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I'm one of those weird data horders that still buys high capacity drives. I take a lot of RAW photos and videos and I prefer to buy and not rent a license to my

I'm one of those weird data horders that still buys high capacity drives. I take a lot of RAW photos and videos and I prefer to buy and not rent a license to my music (and I like using sites like Bandcamp to support independent artists). I recently got a 14TB as a new primary, 10TB secondary, along with similar capacity backup drives. I hope this trend doesn't mean consumer hard drives are going to get more expensive going forward. I keep reading about people predicting SSDs are going to hit the same price/capacity as spinning disks, but I just don't see it with the large >10TB volumes any time soon.

myself248 8y ago
I think it was last year, after ordering a 2TB SSD, that I realized I've probably already bought the last mechanical hard drive of my life. I could go for one more round of 10TB's or something to max out my Drobo, but by the time those seem small, I do expect SSDs to have overtaken them. "No way, Grandpa, magnets were never FREE!" "Well, not free exactly, but we'd harvest them out of our discarded hard drives! Those were a sort of data storage machine, you've probably seen pictures." "But when you removed the magnets, didn't that mean forfeiting the rare-earth-element deposit?"
- rasz 8y ago
  Not if you care about stored data. We already had Samsung drives starting to forget contents after few months with a firmware patch forcing periodic rewrite. SSD (using flash technology) will never replace HDD, unless you dont care about retention. Something else past SSD (phase change etc) might eventually reach that goal.
  - sacheendra 8y ago
    For those use cases where retention is a priority, they maybe better served by bluray discs or tapes. HDDs are being squeezed on both sides. By SSDs for daily use. By discs and tapes for long term storage.
    - walterbell 8y ago
      How much does a USB3 tape drive + tape cost? Blu-ray disc is 50GB. 10TB hard disks cost about $180 on sale, which would take 200 Blu-ray discs.
      - dragontamer 8y ago
        I do some video editing sometimes. I tried to archive one of my projects to Blu-Ray (all of the clips, video files, etc. etc.). Storing 300GB in 6 different BluRays means 6-points of failure. And more importantly, BluRays have a 20MB/s read/write speed. Modern Hard Drives read/write at roughly 200MB/s. A 5TB Hard Drive is just far more convenient, faster, and reliable than stacks-and-stacks of BluRays. A BluRay is great for the "50GB of important data" (Tax returns, resume, other important documents). Having one 50GB "highly reliable" source of storage is great. You can clone that one disk, leave some at your parent's house / some other house you trust, have 3x disks for redundancy at home, etc. etc. Its the easiest way to achieve high-reliability. Oh, and leave a copy in your 5TB Hard Drives too, for convenience sake. But BluRays are cheap for copies and long-term reliability. But they're otherwise awful to work with in my experience.
        mixmastamyk 8y ago
        BR has 100 and 128 GB sizes now, which I use, but doesn't change your calculations much.
      - arcticbull 8y ago
        LTO-7 tapes in the 6/15TB range are between $60 and $80. LTO-8 tapes in the 12/30TB range are about $199 though seem largely on back-order. Double-capacity (24/60TB) LTO-9 tapes are planned.
        dragontamer 8y ago
        But tape drives are $2000+. Which means you need to store over 30TB to 50TB of information before tape drives are more cost effective. I've always wanted to make a tape-drive computer, but each time I run the costs... its just completely unfathomable that I'd ever store the amount of info needed for it to be cost-effective. If I were to build a big storage device for my house today, it'd be Nas4Free system with 6TB Hard drives (avoid shingled drives, PMR for cost-effectiveness, Helium is unnecessary if you stay below 8TB). 6x 6TB Hard Drives with RAIDZ2(similar to RAID6) for a total capacity of 24TB of storage / 2x parity drives for resiliency. That's only $160 per 6TB hard drive (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822149629 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E1682214...), so that's probably going to be cheaper than any tape-drive based system you can build out.
topspin 8y ago
> I keep reading about people predicting SSDs are going to hit the same price/capacity as spinning disks Flash doesn't actually have to reach the same price/capacity ratio to wipe out the small end of the HDD market. The performance and solid state nature of flash provide so much value that few will opt for a HDD when they can have a flash device, even if the flash device is smaller and a little more expensive. Also, at some point not having flash IOPS will become intolerable. Large disks will survive while they have the price/capacity ratio advantage, but the small end of the HDD market is dead. And yes, I do believe this means that the price floor of HDD will climb as the number of lines building HDDs decreases.
- flukus 8y ago
  The small end is why I'm still buying (or at least was a few years ago) machines with spinning disks. Even now looking at the surface range, the surface go has all the computing power I need but is hobbled by a 64GB SSD and jumping from that at $499AU to the 512GB I'd consider the bare minimum you have to spend $2,879.00AU and upgrade several other components I don't care about.
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    However for devices with a standard 2.5" bay, a 500gb ssd only cost £99 (and an hhd is £50)
    - wtallis 8y ago
