As far as I can tell, this doesn't include SSDs. Spinning drive shipments are down -- I say GOOD RIDDANCE!
I run a repair shop, and one of the top computer repairs we do is to upgrade a spinning disk to a SSD.
A 240GB SSD runs $60-$65 these days, and is perfectly adequate for 99% of users. For that other 1% (which I include myself in) 512GB is adequate for 90% of those.
HDD -> SSD is the single most cost-effective upgrade most people can do to breathe new life into an older computer. Going from a spindle drive to a SSD in most computers decreases boot time from ~4 minutes to ~30 seconds. Browsers load faster, videos don't stutter as much, the computer runs more silently. These are the issues most people care about.
A SSD upgrade means a 2010 MacBook Pro now has another 2-3 years of life, which is awesome news to most of the people we serve (who are often college students just trying to make it through college without their computer dying on them.)
I hope to see this chart go to 0 in the next few years as SSDs continue to decrease in price; this doesn't mean much bad news for the "PC industry", just ancient relics of a bygone age finally dying (and/or becoming super-niche for things like archiving where data transfer rates don't particularly matter.)
We won't be seeing these charts go to 0 in a few short years. Hard drives are at 2.7¢/GB while SSDs are at 21.9¢/GB, and that gap won't be closed with just one or two generations of NAND even if hard drives don't get any cheaper. We will increasingly see parts of the hard drive market killed off by SSDs, as the market for low-capacity 2.5" drives has been. Hard drives are shifting from being mainstream storage to archive storage, with things like shingled magnetic recording making hard drives inherently more tape-like. That's why Western Digital had to make a big SSD acquisition (SanDisk), and why Seagate needs to grow their SSD offerings by a lot.
That drive certainly is a bit strange. For one, I would imagine lot of the potential performance is wasted by a SAS connector.
That said, it might be of interest to enterprises from a few different angles (largest drive available for that form factor, easier to manage, great performance, etc). Anything that widens adoption will serve to drive prices even lower. SSDs don't necessarily beat HDDs on price per GB, they just have to get close enough that enough people don't care anymore. And as the original poster pointed out, for many that's already the case.
> And as the original poster pointed out, for many that's already the case.
Because we're seeing, at the same time, a drive away from owning media and instead streaming them, and/or storing data increasingly in The Cloud® and only having a small working set locally.
All those off-loaded will have to be stored somewhere by someone, and that someone will most likely keep using spinning rust for its better price.
And if you do want to keep all your data locally (e.g. because you're living in Nowhere Innawoods and ISPs struggle to get you 6 MBit/s), HDDs can't keep getting bigger and cheaper fast enough.
That's an interesting point, though I suspect it's slightly overstated. I'm sure there's several scenarios that demand huge amounts of storage - e.g. storing HD series, etc - but I'd argue that it isn't mainstream in the greater scheme of things. Heck, I have a 2mbit ADSL line (since I'm living in the arse end of nowhere), and my primary PC has 3x250GB spinnies and a 100GB SSD, no cloud storage. I have a 2TB external for long-term backups. I haven't bothered to replace the HDDs, because honestly I don't really need to. And I'm sure I'm not a special case.
> I'm sure there's several scenarios that demand huge amounts of storage - e.g. storing HD series, etc - but I'd argue that it isn't mainstream in the greater scheme of things.
That was my point; almost nobody is storing HD series anymore because people want to (and in many cases legally are only able to) stream them instead.
Lots of people use Plex etc for movie playback. Kids love to rewatch movies, as do some movie lovers. I have a copy of many movies in a disk array so that I can watch them anywhere in the house without digging out a disk.
I do store movies, and quite a few people around me too. I store only truly remarkable and important ones to me that I might watch later (and often I do), currently filling most of my 3 TB drive. I never go back to series, even the best ones are one-time watch for me.
Flac music can fill another 500 GB easily, more depending what you listen to..
Not a lot of people know how/can stream a properly good 1080p stream with high bitrates. oh, you want some subtitles because you're not an english native? Or you have fancy stereo/surround setup that you want to actually use? oh well, you better download some bigger version.
> But if the Cloud is made up of hard drives, then hard drive manufacturers still win.
If drives in the Cloud are, on average, utilized more efficiently (both in terms of less unused drive capacity being purchased, and existing drives being used for more of their design life and not being tossed because the device they are in is end-of-life even if the drive isn't) than traditional locally-deployed (both client and server) drives, then increasing cloud use could mean the manufacturer's still lose (in terms of year-over-year sales) even with total storage increasing, if the increase in average efficiency outpaces the increase in storage, so that annual drive sales drop.
