed) and about a year and a half ago it was Barbara who is a Linux admin and of course female, neither of which describes me in the slightest.

But again sorry for the misconception as I have NO problem with those that disagree with me, even when those disagreements are heated. i'm the first to admit I can't know everything about everything and am more than open to change my views on the subject at hand if presented actual evidence to the contrary. But when it comes to my little stalker he has NO evidence or links to back up his rabid beliefs, unless you consider "fuck you and die pig" to be a compelling argument, no instead he just spits out little bits of "wisdom" like "Linux is immune to viruses" and "all eyes mean Linux never crashes or has buggy software" and when anybody dares contradict his little platitudes with actual evidence you "must be teh M$ Ninja shill!" and in my case I apparently work in a sekret bunker in Redmond with an endless army of sock puppets that in many cases have actually been here longer than I have and obviously lead very different lives than me.

so sorry for the confusion, feel free to tell me I'm wrong when you have a differing opinion and i'll be more than happy to debate the subject at hand,I just point out when my little stalker is back so I don't have to answer 50 "Why are you suddenly getting modded down?" and "Why does somebody keep telling you to die?" posts.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...that would be great, if it were 2003. On the last Steam sale i bought a ton of games and many clocked in at 35GB+ which even with my 10Mbps connection took quite a long while and many people aren't lucky enough to live in an area that has 10Mbps connections. Then of course you have to look at the caps, which at 20GB-35GB a game really isn't hard to hit anymore. Borderlands 1 is from what? 2009? Yet when i picked it up along with the DLC it clocked in at 37GB. Look at how much the Dawn of War or THQ Humble Bundle weighed in at and you'll see 1.5Gb is really nothing for a modern game. Heck I've only been on steam 2 years and I'm already over 300GB in my game folder and I honestly don't buy that many games, that is around 50 AAA titles.

Re:Less demand

[Crosshair84]

Must irritate them to no end when I use my mod points to mod you back up. (At least when the discussion is on something we agree about.)

Re:Less demand

[tibit]

Ahh well, there's crazies out there. Can't help with that :(

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

I just think its kinda sad myself. I mean can you imagine having so little life that you would spend hours on a search engine, just trying to find one guy you've NEVER met and who wouldn't know you from Adam if you ran into each other, and go through all that trouble just to throw some pointless insults that affect him not at all, all because you have so damned much of your self esteem tied into of all things...an OPERATING SYSTEM? Really?

As I told him when he first started his batshit crazies "I have dozens of brands that I like, feel free to insult them all day long as I DO NOT CARE, I don't have stock in these companies, they have never done anything but sell me a product, my self esteem is not phased in the slightest by somebody saying a product i like is shit, or even having childish insults thrown at me. Life is good for the most part, seeing bad words said about me on a page affects me not at all."

Just sad that somebody can waste so much of their life over a "crusade" that is even more pointless than jousting windmills.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

Thanks for the info, I'll be sure to tell customers that are thinking about SSDs about TrueCrypt. I wonder how well that CPU load would be handled on a netbook? I have plenty of customers with AMD and ION based netbooks and I always thought slapping an SSD in one of those might give it a good kick in the pants.

Re:Less demand

[pnutjam]

If your customers trust you, you should offer to do the encryption for them. Then you can securely store the disk or iso that is created when you do the encryption. This disk will let you remove the encryption to troubleshoot the drive or recover things. It even works if they change the password.

Re:Less demand

[Crosshair84]

At least I follow you because I was looking for an explanation as to why Linux continues to suck so much on the desktop and ran across you. Of course I sometimes post against you on other subjects that we disagree on, if I have the time and feel like it, but the whole point for ME following you at least is your thoughts on PCs and operating systems, thoughts that I find myself in agreement with you on most of the time.

Re:Less demand

[hairyfeet]

Well like I said I'm happy to disagree and debate the points of this or that and I'm open to change my opinion, that to me is the whole point of tech sites, a place where geeks can get together and discuss things that most couldn't care less about but which we find interesting. But when he came up with this delusion that I am actually dozens of people in dozens of professions all posting against him? Who in the fuck would go to all that trouble?

Anybody who has read jack squat that I have posted know that you can spot my writing style a mile away, there was a couple of old sites that I used my original gamertag on before the whole "hairyfeet" thing stuck (that is what I get for reading LOTR while trying to find a UID that /. would take, stupid me) and it wouldn't be 3 posts before they would say "You sound like hairyfeet from /." so its not like I'd be any good at pretending to be somebody else, I'm too set in my ways and my language too obvious.

As for why Linux never goes anywhere after bashing my head against the wall for 7 years dealing with the devs and the "community" I now truly believe its not an Operating System at all, its a collection of little fiefdoms where everybody ignores everybody else and does their own thing and then the distros just slap all this shit that was made with zero consideration of what anybody else was doing into a pile, calls it an "OS" and shoves it out the door. I mean look at all the major guttings we've seen in the last 6 years, think ANY sane company would rip out so many pieces at once or willy nilly like that?

This is why Google with Android and ChromeOS can succeed despite the fact they being more locked down and intrusive, because Google actually puts someone in charge that says "You can't do that, it has to be thus so it'll work" and they listen. With Linux Torvalds is ignoring the DE guys who don't care about the audio guys who don't talk to the networking guys and nobody cares one bit about the application guys so what you get is it manages to work on ONE install (the developer's system) and they go "fuck it, that'll do" and there you go, a rough pile of little programs thrown together that collapses if you look at it wrong. this works in server because most of it is frankly never installed, a lot easier to get something working if you don't need a GUI or wireless or sound, it works in embedded because nobody is gonna update the thing and like server they strip it down to the least amount they can use and still have it work, but on a modern desktop or laptop people expect a working GUI, they expect the sound to work, they expect that new wireless card they got to function, yet all these things are run by little groups with zero interaction...is it any wonder it goes nowhere?

Re:Less demand

[robbie73]

I thought backup was there to protect against data loss. Aren't the users supposed to also save their stuff to an external drive or another computer? (I know most don't even know what backup means.) Education can help a lot. Also, reliable power supplies and UPS systems can also tremendously lessen the likelihood of drive and component failure.

Quoting the Last Line from Buckaroo Banzai...

[Anonymous Coward]

...so what. Big deal.

ok then

[Anonymous Coward]

So we are going to abandon both dvd dl and bluray discs for pcs?

Im sorry, but the bluray burners are just starting to get affordable, once again a sensational story to drum up glum and doom.

Re:ok then

[cheater512]

Yes the burners are just starting to get affordable, but is it actually too late?

Back in the days of 20gig hard drives and 128mb flash sticks, DVD burners were a god send.
But now we are at 3TB hard drives and 64-128gig flash sticks plus 'cloud' storage which is better for long term archives.

Is a measly 25gig single sided going to cut it when they are just starting to get affordable?
Some people will buy them but I suspect every single computer will not have one like they used to with DVD burners.

Re:ok then

[YodasEvilTwin]

Affordable useless crap is still useless crap. I guess some people watch BR movies on their computers with discs instead of torrents, but it ain't me.

Re:ok then

[exomondo]

Agreed, i can't even work out what a bluray burner would even be useful for. USB sticks for removable, portable storage - that can play just about anywhere a bluray can play - and hard drives for archiving (in a redundant setup is best).

Re:ok then

[jones_supa]

But now we are at 3TB hard drives and 64-128gig flash sticks plus 'cloud' storage which is better for long term archives.

Not necessarily. R/W storage has always the risk that somebody accidentally deletes the archived files. HDDs can get damaged from mechanical shocks, flash products can die from ESD zaps. I still feel that the optical disc is the king of proper long-term storage.

Re:ok then

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, i can't even work out what a bluray burner would even be useful for..

Rip that movie in the first place?