      You must not have checked SSD prices since last fall or earlier. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0786QNS9B https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0786QNS9B 500GB SSD for £49.98. M.2 SATA versions are £5-10 more.
mrob 8y ago
Consumer hard drives are already getting more expensive in some cases. I bought a 8TB shingled magnetic recording[0] hard drive about two years ago, and recently tried to buy another one but I couldn't find any in stock. I bought a more expensive non-shingled drive instead. I assume nobody sells shingled drives to consumers anymore because people are too stupid to understand what it means and think the very slow random write performance is a defect. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording
wtallis 8y ago
> I keep reading about people predicting SSDs are going to hit the same price/capacity as spinning disks, but I just don't see it with the large >10TB volumes any time soon. To elaborate on this: $/TB varies widely depending on total drive capacity. The fixed costs of hard drive spindle motors, actuators, etc. are higher than the costs of an SSD controller and PCB. Adding a platter to a hard drive is cheaper on a per-GB basis than adding more NAND flash to an SSD, but there's a crossover point below which SSDs have cheaper price per GB and small hard drives are no longer economical to manufacture. That crossover point has now risen to encompass the majority of consumer use cases, but it is nowhere near 10TB and won't be anytime soon. That crossover point also seems to be moving upward much faster than typical consumer storage needs, so we can expect this segment of the hard drive market to continue to wither.
- the8472 8y ago
  > That crossover point has now risen to encompass the majority of consumer use cases cheapest drives measured in price/capacity HDDs: 2TB @ 0.017€/GB M.2 SSDs: 2TB @ 0.1€/GB I see no crossover point here. SSDs are not even touching the the same order of magnitude.
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    The crossover point is currently around 256gb. 500gb is close. 1tb/2tb isn't there yet. But it likely won't be too long.
    - the8472 8y ago
      2.5" HDD, 250GB @ 0.059€/GB 2.5" SSD, 256GB @ 0.108€/GB Still not seeing it. And I don't consider these ranges practical. But I guess some people must since they're still made.
      - wtallis 8y ago
        Pay a little more attention to the hard drives you're looking at. Almost all the product listings for tiny hard drives are for models that are several generations old, usually with branding that the manufacturers have long since retired (WD Caviar, Seagate Momentus). The cheapest listings are often grey market sellers of old stock with no manufacturer's warranty. Seagate has abandoned all capacities below 500GB, and they offer limited options for form factor and RPM at 500GB. Western Digital still lists one 250GB model and two 320GB models, but none of them are cheaper than a 480GB-class SATA SSD. Current 500GB hard drives start at $38-40, and 480GB SSDs start around $48-50. These capacities are sufficient for typical consumers.
walterbell 8y ago
From another thread: http://serverbuilds.net http://serverbuilds.net and associated forum/chat is an active community for affordable DIY NAS with used enterprise hardware and FreeNAS, Unraid, ESXi, etc.
blihp 8y ago
The good news is the mid- to high-end of the hard drive market will be the last to go as SSD can't compete there (yet). The bad news is that in the short term I would expect progress in mechanical drives (both cost and absolute capacity) to slow even more than it already has over the last decade as the market opportunity will warrant less investment by storage companies. By the time the end game plays out, there will be cost effective alternatives. (whether or not they'll be available to consumers is a different question) Look at it this way: the optical drive/disc market has been 'dead' for years but you can still pick up a new DVD burner for ~$20. Hard drives will likely follow suit: at some point it won't make sense for hard drive manufacturers to invest in developing new drives, but they'll keep churning out the existing stuff for years and years until demand dries up. They've already done the expensive part (developing the drives, establishing supply chains, building the plants and setting up the manufacturing lines), and will keep doing the cheap part (actually making them) as long as there's a market.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Yes, I recently looked up the BR burner and discs I bought circa 2010 for large backups of photos, etc. Drives, capacities, speeds all about the same, which was mildly surprising.
d1zzy 8y ago
Recently I've joined the home NAS crowd. I never thought I would but it just happened naturally. I was rewatching the GoT BluRays to prepare for the new season and it was very frustrating having to change discs every 2 episodes, taking forever to load a disc, printing the same stupid copyright warning every disc. So instead I went and ripped them (funny that the copyright message saying not to copy them was a factor in convincing me to actually do so). But then I started running out of disk space so here I am a few weeks later using RAID5 and multiple drives exposed through the LAN and having ripped my entire BluRay library. It's actually quite cool in that I now get both the benefits of streaming (can play any ripped title on demand whenever I feel like it) and none of the drawbacks: doesn't need Internet nor does it use my monthly traffic limit, it's at much higher quality than any Internet stream (GoT BluRay episodes average at around 35mbit/sec while an Internet stream doesn't go above 5mbit) and there are no "concurrent streams" limit (well, other than the one inherent to the speed of my LAN/NAS but I've yet to hit that one).