Many technologies have this type of price tiering -- high end costs a fortune and exists for super-niche customers and to build out the manufacturing process. (Recall $25,000 plasma TVs 15 years ago).
If you're making large purchases right now, 3+TB SSDs are pricing out fast spinning disk tiers. You probably will see no 10k/15k drives in 2-3 years.
it's on track to give me 10 years of use now, if not more (i'll probably succumb to upgrade fever before then). knocking on wood. the ram and ssd were a given, but i was surprised at how much more 2d performance the video card delivered. i really just wanted 4k for the real estate, but the actual speed at which it renders everything jumped dramatically.
I have a 2010 iMac that's unbearably slow at the moment, and since I suspect that the hdd is the reason I'm considering upgrading to a 1TB SSD (since I don't want less storage space).. But including installation, that's roughly $400. And spending $400 to prolong the life of an iMac with a fairly crappy GPU seems a lot. But on the other hand a new iMac (with a non-Intel GPU) is $2000 or more. Hard decision!
What 1TB SSD costs $400? The 512GB SSD I bought merely cost me $120. The 1TB Model costs a slightly more than twice that.
So far I've been completly disappointed with my purchase. Compared to my 3TB HDD I've spent more money yet only see a 2x improvement in speed compared to my HDD for sequential loads. Sure it now boots much faster but that's hardly worth the money I've spent on it.
I was just about to say I've never seen 1TB SSD's anywhere near that cheap - Apple in Australia still charges $800 to add a 1TB SSD to a MacBook Pro. But I see Amazon now sells SanDisk X400 1TB SSDs for $230 USD.
Alas, everyone still seems to recommend Samsung Evo if you want reliability (I do), and $330 for a 1TB EVO 850 is still a little more than I want to pay. (Especially when a 2TB spinning disk selling for $95 now.)
I'll keep the iMac until it gives up the ghost completely, so resale value isn't a parameter. It's more a question of "will the $400 give it enough longer life to make more sense than buying a new one now".
Perhaps I should go with a 500GB SSD and transfer the movies and whatever else is taking up space to the server. And then buy a new iMac once they put the next-gen GPUs in them.
get a smaller one for your OS + common apps and a used nvidia gpu from a newer mac.
an ssd is a completely different paradigm. it's night and day, even on an old sata bus.
this shoudn't even be a question. hdd computers are completely unuseable to me now. i sat down at one the other day and i thought it had crashed and almost rebooted it, but it was just chugging the disk.
I have considered switching out both the HDD and the DVD drive to get space to build a Fusion drive, but I kinda want to keep the DVD drive; it's the only one we have in the house.
Hm. Maybe I should build a Fusion drive and add an external optical drive...
My 2009 core 2 duo is still running smoothly with maxed out ram and an ssd upgrade. Granted, it doesn't do games, and I wouldn't want to train a neural net on it, but even as a primary desktop it's still nice to use.
well the cpu, ram, storage, and video card were never made by apple anyway. the case, motherboard, and other various hard bits and (maybe most importantly) operating system are still apple.
I recommend the SSD to all my friends with older macbooks. As a christmas gift I upgraded my girlfriends 2012 macbook to a 512 gb one, and the computer went from barely working/loading anything to feeling like a brand new machine.
I'm in the same boat. Write speed increased 8.5x. Before, apps would take forever to load and respond. Now, it's on par with my work computer - a 2015 MBP.
I recently had to RMA a Samsung 840 EVO that was less than 3 years old, and had only seen light usage (but no extended offline time). It just suddenly stopped responding to ATA commands, returning errors. All the SMART attributes were fine and the drive even gave itself a clean bill of health. Distressingly, even as it was returning read/write errors like crazy, the SMART read/write error attributes stayed at 0. It was running the latest firmware. I could not even do an ATA secure erase to reset it to clean condition, as that command returned an error as well.
I sent it out for RMA, they returned it with the work description "firmware upgraded" and no further information. It's the same drive, but it's been zeroed/factory-reset.
I have backups, so I'm not too concerned about losing data, but this episode didn't exactly make me confident in the quality of SSD firmware, especially since samsung is supposed to be one of the better manufacturers out there.
Just one anecdote, make of it what you will. Of course, I've had countless hard drives fail over the years as well, but the failure mode is very different, there's no partial read possible and it just happened all of a sudden with no indication.