Re:ok then

[Miamicanes]

non-LTH BD-R has a HUGE advantage over any hard drive: you can throw it in a drawer, forget about it for the next 25 years, maybe even let it bake in a hot, humid Florida garage for 5-10 years, and end up with something that's likely to still be readable. There are so many things that can go wrong and break with a normal hard drive over the span of 25 years, the likelihood of ANY hard drive actually working even 10-15 years down the road after years of disuse and questionable storage is basically "nonexistent", and depressingly low even if you've kept it in a 70 degree room with low humidity the whole time.

DVD-R used organic dyes and isn't likely to be a reliable long-term storage medium, but the ORIGINAL (non-LTH) BD-R discs are about as close as you can get with modern media to "carving it in stone". There's even a company (Milleniata?) who makes discs that are basically BD-R media burned to DVD geometry (you need a supported BD-R drive to burn them), and a likely shelf life of a hundred years or more (especially if you burn 2 or 3 copies, and store them in different locations, so you can scrape the bits from all 3 and take advantage of error correction to reconstruct an intact copy decades from now).

VHS has been dead as a consumer format for more than a decade, but there are STILL companies selling new VCRs. What vanished were the cheap consumer models. What remains are heavy-duty pro models designed mainly for recovery and restoration work... and it's a market that's slowly growing as desperate consumers realize they no longer have the players for their old high school band/cheerleading/football tapes their parents made years ago, and they go looking for solutions (or people who can do it for them). Best of all, the patents have all basically expired, so now a smaller company with the ability to machine metal & plastic parts actually CAN step in to take over a market that companies like Sony & Matsushita lost interest in years ago.

Re:ok then

[cheater512]

And bluray never gets scratched or degrades and backing up lots of data with it takes a really small amount of space.

Oh wait....

Re:ok then

[The Snowman]

And bluray never gets scratched or degrades and backing up lots of data with it takes a really small amount of space.

Have you ever tried scratching a Blu-ray disc? I have: old backup discs that are being "retired." I have taken a utility knife and dragged the sharp end across a disc and had it not leave a scratch. I have used fingernails, nail clippers, and other random sharp implements I have around my desk. I have to go across the disc several times and/or push really hard to ruin a Blu-ray.

That or snap it in half, but even that is more difficult than with a CD or DVD.

Re:ok then

[Kjella]

Not necessarily. R/W storage has always the risk that somebody accidentally deletes the archived files. HDDs can get damaged from mechanical shocks, flash products can die from ESD zaps. I still feel that the optical disc is the king of proper long-term storage.

There's not much chance of accidentally overwriting a disconnected external HDD clearly labeled BACKUP either. I take it you've never tried to restore a large amount of data from optical media? I have and they do get unrecoverable CRC errors, but what's almost as bad is the read speed of old discs. My drive would spin up, down, read and re-read so a single disc could take an hour to read. Even on good discs I say you'd be lucky to restore 4 DVDs/hour, and it takes 200+ to restore a single 1TB HDD. And unless you have a disc robot that means you'll be glued to your computer for days changing discs every 15 minutes.

If you want more security, the best way is more copies. With HDDs you could have triple backups with far less effort than making one DVD backup set. If you have the bandwidth make multiple online backups, don't trust one backup service. Of course in theory you could have supervirus wiping all your disks and logging into all your backup services and deleting all your files, but that's why you have a disconnected HDD. And if you're robbed blind or the house burns to the ground they'll all go unless you've taken one offsite, but your online backups will still be there. The chance of both on- and offline backups disappearing at the same time is practically none.

Re:ok then

[slaker]

Try scratching the label side. You'll find that it's much easier and more productive to damage that side anyway since it's closer to the aluminum coating.

Re:ok then

[tchuladdiass]

I think that only applies to CDs. I know DVDs have the shiny metal equal distance between the two sides (that is how they can have two-sided DVDs). I would think that BluRay is the same.

Re:ok then

[NJRoadfan]

VHS has been dead as a consumer format for more than a decade, but there are STILL companies selling new VCRs. What vanished were the cheap consumer models. What remains are heavy-duty pro models designed mainly for recovery and restoration work... and it's a market that's slowly growing as desperate consumers realize they no longer have the players for their old high school band/cheerleading/football tapes their parents made years ago, and they go looking for solutions (or people who can do it for them). Best of all, the patents have all basically expired, so now a smaller company with the ability to machine metal & plastic parts actually CAN step in to take over a market that companies like Sony & Matsushita lost interest in years ago.

Umm, there is no such market. Any new VHS VCR you can buy is found in a DVD combo deck and is utter garbage. All the best SVHS and DVHS decks (made by JVC and Panasonic) for digital transfer work have long since been discontinued. JVC also managed to keep the VHS patents fresh when things like SVHS ET (SVHS recording on standard VHS tapes) and later the Digital VHS format.

Re:ok then

[jedidiah]

Optical media likely still beats thumb drives in terms of cost and are still more standard. The problem with standard is that "just about good enough" isn't really good enough. If you're even acknowledging the fact that thumb drives aren't universal, then you've already got a serious problem with the format.

It's a bit like Zip disks or MD disks.

"Almost standard" isn't quite good enough.

Re:ok then

[jedidiah]

A hard drive is still a whole hell of a lot less bother than an equivalent stack of BD media.

Any "stack o media" approach is just a deranged nightmare scenario out of the 80s.

Re:ok then

[exomondo]

Optical media likely still beats thumb drives in terms of cost

Well that depends on what you want to do with them.

If you're even acknowledging the fact that thumb drives aren't universal, then you've already got a serious problem with the format.

I'd say USB sticks are supported in a lot more places than bluray discs are.

Re:ok then

[bzipitidoo]

Having never used a Blu-ray despite having several burners, I had no idea they were that tough. DVDs sure aren't. I've had CDs and DVDs scratched as I was removing them because the powered tray picked that moment to close. The corner of the tray's face was a sharp point that, even though made of plastic, was able to gouge a big scratch into the disc before I could pull it away. I've learned to grab the disc so that I can instantly whisk it out of the way or drop it back into the tray should the OS pick the worst possible moment to activate the tray. I've also filed those sharp corners down.

I don't like optical media, and I really don't like powered trays.

Re:ok then

[TheLink]

non-LTH BD-R has a HUGE advantage over any hard drive: you can throw it in a drawer, forget about it for the next 25 years, maybe even let it bake in a hot, humid Florida garage for 5-10 years, and end up with something that's likely to still be readable.

Perhaps, but will you be able to easily get a working bluray player in 25 years?

Re:ok then

[adolf]

BD burners are good for a few things:

1. Not-so-huge data that is suited for off-line, off-site storage. Put a BD in your safe deposit box or at a friend's house, and it won't degrade like a hard drive and won't die like a flash drive. 20GB (or whatever) is enough to hold a lot of important work from an author, a musician, or many other creative fields.

2. Movies. Backing up BD movies to writeable BDs, and being able to play them in the same manner as the original, seems like a useful function. (Especially with Red Box offering DVDs, not that I would ever encourage anyone to ever keep a copy of a rented film...)

3. Giving them away. I can fill a cheap BD (or several) with data and give it to a friend/customer/mail it to another country and it costs me very little, and I don't ever need the media returned. 16/32GB thumb drives or hard drives are very expensive by comparison: Chances are that I want my thumb drive/hard drive back so I can use it for something else later.

BDs are nice in the same capacity as giving a friend a burned CD full of whatever, or a cassette tape of a vinyl record.: They're cheap enough that it doesn't matter.

(At this point, someone will say: Yes, but can't you just give them data over the Internet? To which I can retort, yes, I can...but sometimes doing that just sucks.)

Re:ok then

[adolf]

That's a solved problem for both DVDs and BDs.

Re:ok then

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to break it to you, but electricity in sufficient quantity can kill optical media too.

