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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."
That means prices will go down, right?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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 / maybe apps based on how big the SDD is.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
then copy to flash right before the install. No stacks of install media needed.
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).
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.
"You can even keep them up to date with OS patches unlike burnt disks."
Someone obviously hasn't heard of nlite.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Also what about building a pc you need a os install disk.
That requirement went away like a decade ago.
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.
In other news, the price of wax cylinders is set to rise this year.
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.
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 a 25g+ movie and that's just one movie.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
And bluray never gets scratched or degrades and backing up lots of data with it takes a really small amount of space.
Oh wait....
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?
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.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
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.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We are living in an Information Age. Do you honestly expect all of the Clouds to store Petabytes of data on SSD drives?
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
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.
unless you're a musician with shitloads of samples and music, or perhaps a pornophile with tons of video.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
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.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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?
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...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Talking about bulk pressed disks in bulk cost is way less then bulk USB sticks
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.)
Kid-proof tablet..
That's a solved problem for both DVDs and BDs.
Kid-proof tablet..
Your sentence no verb.
No sig for the moment.
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.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
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?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"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.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
> 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.
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.
-
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 $20.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
In what way are the thumb drives not universal? They are supported on pretty much every device with a standard USB port and work with no extra steps on all major operating systems. Most computers (if not all) made in the last 6 years or so can boot from them. That's as good as universal in my book, certainly more than needing a separate reading device in all computers.
Also the quality of optical device readers has taken a very sharp turn for the worse since they have got to commodities level. I have encountered many cases where a DVD unit would not read rewritables, or even read CDs but refuse to read DVDs, and the culprit was not wear and tear. In fact, I own a DVD reader that has not been used 100 times in its lifetime that has become unable to read rewritable DVDs. Optical drives on laptops are even poorer quality. So, having optical media and the corresponding unit in a device is no longer a guarantee that you will be able to use said media. In those cases, ironically, it's usually the USB thumb drive that saves the day.
At this point in time a 25 GB rewritable Bluray disc is about 15$. 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.
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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"?
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...
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.
I am John Hurt.
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.
I am John Hurt.
I have already ditched all internal optical drives of my computers. I have one usb dvd burner/drive in case if I need one.
As one of the Disruptive Technology posters applications highlighted in Innovators Dilemma this is pretty ironic.
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.
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.
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?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
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.
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).
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
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.
I meant a 50 GB rewritable BluRay disc, not a 150 GB one.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
BD-R has several advantages:
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.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
http://www.fencepost.net/2010/03/usb-flash-drives-with-hardware-write-protection/
Social Credit would solve everything...
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!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
Cheap storage VM.