Close to 100% of the SSD failures I've seen have not been from being left off for a few years, nor from actual flash media failure, but from firmware bugs or, occasionally, mechanical failure.
(I've had very small sample size of SSDs not being powered up for a few years, but the few I have powered up after not powering on for years have had all their data retained. Ask me in another 15 years or so, though.)
I've written a few flash storage systems (small ones, for consumer devices). If your data structures are such that you can't do an atomic commit, you shouldn't be in the marketplace.
There was some widely circulated study few years ago which found that most SSD models they tested had problems on power loss. Some even bricked. They didn't publish concrete names, unfortunately.
But yeah, I agree it's a bug and shouldn't happen. So what :)
Note that the 320 recommended by the second article had similar issues, supposedly fixed in firmware 4PC10362, but some users reported problems even on that version: https://communities.intel.com/thread/24339?start=15 (many of those complaints look like different problems, but not all).
My "favorite" were the OCZ Vertex 1 drives which almost certainly had issues with the firmware eating paste and overwriting some internal metadata - periodically the drives would start throwing read/write errors on swathes of LBAs, and the only way to mitigate this would be to throw the jumper on to put the drive in "recovery" mode and do a destructive firmware reflash that blew away all the contents.
And then it would work perfectly well again...for a while.
I agree with the downstream commenter about this still qualifying as a FW bug, but to be more clear:
* there's the story I posted about the OCZ V1 drives eating paste periodically while behind redundant power.
* there was a fun problem of some OCZ Deneva 2 drives deciding that they would simply drop off the port and not come back without a cold power cycle, behind redundant power (and a related story about the drives being in such a state, and the AHCI init code on the BIOS getting confused and hanging forever, which was what actually necessitated the cold cycle).
* there was the really fun case someone I worked with came up with where they found a way to reproducibly brick a particular family of SSDs using only about a TB of IO on a 480 GB SSD. (And by "brick", I mean "call the manufacturer, it's not coming back.")
* there was the SandForce bug once upon a time which caused the affected SSDs to not show up correctly as disks under Windows when on SATL because the firmware reported an empty "version" field, and while all the other OSes tested were content with this, and Windows when not using SATL was content with this, Windows when using SATL would report the disk as an "Unknown Device" for this.
I had my first computer fire, last year. One of the contacts in an SSD power connector delaminated, causing a short. The SSD was toast. Or at least, the power connector had melted. The power supply was toast. But with a new power supply, the machine itself is fine :)
There are brands of SSD that I will not have in our datacenter (medium scale, several thousand machines). Kingston and OCZ are the ones that I kill on sight. I found some new-in-box drives in a corner a week or two ago, and threw them away. They're poison.
For developer workstations, we get good results from Samsung drives. We run Intel enterprise class drives in servers and they're fine, don't even have to think about them.
We've pretty much stopped buying spinning drives, with a few exceptions where we need lots of capacity and don't care about performance.
All in all, there is absolutely zero reason to worry about SSD data retention in typical client environment. Remember that the figures presented here are for a drive that has already passed its endurance rating, so for new drives the data retention is considerably higher, typically over ten years for MLC NAND based SSDs. If you buy a drive today and stash it away, the drive itself will become totally obsolete quicker than it will lose its data. Besides, given the cost of SSDs, it's not cost efficient to use them for cold storage anyway, so if you're looking to archive data I would recommend going with hard drives for cost reasons alone.
I built a new server for myself six months or so ago. I put in 6 x 4 TB WD Red HDDs and a pair of Samsung 850 Pro 256 GB SSDs for the OS/boot partitions.
I really like those SSDs! I replaced the (about three year old) Crucial M500 480 GB SSD in my ThinkPad W530 with a pair of them and have since put them in every machine I've got (with the exception of my new MacBook Pro).
Personal anecdote, I have had trouble with OCZ. I have had no trouble with Samsung EVO. Now, I go with Samsung EVO for all my drives - they are not much more expensive than the cheap drives and the fact that they just work is worth it to me.
Unfortunately for those of us who run home servers or NAS, prices and technology of large drives have also stagnated. I recently had to replace a few years old 4TB drive that had died. I was looking forward to grabbing an 8TB or something for the same price, but no. In fact, I ended up buying exactly the same model #, for only about $50 less. (I looked up the original receipt to check!)