Re:ok then

[Jesus_666]

"Optical media" means "DVDs". I know two or three guys wh even have a BluRay drive and those drives are all inside PS3s. For data transfer I'd call BluRay non-viable.

Now, admittedly my friends are all techies who usually build their computers themselves, thus omitting a BD drive they don't see a need for. Regular off-the-shelf desktop computers may come with a BD drive by now but regular off-the-shelf notebooks most certainly don't.

Even if we assume ubiquity, a BluRay burner is 75 bucks and a 150 GB rewritable disk is ten bucks. The same kind of money buys me a big-name brand 64 GB USB 3.0 stick that I can expect to to work on nearly every system I plug it into (excluding Linux if formatted with exFAT or requiring a free third-party driver for OS X if formatted with NTFS), that is much more compact, quieter, scratch resistant, uses less energy...

Perhaps BluRay is nice for data archival but for data transfer I don't really see the advantage. If I need to move more than 64 GB at a time I'll just use one of the bunch of external HDDs I've got lying around. Even if I had to buy a new one, 90 bucks would buy me a 2 TB USB 3.0 external from Seagate (3.5") or a 1 TB one (2.5"). The same kind of storage in rewritable BluRays (without a burner) would set me back 140 bucks or 70 bucks, respectively. And I'd take a 90 bucks HDD over 70 bucks for rewritable optical media.

I simply fail to see the attractiveness of BluRay as a data transfer medium.

Re:ok then

[fnj]

You know it. They are not that tough. It's utter horse shit. No optical media can stand up to knives, except plastic picnic knives. The idea is ludicrous.

Re:ok then

[Miamicanes]

> Perhaps, but will you be able to easily get a working bluray player in 25 years?

A working bluray player? Maybe, maybe not. A drive capable of reading BD-R discs, regardless of what its own native format might be? Almost certainly and beyond doubt. The last time I checked, CD-ROM is ALREADY somewhere between 20 and 25 years old , and my shiny new BD-R drive is perfectly capable of ripping redbook audio CDs from 1982, as well as a bunch of CD-ROM clipart discs I bought around 1993. In fact, the last time I checked, there are now even utilities to rip the raw data from an un-finalized or "coastered" disc from 10 years ago, and do offline recovery on the files.

I think it's safe to say that any new optical format MUST be formfactor-compatible with CD and DVD in order to succeed from now on. Some future format with larger-diameter discs might appear, but it's almost a given that its spindle hole will be the same size as CD/DVD/BD, and you'll be able to use old discs in it the same way you can use small-diameter CD/DVD discs in normal drives. At this point, there's so much invested in the form factor of CD/DVD/BD discs, it would take an epic shift of almost unprecedented change to overcome it at this point... and really, there's no compelling reason to deviate from it. Optical discs and their drives will never be thin enough to make the thin-at-all-costs crowd happy, and everyone else really doesn't *care* about a millimeter or two.

Re:ok then

[MrNiCeGUi]

In what way are the thumb drives not universal? They are supported on pretty much every device with a standard USB port and work with no extra steps on all major operating systems. Most computers (if not all) made in the last 6 years or so can boot from them. That's as good as universal in my book, certainly more than needing a separate reading device in all computers.

Also the quality of optical device readers has taken a very sharp turn for the worse since they have got to commodities level. I have encountered many cases where a DVD unit would not read rewritables, or even read CDs but refuse to read DVDs, and the culprit was not wear and tear. In fact, I own a DVD reader that has not been used 100 times in its lifetime that has become unable to read rewritable DVDs. Optical drives on laptops are even poorer quality. So, having optical media and the corresponding unit in a device is no longer a guarantee that you will be able to use said media. In those cases, ironically, it's usually the USB thumb drive that saves the day.

At this point in time a 25 GB rewritable Bluray disc is about 15$. A 32GB SanDisk Cruzer is 17$. A thumbnail sized 32GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit CZ33 is 21$. Out of those, I think the thumb drives are a much better value for money, even ignoring the fact that most computers would be unable to use the Bluray disc.

Re:ok then

[bemymonkey]

Just looking at the computers I'm around on a regular basis (work, random people at my university, home, friends' places), there are thousands of places to put USB sticks, and about... 3 (?) to put a BD, and two of those are dedicated video BD players, so no use for BD "storage" discs...

How is optical media more "standard"?

Re:ok then

[bemymonkey]

There's not much chance of accidentally overwriting a disconnected external HDD clearly labeled BACKUP either. I take it you've never tried to restore a large amount of data from optical media? I have and they do get unrecoverable CRC errors, but what's almost as bad is the read speed of old discs. My drive would spin up, down, read and re-read so a single disc could take an hour to read. Even on good discs I say you'd be lucky to restore 4 DVDs/hour, and it takes 200+ to restore a single 1TB HDD. And unless you have a disc robot that means you'll be glued to your computer for days changing discs every 15 minutes.

This. I backed up about ~150 gigs of data a few years ago (back in the DVD days), and by the time I was done, I never ever wanted to see another optical disc again. Nevertheless, when the time came to restore everything (being very naive, I left the hard drive on a different continent and only took the discs with me to my destination), about 10 gigs of data were unreadable... Screw optical discs. I'd rather keep 10 levels of hard drive redundancy up to date than rely on another optical disc...

Re:ok then

[lightknight]

I'm thinking more along the lines of entire seasons of various shows on a single disc. Of course, I have a giant stack of Blu-Rays, and yet have not burned a single one...I think part of the problem is that 25GB is too small for a complete show in some instances, and that I have to hand label them / print labels to put on them (I love my LightScribe, but the Blu-Ray discs I have do not have that option). Plus there's the minor fact that it's not compatible with most of the things in my house...save other computers I've built (perhaps some of the laptops I have not? not sure).

The amount of effort it takes to put together a setup that will play a Blu-Ray disc in its original movie form is...a pain. Need software, and a firmware updater in case certain keys are revoked. Connections need to be DVI or HDMI...and so on. Annoying.

Re:ok then

[lightknight]

Hmm. Indeed. Blu-Ray needs 100GB discs to remain somewhat viable. The things which would benefit from Blu-Ray are the things that are too large for a Blu-Ray disc.

For instance, making backups on my main drive: if I used a 100GB Blu-Ray disc, that may be only two or three of them per week. If I use 25GB Blu-Ray discs...well, I have other things to do than play disc jockey.

Re:ok then

[Rich0]

A 4.5 GB write-once DVD is about 25 cents. If I need to archive data I don't need a rewritable disk.

And those DVDs are easy to number and stack. Since they're dirt cheap I can burn a copy and keep it offsite.

If your goal is to archive a bunch of data the last thing you want to use is a rewritable Blu-Ray disk.

Re:ok then

[tibit]

Whatever it is that you're drinking, sniffing or shooting up on -- please abstain, for your own good. Or buy a new blade for your utility knife. Or are you just a troll?

Re:ok then

[tibit]

the likelihood of ANY hard drive actually working even 10-15 years down the road after years of disuse and questionable storage is basically "nonexistent", and depressingly low even if you've kept it in a 70 degree room with low humidity the whole time.

For a properly designed hard drive, it shouldn't be a problem at all. Just for the giggles I've attached an old laptop hard drive from I think a bit before the turn of the century. It hasn't been used for 12+ years. I can image it to a file without any problems, so I can't but assume it's all readable. Files look OK. Vmware seems to boot Windows 95. So that's one anecdote.

Re:ok then

[MrNiCeGUi]

Yes, I agree that unlike Bluray the lowly DVD still has a price advantage compared to thumb drives, but I would not call a 25 cents DVD archival material. And when you are talking about larger sized backups usb hard drives start to become a better alternative, since a decent quality DVD comes to about the same price per GB, and hard drives have both the advantage of speed and convenience on their side.

Re:ok then

[Rich0]

Yeah, my issue is that most of the stuff I need to archive comes in 5GB chunks (like photos/etc). I back up online and I don't want to be paying Amazon for 1TB of storage (~$50/month) until I can fill an entire 1TB drive (which is how big you need to get before hard drives become economical). Paying them for 5GB of storage until I can fill a DVD is much more economical and convenient.

The only other options involve rotating hard drives offsite daily, which isn't terribly practical on home scale. Or I can do what most people do and just back-up to an external hard drive which just sits on your desk ready to burn in the next fire.

Re:ok then

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between an object standing up to a concerted effort to destroy it, and standing up to even extreme examples of accidental damage scenarios. A Blu-Ray disc will handle the latter quite nicely where DVDs and CDs would fail. This is largely due to the BD spec including an anti-scratch coating.

tl;dr He's right, you're wrong, do some research before you demonstrate your ignorance.

Re:ok then

[The Snowman]

Whatever it is that you're drinking, sniffing or shooting up on -- please abstain, for your own good. Or buy a new blade for your utility knife. Or are you just a troll?

Google it. Blu-ray discs have an anti-scratch coating. It takes a bit more effort to damage them, but they are certainly not invincible. They also have the media layer in the middle of the plastic, not on the top like with CD-Rs and some cheap DVD-Rs.

Re:ok then

[The Snowman]

A hard drive is still a whole hell of a lot less bother than an equivalent stack of BD media.

BD-R has several advantages:

• Write-once. Assuming the system doing the writing is clean, the disc cannot get infected with malware nor can it infect other systems.
• Cheaper than hard drives, which means I can burn a few years' worth of photos or whatever and give it away to a friend. And I can share plenty of data on that disc much faster than trying to find 25 GB of online storage and transfer it over a cable modem with its tiny upstream bandwidth.
• Compatible with the Blu-ray player attached to my home theater. I can burn media which I can play in mine or anyone else's living room.

I do use redundant hard drives to store my data, but when my data needs to move, it goes on optical. Each storage medium has its purpose. I would never want to sift through piles of optical discs of any type to find something: I would rather search a properly-organized directory structure on my file server. But optical discs certainly aren't obsolete nor are they useless.

Hell, people younger than my parents still listen to vinyl records. Some technology never dies.

Re:ok then

[tibit]

There's a big difference between scratches from tiny particles and dragging a utility knife across a disc. In the first case, the anti-scratch coating is thick enough to mechanically resist the plastic deformation of the underlying substrate, and to resist the shearing as well. With a utility knife, the anti-scratch coating simply transmits the compressive load to the substrate, which then gets plastically deformed. Then some anti-scratch coatings will crack, some will deform along with the substrate. That's all there's to it. It's like expecting chrome-plated brass to resist utility knife treatment. It doesn't -- it sure resists a bit better than without the hard chome plating, but once you press hard enough, it doesn't matter -- all it does is make the knife slide easier!

Re:ok then

[pnutjam]

Cloud storage is the worst possible option for long term archive, IMHO. Your monthly costs will far outstrip the upfront cost for your own archive, usually in the first year. You also never know the long term prospects for any company, your storage could disappear overnight with little or no warning. Finally, God forbid you need to pull down your backups during a disaster on a residential ISP line.

DVD writers

[Anonymous Coward]

My last DVD writer uses IDE connector. Updated to later motherboard, and it no longer had an IDE connector. So now I no longer have an optical drive. The old DVD drive is now in a file server getting about the same amount of usage - almost none.

Optical drives are soon going the way of the floppy.

Re:DVD writers

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, i just bought a $20 SATA DVD/RW (dual layer)

but then again, i am not a fucking idiot like you

optical disks still cost less then usb keys in bul

[Joe_Dragon]

optical disks still cost less then usb keys / sdcards in bulk.

Also HSI is not all over the place and 3g/4g caps are low.

And to install a OS a disk is nice and not a restore / recovery partition that can be wiped out by hdd failing / junk software / putting a bigger drive in your system.

Also what about building a pc you need a os install disk.

I still systems with SDD's system and HDD's data

[Joe_Dragon]

I still systems with SDD's system and HDD's data / maybe apps based on how big the SDD is.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[fatalexe]

I switched to using USB drives to install the OS of a computer a long time ago. You can even keep them up to date with OS patches unlike burnt disks. Usually installs faster too.

awwwwwww

[Anonymous Coward]

but prices after that accident are still way way way way higher so dont give me the cry baby crap and who the hell wants a 120GB drive when i can have a 1TB or 3TB

Price fixing and the Thailand flood Scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets not forget, that this is the same industry that has been screwing us for years. This Slashdot article sums its up pretty nicely http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/11/09/1634247/a-year-after-thailand-flooding-hard-drive-prices-remain-high

Predicting their demise is silly, they will continue to offer larger capacity and better cache systems for years to come, and undoubtably will always be considerably cheaper in large capacity.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[8ball629]

As fatalexe said:

I switched to using USB drives to install the OS of a computer a long time ago. You can even keep them up to date with OS patches unlike burnt disks. Usually installs faster too.

I recently used a USB drive as a boot-only type device to pull up the install screen, then installed all of the ports and packages over my network.

Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no sympathy for VHS manufacturers, why should you for Disk Drive manufacturers?

Embrace the future.

Double digit dip?

[Anonymous Coward]

So hard drive revenues are going to decrease by 10 cents?

Profit margins returning to normal maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Allow me to say awwwwwwwwwwww.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/05/25/169203/higher-hard-drive-prices-are-the-new-normal

Four quarters ago, manufacturers were making profit margins of 3-6%. Three quarters ago, after the floods in Thailand, they had profit margins of 16-37%.

If they're losing 11% revenue over this time last year, that's probably just a reversal of that record-high profit margin taking effect. And if it isn't, well, awwwwwwwwwww.

Let's see

[0123456]

We haven't a major increase in HDD capacity for a long time. That means, instead of paying $300-500 for a high-capacity drive as we did when drive capacity seemed to be doubling every year, we've been paying $100-150.

So I'm shocked that revenue might be dropping.

Re:Let's see

[jones_supa]

That's true. The next increase will probably happen during the following years if and when the manufacturers get drives utilizing HAMR developed to real products.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem with usb flash drives is that they easily can become infected. They need a "write protect" switch so when you have a clean one and use it on someone else's system you don't get badness on it. This needs to be standard on all flash drives or a new round of mayhem will ensue as these become the new floppies. At least CDs and DVDs let you transfer, install software, etc. without getting infected by virus, trojans, etc.

store the images on a separate HDD/NAS

[Chirs]

then copy to flash right before the install. No stacks of install media needed.

Re:store the images on a separate HDD/NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is easier said than done. Are you recommending just dd-ing the whole partition to the thumb drive? What about the offsets on the partition (are they important)? In short: have you actually done this?

Re:store the images on a separate HDD/NAS

[DeathFromSomewhere]

I've done it several times. It's much faster than dragging out a piece of hardware I'm never going to use again to burn a disc I'm never going to use again.

Don't know and don't care if this works for your bizarro OS of choice.

Where are the hybrids???

[jtownatpunk.net]

Seriously. Where are they? I've got the 750 gig Seagate and I love it but it's not big enough for my games. The only other choice I have is the 1tb Revo but that's not really much of a bump and it would take up a PCIe slot, preventing me from ever running 4-way SLI. And it's almost 4x the price of the slightly smaller Seagate. Hardly a bargain compared to SSD. If I'm gonna spend $500, I may as well spend a grand and go full SSD.

I assume Apple must have some sort of exclusive deal on their 3tb hybrids or we'd be seeing general purpose versions of those drives by now.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[moonwatcher2001]

In the new iMacs.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[Anonymous Coward]

They're using intel RST tech. Spindle + SSD AFAIK.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not slowing down on SSD research at all. Hitachi and Seagate have research labs here in Boulder CO and and they've been hiring engineers like mad the past few months for work on new SSD tech.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[Guppy]

Where are the hybrids???