I thought this quote from a recent James Hamilton blog post seemed like a plea for the hard drive manufacturers to get their act together... seems like he's not alone ;)
"But, leveraging an existing disk design will not produce a winning product for archival storage. Using disk would require a much larger, slower, more power efficient and less expensive hardware platform. It really would need to be different from current generation disk drives. Designing a new platform for the archive market just doesn’t feel comfortable for disk manufacturers and, as a consequence, although the hard drive industry could have easily won the archive market, they have left most of the market for other storage technologies."
Reading the suggestions about form factor in the white paper, I'd love to see full-height 5¼" drives spinning at 10K that look like their MFM ancestors, only having ~200,000 times more capacity. :)
(Also, the part which discusses hybrid SMR drives that allocate a conventionally recorded section on the platters for GC and hot/cold data separation purposes – would a small SSD be applicable for this functionality?)
>>> Despite the drop in HDD unit shipments, both sequentially and year-over-year, total capacities shipped by the two leading makers of hard drives increased in Q1
Somehow misleading title. You don't buy a HDD, you buy storage capacity, and this metric is increasing, so it seems that the HDD industry is pretty healthy.
Spinning disks still have their uses though. For example, they're ideal for a low-to-moderate amount of disk activity, and they last longer. Just make sure you schedule a daily defragment. Spinning disks are also great for 'cold storage' of files. I wouldn't store anything worthwhile on an SSD though because of their fail-rate. SSDs of course have their use cases too, but there are many trade-offs to using them exclusively for everything. I know people who exclusively work with SSDs naively thinking they're a progression from spinning disks. Not actually the case!
Daily defragmentation on a disk with "low-to-moderate" use? Maybe that's still a Windows thing, but on my Linux systems and OSX I haven't defrag'd in ages. (Actually just once on OSX when I was grasping at straws with a disk issue).
I find this even more interesting because a large chunk of the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" is about disruption in the storage industry.
I've not finished reading the book yet, but I think there were a few predictions about what would happen to companies that dominate the spinning drive market - it would be interesting to see how closely the predictions align with reality.
I find this pretty interesting. Places like NetApp, Google, and Amazon can consume a lot of disk drives, and their customers don't seem particularly inclined to stop storing stuff.
So presumably this is just the shift of laptops over to SSDs rather than storage being less useful. If that is the case it would suggest that storage prices may stabilize a bit on a cents per GB basis.
Uh, the floods were real, killed real people, and damaged real property. No need for the scare quotes.
> Something about supply/demand doesn't make sense here.
Yep. It feels like there's a price-fixing investigation that runs periodically in each PC component market that finds solid evidence of price fixing and then forces the prices down.
Maybe we don't need bigger drives? For installing software disk size has been irrelevant for some time - we always have space for software. Maybe after we have always space for films - then there is no other thing to fill up the disks?
Where do you store videos and music you work on? Where you do you store containers or vms or build artifacts for software development? Prices of SSDs have to come down at least 5 times to be in any way comparable (10x actually to match $/GB but 5x would be huge).
We absolutely need bigger drives because we will have bigger files. Think video (4k, 8k, VR, HDR), archive of operating system images for development, data to use for ML, NixOS style immutable operating systems, all the data from your personal IoT gadgets. Readily available larger storage gives us many benefits:
1. requirement for OS stack to adapt (think ZFS)
2. doing things we wouldn't consider possible at home before
3. more complete backups with history
By enabling new things for the masses, we enable the development of new stuff by people in their free time.
Let's not mix tablet/phone use of storage with that of computers with keyboard+mice.
I run a repair shop, and one of the top computer repairs we do is to upgrade a spinning disk to a SSD.
A 240GB SSD runs $60-$65 these days, and is perfectly adequate for 99% of users. For that other 1% (which I include myself in) 512GB is adequate for 90% of those.
HDD -> SSD is the single most cost-effective upgrade most people can do to breathe new life into an older computer. Going from a spindle drive to a SSD in most computers decreases boot time from ~4 minutes to ~30 seconds. Browsers load faster, videos don't stutter as much, the computer runs more silently. These are the issues most people care about.
A SSD upgrade means a 2010 MacBook Pro now has another 2-3 years of life, which is awesome news to most of the people we serve (who are often college students just trying to make it through college without their computer dying on them.)
I hope to see this chart go to 0 in the next few years as SSDs continue to decrease in price; this doesn't mean much bad news for the "PC industry", just ancient relics of a bygone age finally dying (and/or becoming super-niche for things like archiving where data transfer rates don't particularly matter.)