Toshiba's hybrid hard drive is already in mass production (the MQ01ABDH model, in 750GB and 1TB sizes), but it's OEM only. Right now you pretty much have to buy a new Toshiba laptop to get one. Western Digital seems to have pushed theirs back into 2014.

Well, there are also the hybrid drives from Samsung that came out back in 2007, but I don't think anyone's counting those.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[lexman098]

First of all, I don't know how many games you would want to play at one time that take 700 gigs. Aside from that, I think windows can make a hybrid drive setup for you if there's flash memory available (ssd, usb stick etc). 2 TB HDD plus 30 gig SSD is probably the cheapest way to go hybrid.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[k3vlar]

Apple doesn't have 3tb hybrid drives... theirs is a software solution. They include a 128gb off-the-shelf(-ish) SSD, and a 3TB platter-based hard drive. Their volume manager software "intelligently" shuffles data around, to optimize access speeds. Not sure how effective it is, but it sure sounds appealing in their advertising material.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[greg1104]

The hybrids are a nice win on boot time. On many benchmarks, you'd be better off spending that money on more RAM though. Hybrid drives beat regular ones, sure, but you have to match cost and compare against having more memory.

Seagate's hybrid drives will have a much bigger win when they finally release the write caching firmware. The disappointing schedule on that has made me regret buying one of those. I would have been better off just paying for all SSD in the first place, or more RAM.

Apple's "Fusion" drives are a SSD and a regular drive combined into a single logical volume with software. This is not a novel approach. ZFS has promoted using a SSD along with regular storage via its ARC cache for many years. In 2010 DragonFly BSD added the swapcache using a similar idea.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what I use
 
45GB + as big of a HDD as I want to combine with it, I noticed a significant difference in game load speeds.

Re:Where are the hybrids???

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, every major storage vendor (HDD/SSD/tape) has a development site within ~15 miles of Boulder, CO:

Hitachi
Seagate
Western Digital
Intel
Micron
Samsung
Quantum
Oracle (formerly Sun/StorageTek offices)
LSI
Marvell
3Par
ST Micro

Almost all of the above companies are hiring right now for software/firmware development engineers.

Plus there's countless others peripheral to the large companies. About the only ones missing are EMC, as they're on the east coast.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[Khyber]

"You can even keep them up to date with OS patches unlike burnt disks."

Someone obviously hasn't heard of nlite.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[exomondo]

Also what about building a pc you need a os install disk.

That requirement went away like a decade ago.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[Trolan]

Same here. There's even USB drive enclosures which let you select an ISO from the disk, and then present themselves as a CD/DVD drive as though that disk image were directly inserted. Far, far easier to load up a 2.5" drive with a ton of disk images, and just carry the enclosure around for system repairs, instead of a slew of optical media.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[Anonymous Coward]

Well there is the lock switch on all standard size SD-Cards, I have never found where it actually did anything (i could still write regardless of position and files would show up on other systems.

If it's the same as the SD-Cards it is just a waste.

What absolute bollocks

[Anonymous Coward]

"... optical drives could eventually be abandoned by PC makers altogether."

Yeah because at £140 per 256GB SSD they're really gonna be able to meet today's storage needs

Wax cylinders

[GrahamCox]

In other news, the price of wax cylinders is set to rise this year.

Re:Wax cylinders

[Junta]

Not an apt analogy. Traditional hard drives still contain the vast vast vast majority of data in the world. Even if every last consumer device were 64 GB of SSD and no one bought any laptop/desktop anymore, all the data they care about would still be on magnetic disks at google/apple/dropbox/mega/azure/ec2/etc...

Re:Wax cylinders

[GrahamCox]

But optical?

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[Anonymous Coward]

optical disks still cost less then usb keys / sdcards in bulk.

Only if you don't factor in write cycles....and as neither are great choices for long term backup, I think you should.

Also HSI is not all over the place and 3g/4g caps are low.

All the more reason why slow and (physically) large optical drives are on the way out.

Also what about building a pc you need a os install disk.

Microsoft has distributed student and developer versions of their OS digitally for years and recommends using a flash memory device for the install....and they have officially supported installing from flash with any retail version since at least Vista.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[jones_supa]

I switched to using USB drives to install the OS of a computer a long time ago. You can even keep them up to date with OS patches unlike burnt disks. Usually installs faster too.

It's just that malware can modify the contents of the flash drive and after that, all your installs will be contaminated.

but do you really want to download and store 25g

[Joe_Dragon]

but do you really want to download and store a 25g+ movie and that's just one movie.

Low end drives are too expensive

[MarioMax]

It just drives me absolutely crazy that low end hard drives are as expensive as they are, and stubbornly not dropping. Take for example these prices on Newegg for a new internal desktop hard drive:

250GB - $49.99 ($2.00 per 10 gigabytes)
320GB - $59.99 ($1.87 per 10 gigabytes)
500GB - $58.99 ($1.18 per 10 gigabytes)
1TB - $79.99 ($0.80 per 10 gigabytes)

I mean, don't get me wrong, the 1 terabytes are an attractive price on a price-per-gigabyte point of view. But there are times where you simply don't need (or want) a large drive, and a small one would do, or your budget for a larger one doesn't exist and you need a smaller drive. But the price per gigabyte is so out of whack on the low end models, it doesn't make sense to waste your money. You'd think stores and suppliers would want to dump their low end inventory for the larger capacities, but apparently they aren't in any hurry.

Re:Low end drives are too expensive

[Tackhead]

250GB - $49.99 ($2.00 per 10 gigabytes)
320GB - $59.99 ($1.87 per 10 gigabytes)
500GB - $58.99 ($1.18 per 10 gigabytes)
1TB - $79.99 ($0.80 per 10 gigabytes)

I mean, don't get me wrong, the 1 terabytes are an attractive price on a price-per-gigabyte point of view. But there are times where you simply don't need (or want) a large drive, and a small one would do, or your budget for a larger one doesn't exist and you need a smaller drive. But the price per gigabyte is so out of whack on the low end models, it doesn't make sense to waste your money. You'd think stores and suppliers would want to dump their low end inventory for the larger capacities, but apparently they aren't in any hurry.

There's more to a hard drive than the platters.

What this pricing is telling you is that it costs about $30-40 to produce a hunk of machined aluminum, a controller board, a few connectors, some cache memory, a voice coil, a fancy motor, and a read-write head. And it costs about $5 to produce a platter, regardless of whether it was a 500GB/1TB platter that's only good enough to be used on one side, both sides of a 320MB platter, etc.

The pricing curve for SSDs will have a very long-term advantage over spinning metal in that the costs of the "mechanical" parts of an SSD are negligible in comparison to the costs of a spinning disk. There'a a very real floor in HDD pricing, because there's a lot of things inside an HDD that don't store bits.

Re:Low end drives are too expensive

[nolife]

If you only need a 500GB drive then buy it and you will save $20 over the 1TB drive. Spending $20 more on something that you will not need is wasting your $20 regardless if you perceive it as a better value or not. Marketing departments love you.

Re:Low end drives are too expensive

[Hadlock]

The case alone costs about $12 to buy the raw materials, cast, and precision machine. The only difference between the 250GB and 1TB version is the number of platters, quality of platters and model of read/write heads. The profit margin on the 250GB is probably about 15%, just the same as the model with the high end 1TB platters & read/write heads. Eventually you run in to a price floor, which is based on the physical reality that the drive is made from high grade machined aluminum.

Re:Low end drives are too expensive

[Kjella]

There's more to a hard drive than the platters. What this pricing is telling you is that it costs about $30-40 to produce a hunk of machined aluminum, a controller board, a few connectors, some cache memory, a voice coil, a fancy motor, and a read-write head. And it costs about $5 to produce a platter, regardless of whether it was a 500GB/1TB platter that's only good enough to be used on one side, both sides of a 320MB platter, etc.

And that's just the production, you still have the same costs on packaging, distribution, support, warranty returns etc. no matter if it's a 250GB or 1TB drive you're selling. I see the same thing here with for example broadband, there's a price floor just to operate a service to you no matter if the flow is a trickle or a torrent.

Re:Low end drives are too expensive

[snadrus]

USB Flash Drive:
32GB - $17.98 ($5.60 per 10 gigabytes)
If you're storing just an OS image, why waste $30?

Re:Low end drives are too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

What this pricing is telling you is that it costs about $30-40 to produce a hunk of machined aluminum, a controller board, a few connectors, some cache memory, a voice coil, a fancy motor, and a read-write head.

Exactly. Look at the historical pricing for low-end hard drives. Back when 250MB (rather than 250GB) was the smallest hard drive that you could buy, it too was in the $40-50 price range ($30 on sale). Anyone observing the hard drive price over time from the near past will notice that a given capacity starts high, drops lower and lower, bottoms out at about $40, and then disappears as the next size up hits the $40 price point. If, for some strange reason, someone was making a 250 MB magnetic-storage hard drive today, they'd still be priced at around $40. (Which is why no one is making them anymore - who'd buy a 250MB hard drive when you can get a 250GB one for the same price?)

Re:Low end drives are too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not as trivial as some might assume.

Shipping hard drives without them all being damaged is a huge technological challenge. A lot of engineering and packaging research goes into shipping them safely for minimal costs.

Re:Low end drives are too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be true, if HD makers didn't priced their HDs as a linear relationship with the drive's capacity, and if 250GB HDs were sold some years ago for a lot less than $50. For example, I've bought 2 HDs inthe past 5 years: a 650GB external HD and a 500GB internal HD. The 650GB external HD cost me in 2006 about $45 while the 500GB HD cost me in 2011 around $50.

Re:Low end drives are too expensive

[gnasher719]

If you only need a 500GB drive then buy it and you will save $20 over the 1TB drive. Spending $20 more on something that you will not need is wasting your $20 regardless if you perceive it as a better value or not. Marketing departments love you.

On the other hand, a 1TB drive filled with 400 GB of data will run a lot faster than a 500GB drive filled with 400 GB of data.

It's deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

The market is punishing the Hard Drive creators for the fact they engaged in price gouging. The popularity of SSDs skyrocketed after hard drive manufacturers took advantage of several factories being disabled. Now that people like SSDs, the popularity of hard drives is permanently diminshed.

Did you enjoy your short term gains without and long term goals? Hope you did. Bye bye in a few years, then!

Re:It's deserved

[Rich0]

Did you enjoy your short term gains without and long term goals? Hope you did. Bye bye in a few years, then!

You say that as if the company has feelings. The company didn't enjoy anything, and will feel no pain when they collapse.

The executives running the company, however, certainly enjoyed their hefty bonuses during the years they gouged the industry. They can just coast now until they get fired, and then retire to their private islands. I'm sure they've all learned their lessons.

Re:It's deserved

[lee13se]

You say that as if the company has feelings. The company didn't enjoy anything, and will feel no pain when they collapse.

I thought companies were people. What is a person without feelings?

Re:It's deserved

[Rich0]

Legally they're people. In practice they are nothing like people. Hence the reason the world is messed up. People have incentive to not do bad things because they might be punished. Companies have no incentive to not do anything, because they don't actually make decisions - the people working in them make the decisions and usually don't sufferer the consequences.

No usb what about input like keyboards / mouses?

[Joe_Dragon]

No usb what about input like keyboards / mouses? and all the other USB stuff.

Wired is better for desktops and on a laptop a wired mouse is harder to lose. Wireless = haveing to deal with batteries

Optical drives

[epp_b]

Optical drives are on the way out? Good riddance. I'm tired of those slow, cumbersome wastes of space.

Any software that isn't delivered as a download (and most of it is these days) should be on a USB drive. And it should have been like this for years already.

Re:Optical drives

[Bing Tsher E]

A lot of software 'deliverable as a download' is only available as long as the proprietary vendor deems to make it available.

I'm sorry, but I like having a durable backup installer of anything I am going to rely on. And that means on permanent media that I can put away in a drawer.

Re:Optical Drives

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet you said the same thing about floppy drives...

Re:Optical drives

[bingoUV]

I'm sorry, but I like having a durable backup installer of anything I am going to rely on. And that means on permanent media that I can put away in a drawer.

Yes, but what has that got to do with optical media?

Optical Drives

[Murdoch5]

Say what you want about them but I still love a good DVD-RW drive. It will never matter what kind of computer I'm running, an optical drive will always be in my bill of sale.

DVD-Rs are good for long term backups

[linebackn]

Quality DVD-Rs and CD-Rs last a long time, have no mechanical components to wear out, or electronic parts that can get zapped. They are not even magnetic, so EM is not an issue. Except for RW media, they can not be overwritten so data can not be altered by a computer glitch or virus. Their interface to the computer can't become obsolete since they don't have one, and newer drives would adapt for the next great thing. CD-R media even lets my data be readable in the oldest of CD drives. Disks are easier to store and organize than a pile of flash drives. And CD/DVDs don't usually break when dropped, like hard drives.

Unlike teh cloudz, the data is secure from prying eyes and right under my fingertips when I need it.

I use DVD-R for long term backups all the time, and I'm a little concerned that if CD/DVD media goes the way of the floppy drive then what can I use that is just as reliable and inexpensive?

Re:DVD-Rs are good for long term backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck, CD-R and DVD-R are based on organic dyes that start degrading within a decade at room temperature.
(non-LTH) BD-R actually doesn't have that issue.

Re:DVD-Rs are good for long term backups

[the eric conspiracy]

Floppy drives are still available, mostly in the 3.25 size. But 5.25 blanks and refurb/NOS drives are still around too. There must be an inventory of many many years worth of old 5.25 drives around.

CDs, DVDs etc are still being sold in large quantity today. I do think though the absolute peak has passed. But optical drives will be available for a long time to come barring an extinction event. I think at least 30 years probably longer given the durability of the media. I have some CDs from when I bought my first Sony CD player in 1982. No evidence of deterioration.

Re:DVD-Rs are good for long term backups

[Anonymous Coward]

That is why you use gold archive grade disks.

Re:DVD-Rs are good for long term backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you still using DVD/CD for anything? I've already moved to Blu Ray backups for anything important.

Re:2 notes

[Anonymous Coward]

No USB, no optical, no HDD, no power in the hands of ordinary serfs.

Which seems like a bad idea to me, but the ordinary serfs seem to love it, and can't get on board fast enough, so is it really a problem if most people prefer it?

Expected?

[pod]

This seems to be the expected result of SSD technology spreading and becoming cheaper. Your everyday user can now buy a reasonably-sized PC with only an SSD for storage. Additional storage needs can be easily addressed with memory sticks, external drives, and cheap and easy to configure and use network storage.

Optical is a bit of an odd one, but not totally unexpected. Online software delivery (no need for CDs/DVDs), downloadable music and movies, online and networked data storage, pretty much eliminate the need to burn a disc, and the lack of an out-of-the-box Blu Ray player in Windows probably puts the final nail in that coffin.

Re:DVD-Rs are DEAD DEAD DEAD for long term backups

[Anonymous Coward]

I use DVD-R for long term backups all the time, and I'm a little concerned that if CD/DVD media goes the way of the floppy drive then what can I use that is just as reliable and inexpensive?

Have fun putting DVDs through your computer when your hard drive dies.

I have over 3TB of pictures and video collected over about a decade of hobby photography (including having family take a few thousand shots at our wedding). I realised disk shuffling had become impractical almost a decade ago. Large spinning disks are heaven sent. The only issue is reliablilty. So multiple copies, including 2 off site for anything really important (updated every 3-6 months or so).

I can keep everything accessible on a pair of 3TB USB disks.

I have a couple more for software downloads, legally obtained video, podcasts, free ebooks, 500TBs worth of astronomical data etc. and a second backup of them off-site too.

No way would even Bluray disks meet my needs now.

Spinning USB disks make having a stack of thumb drives obsolete too. I can have 1TB in my pocket in a rubber protected case. Sure it's not as small as a thumb drive, but it can hold a ton of crap and it's not slow as molasses to write to.

Re:DVD-Rs are DEAD DEAD DEAD for long term backups

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an outlier. Most people don't have terabytes of personal data to backup.

Hard Drive business is an oligopoly business

[Taco Cowboy]

Not if you cut supply.

In an open marketplace, where there are a lot of competitors, cutting supply would be a commercial suicide.
 
But the hard drive business we have today is an oligopoly business. After the rounds of M&A there are less than 5 serious contenders in the HD manufacturing business.
 
Cutting supply in such scenario has become a very possible option for the oligarchs.

Re:Hard Drive business is an oligopoly business

[lightknight]

And one which would hasten their death. They have no long term plans if the hard drive market goes belly up, and SSDs are slowly creeping up on them.

When SSD capacity / costs are less than HDs, they're done. And yes, I've seen Seagate's Pulsar SSDs, and no, I do not know anyone planning to pay that kind of money for what is, if I remember the reviews correctly, worse than consumer level SSDs: they were essentially late to the party, and have been trying to pitch their underwhelming product as an 'Enterprise' level SSD, at prices that are rather frightening.

Yup, did a quick double-check to make sure my information was still valid, and yes, those prices are outrageous (cue guitar riff).

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Pulsar-2-2-5-Inch-Internal-ST100FM0012/dp/B0089V4XPU/ref=pd_sim_sbs_pc_3

$1,319.99 for a 200GB MLC drive.

This is sadly bullshit.

[citizenr]

We are living in an Information Age. Do you honestly expect all of the Clouds to store Petabytes of data on SSD drives?

Re:This is sadly bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Within 10 years yes. SSDs are between 4-8 times as expensive as HDs with their price halving every 1.5-2 years. HDs have a very high relative base cost just in materials, while SSD chips are tiny and most of the expenses is initial investment rather than material cost. As soon as SSDs reach even double the cost of hard drives, their performance alone will make them a much more attractive alternative, especially as their reliability increases.

Re:This is sadly bullshit.

[citizenr]

As soon as SSDs reach even double the cost of hard drives, their performance alone will make them a much more attractive alternative, especially as their reliability increases.

Except their reliability decreases sharply with every new generation.

Re:DVD-Rs are DEAD DEAD DEAD for long term backups

[jsepeta]

unless you're a musician with shitloads of samples and music, or perhaps a pornophile with tons of video.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[fermion]

By my calculations DVD is about 5 cents/gb, hard drives are about 10 cents/gb, and USB drives are about 50 cents/gb.

DVD is slow and bulky requiring a DVD drive to run. Even in clean storage the disks can fail, and you for any computer bakcup multiple disks are going to be required. They are not really suitable for the modern computer.

My OS and computer backups are on hard drives. I boot the computer, select the partition, and go. For backups the software automatically wipes and reloads the computer to the last known status, usually either a snapshot for machines that I want to remain static, or a recent backup for my work machines. Files that change frequently are also backed up online, and reloaded if I have a failure. For software on optical media, a image is created, save on a harddisk or USB, and loaded as needed

Most of my software is downloaded. Software that would require more than a DVD or two is shipped on USB. I have not seen software on DVD for well over a year.

Re:I still systems with SDD's system and HDD's dat

[drinkypoo]

That's my situation, I can't afford a SSD to hold my data. So I have a small SSD to hold the system and my home with a little bit of my data including my firefox profile and so on, a medium HDD to hold big apps, and a sizable (3TB) disk on a dockstar for the bulk of the data, which gets backed up periodically to another one just like it...

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[Joe_Dragon]

Talking about bulk pressed disks in bulk cost is way less then bulk USB sticks

Re:I still systems with SDD's system and HDD's dat

[Abreu]

Your sentence no verb.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[pwizard2]

I still have an ancient 128 MB Memorex USB flash drive from 2002 that has a physical write-protect switch (and it actually works without relying on software). Even after all these years the drive is still good; if it wasn't such low capacity I never would have replaced it.

Re:No usb what about input like keyboards / mouses

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understood this. why bother going to usb for keyboards and mice?

Even if your motherboard is giving up valuable usb space for "just" a couple of PS/2 ports you can still use the PS/2 bus for talking directly to old Serial 9 pin interfaces.

Frankly for timing related issues you just cannot beat a direct to hardware connection like RS-232 Serial, USB will give you tons of timing related issues, but Serial is still a brass tacks level language.

Why did we bother doing that? Not only did we sign away the very last proper hardware interface we had but now we have to contend with USB's ability to spy on you, to install malware when the keyboard/mouse is also a flash drive..

Just because you or someone else is too dumb to properly insert a PS/2 connector doesn't mean we should lower the standards just so they can pass the test and plug the connector in, dumb people will remain dumb regardless of what connector you use, I've seen way too many usb connectors broken off in computers to believe otherwise.

Moving from PS/2 to USB input devices was frankly a dumb move from a security standpoint at least, I think the high priced keyboard and mice buyers out there wouldn't agree with me but they can go and get fucked, anyone who spends $250 on a keyboard and $100 on a mouse needs to be shot.

How about a high-capacity optical format?

[GodfatherofSoul]

I'd love to have something good enough to back up large amounts of data without burning through a stack of CDs or DVDs. Does the technology have to be driven by the entertainment industry?

Re:How about a high-capacity optical format?

[CanEHdian]

It's there; Blu-ray Disc recordable. The problem is that the quality media are still relatively expensive.

Re:I still systems with SDD's system and HDD's dat

[Anonymous Coward]

And he can't spell SSD. Three times.

suck it, hard drive market is garbage

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

The hard drive market is awful. I recently settled on a 1tb WD black drive. Because it has a 5 year warranty. For the same amount, i could get a 1 year warranty 2tb 5400 rpm drive.

The market is crap. The low end drives are just piles of smoking trash, and the "high end" aka NORMAL hard drives circa 2010 are like 80 or 90 cents per GB. (wd black 2tb = $170). They they added a mid range (RED), and an ultra low end space wise 7200 rpm (blue). which position themselves in price wise right and conveniently in between green and black! used to be every drive got the best technology and cache. Now we have gay ass segmentation

And seagate, dont get me started. They have no warranties longer than 3 years, with most drives have a 1 year warranty. Yeah thanks no. Firmware bug + 1 year warranty.. PASS

good thing most computers which are not servers of some sort can get by on a single $70 ssd. The quantum leap of performance which is the solid state drive allows me to defer most mechanical hdd purchases till an age of reason returns.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[mjwx]

optical disks still cost less then usb keys / sdcards in bulk.

Also HSI is not all over the place and 3g/4g caps are low.

And to install a OS a disk is nice and not a restore / recovery partition that can be wiped out by hdd failing / junk software / putting a bigger drive in your system.

Also what about building a pc you need a os install disk.

Add to this portability. If I have to send 12 GB interstate overnight, it's cheaper and easier to burn it to 3 DVD's and courier it. I have to send 2-3 GB of data to clients on a semi regular basis and it's simple to pop it on a DVD and into the post rather than set up FTP/HTTP downloads for multi GB's worth of RAR files (note the plural, I'd cut the files into manageable peices). Plus with DVD's more often than not I can send the data as is (usually images and shape files) which the clients prefers.

OK, I do OS installs from USB media when I can these days but... Yes, I still have optical install disks and cant see then going anywhere until flash drives come in a box of 50 for $20.

Re:DVD-Rs are for long term backups

[mjwx]

Have fun putting DVDs through your computer when your hard drive dies.

Have fun putting through a HDD when your HDD dies only to realise the drive has been sitting on a shelf for long enough for the motors to seize up.

If your long term backups are too big to go to DVD, you put them to tape. 1.5 TB on an LTO5 tape for the same price as a 1 TB HDD and the tape is a hell of a lot more durable and eaiser to recover data from if it isn't in good condition a few years later.

If you've only got one set of backups and/or are constantly overwriting them with new copies then you're a complete fool (and you'll feel like a complete fool when you go to restore that corrupt file and you realise it was corrupted 3 months ago and you've been backing up the corrupt version over the top). For our backups, they go to tape each month and get stored for 2 years, For archives they go to DVD as each job is usually only a few GB. For things that we have to keep for legal reasons (I.E. Financial data) this is so small it can be put to CD. Storage of this is easy as we have to make a new copy every month for auditing purposes and this does require separate media (otherwise the auditors get upset).

If you think optical media is going away, you're seriously deluding yourself. Optical media will be with us until AFTER you can buy a box of 50 flash media off the shelf of K-Mart for $20.

5.25" won't be back I don't think.

[YesIAmAScript]

5.25" just doesn't make sense anymore. Any amount of vibration, out of roundness or runout, tilt or wobble are all increased by having bigger platters. Getting that head to fly well and closely requires very little tilt, and that's harder at bigger diameters. It also requires more power to spin them faster to get low rotational latencies.

Maybe if you don't need good latency you could just spin them slow and live with it. But really smaller makes more sense.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[BeTeK]

I have already ditched all internal optical drives of my computers. I have one usb dvd burner/drive in case if I need one.

Innovators Dilemma

[Martin S.]

As one of the Disruptive Technology posters applications highlighted in Innovators Dilemma this is pretty ironic.

Re:DVD-Rs are for long term backups

[Rich0]

DVDs work well for intermediate-sized archives.

I have a need to backup photos. I back them up to the cloud, but that is relatively expensive (a few cents per GB per month). So, once I have a DVD's worth of data accumulated I burn it and exclude it from online backups. That costs about 5 cents per GB per copy one-time regardless of length of storage, and they last a very long time.

Hard drives are now approaching that kind of cost, but it isn't exactly convenient to update them in chunks of a few GB - you need to bring the drives back, mount them, do the backup, and then store them again.

LTO is quite expensive unless you store a LOT of data. The drives cost thousands of dollars. I'd trust them more than a pile of hard drives though.

Shirt Hard drives, Shit Prices

[Anonymous Coward]

10^14 error rate, warranties slashed, 100h 24/7 power-on, high prices, bad economies

times are tough and you want to sell us overpriced shit that breaks? i'll pass, and i'll keep passing.

Re:No usb what about input like keyboards / mouses

[tibit]

How on Earth will a legacy asynchronous serial port resolve any "timing" issues? A USB host sends out a start of frame every 1ms (or subframes every 1/8th of a ms for high-speed). Those reach all devices attached to same host at the same time, and are perfect for synchronizing multiple PLLs etc. There's no trivial way to synchronize multiple legacy async serial devices that are hooked up to separate serial ports -- not without writing a kernel driver, at least, and even then you'll run into a lot of work trying to get sub-microsecond jitter. USB also has link layer error detection that is quite a bit better than what you get with parity checks. I don't know how a specialized low-speed PS/2 port is any better than that.

If you don't know how to use it properly, you need to learn, it's all there's to it. The USB specs are free. I don't know what timing issues you have that would have been fixed by legacy ports. I seriously don't. Just look at what you get with typical legacy async running at 115200,N,8,1. You get 11.5 bytes per millisecond - per one USB frame period. Not only no one wants a smaller granularity than that, but with contemporary async cards you will have worse granularity than that because a 64 byte FIFO will probably only wake the driver up every couple of ms unless you reconfigure the FIFO watermark levels. People do have problems when they use USB-to-serial converter chips and access them using Windows serial port APIs, because those APIs do not deal with USB peculiarities and don't offer the control you need to use the interface properly. When you use the FTDI chip, use the FT2XX API, not legacy serial API. I'm not sure how it's done on chips from other vendors. I'm not sure either what bells and whistles are available for the OS-provided USB CDC driver on Windows 7 & up -- haven't tried that yet, but I will.

No, move from PS/2 to USB was not a dumb move. It was probably one of the best things to come around. You're free to disable USB storage driver in any OS of your choice, thus solving your "security nightmare". Even relatively low-key microcontrollers can emulate low-bandwidth USB without any dedicated hardware. It's only 1.5 mbits/s. The sources are available for many popular microcontrollers. For this, you get a HID class device that needs no custom drivers, and has all of its bells-and-whistles direcly visible to the userspace. With a PS/2 keyboard, you wouldn't get that. There was no trivial way to send any data but scancodes, so forget joysticks or anything else, unless you were up for writing a custom kernel driver.

So yeah, you have no clue, you won't educate yourself, and are just rambling.

Profiteering.

[DarthVain]

Since day one of the Flood (which was a long time ago) HD companies have been Profiteering. I refuse to participate. They have jacked the prices on all of us using the flood as an excuse and then artificially kept it high. With the number of HD companies out there, I wouldn't be suprised if there was actual colusion and as some point an investigation about insider price setting. Unfortunatly it won't help consumers in the short term. Remember the memory BS years ago, yeah well they did eventually investigate it, and found all parties guilty, and fined everyone, but just part of doing buisness and it was years too late to help any of the consumers. They also recently caught LCD makers as well.

In any case, this is an obvious case of Profiteering, and until prices lower to what they should be, I have refused, and will continue to refuse to buy more. I'll optimize what I have if need be (baring outright failure). I mean prior to the flood which was like what 2 years ago, I bought a 2TB HD for 70$. Look at every computer component out there and what happens with prices over time. This has nothing to do with the flood and is totally a calculated buisness decision to make more profit as the expense of the consumer.

So ya. I hope they lose money hand over fist the greedy bastards. Maybe then they will come to their collective senses.

Re:DVD-Rs are for long term backups

[tibit]

I haven't had a single hard drive that sat years on the shelf seize up. Not a single one, despite having at least 40 drives that sat 5+ years on a shelf. I usually don't toss out old hard drives, just wipe them and put them on a shelf somewhere. I've just finished spinning them all up and verifying that they are operative. All prompted by the crazy slashdot posts. 0 in 40 is good enough for me, including one drive that sat on a shelf for 12 years at least. All the hard drives I ever had would die while being in use.

heat

[junkgoof]

On the server side I had a rack where the disks would die if anyone closed the door due to heat. I inherited the rack, hit the issue and removed the door so it would not happen again, but it had happened before (2 disk failures with the door closed, zero over 4 years with the door in storage). I had an AMD that ran hot and almost every component (disk, mainboard, card) died over time (better case and fans would have helped, maybe a better power supply, too). Heat may not always be a problem but it can be a problem. Not everyone has a decent case and power supply (I overreacted and got an Antec with way too many case fans).

if you're on a desktop

[Chirs]

then get an SSD and run software to automatically cache stuff on it.

The only place dedicated hybrid drives really makes sense is for upgrading old laptops...for new ones they could stick a small SSD right on the motherboard.

Oops.

[Jesus_666]

I meant a 50 GB rewritable BluRay disc, not a 150 GB one.

Re:optical disks still cost less then usb keys in

[randyleepublic]

http://www.fencepost.net/2010/03/usb-flash-drives-with-hardware-write-protection/