myself248 8y ago

I think it was last year, after ordering a 2TB SSD, that I realized I've probably already bought the last mechanical hard drive of my life. I could go for one more round of 10TB's or something to max out my Drobo, but by the time those seem small, I do expect SSDs to have overtaken them. "No way, Grandpa, magnets were never FREE!" "Well, not free exactly, but we'd harvest them out of our discarded hard drives! Those were a sort of data storage machine, you've probably seen pictures." "But when you removed the magnets, didn't that mean forfeiting the rare-earth-element deposit?"

rasz 8y ago
Not if you care about stored data. We already had Samsung drives starting to forget contents after few months with a firmware patch forcing periodic rewrite. SSD (using flash technology) will never replace HDD, unless you dont care about retention. Something else past SSD (phase change etc) might eventually reach that goal.
- sacheendra 8y ago
  For those use cases where retention is a priority, they maybe better served by bluray discs or tapes. HDDs are being squeezed on both sides. By SSDs for daily use. By discs and tapes for long term storage.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    How much does a USB3 tape drive + tape cost? Blu-ray disc is 50GB. 10TB hard disks cost about $180 on sale, which would take 200 Blu-ray discs.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      I do some video editing sometimes. I tried to archive one of my projects to Blu-Ray (all of the clips, video files, etc. etc.). Storing 300GB in 6 different BluRays means 6-points of failure. And more importantly, BluRays have a 20MB/s read/write speed. Modern Hard Drives read/write at roughly 200MB/s. A 5TB Hard Drive is just far more convenient, faster, and reliable than stacks-and-stacks of BluRays. A BluRay is great for the "50GB of important data" (Tax returns, resume, other important documents). Having one 50GB "highly reliable" source of storage is great. You can clone that one disk, leave some at your parent's house / some other house you trust, have 3x disks for redundancy at home, etc. etc. Its the easiest way to achieve high-reliability. Oh, and leave a copy in your 5TB Hard Drives too, for convenience sake. But BluRays are cheap for copies and long-term reliability. But they're otherwise awful to work with in my experience.
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        BR has 100 and 128 GB sizes now, which I use, but doesn't change your calculations much.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      LTO-7 tapes in the 6/15TB range are between $60 and $80. LTO-8 tapes in the 12/30TB range are about $199 though seem largely on back-order. Double-capacity (24/60TB) LTO-9 tapes are planned.
      - dragontamer 8y ago
        But tape drives are $2000+. Which means you need to store over 30TB to 50TB of information before tape drives are more cost effective. I've always wanted to make a tape-drive computer, but each time I run the costs... its just completely unfathomable that I'd ever store the amount of info needed for it to be cost-effective. If I were to build a big storage device for my house today, it'd be Nas4Free system with 6TB Hard drives (avoid shingled drives, PMR for cost-effectiveness, Helium is unnecessary if you stay below 8TB). 6x 6TB Hard Drives with RAIDZ2(similar to RAID6) for a total capacity of 24TB of storage / 2x parity drives for resiliency. That's only $160 per 6TB hard drive (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822149629 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E1682214...), so that's probably going to be cheaper than any tape-drive based system you can build out.

topspin 8y ago

> I keep reading about people predicting SSDs are going to hit the same price/capacity as spinning disks Flash doesn't actually have to reach the same price/capacity ratio to wipe out the small end of the HDD market. The performance and solid state nature of flash provide so much value that few will opt for a HDD when they can have a flash device, even if the flash device is smaller and a little more expensive. Also, at some point not having flash IOPS will become intolerable. Large disks will survive while they have the price/capacity ratio advantage, but the small end of the HDD market is dead. And yes, I do believe this means that the price floor of HDD will climb as the number of lines building HDDs decreases.

flukus 8y ago
The small end is why I'm still buying (or at least was a few years ago) machines with spinning disks. Even now looking at the surface range, the surface go has all the computing power I need but is hobbled by a 64GB SSD and jumping from that at $499AU to the 512GB I'd consider the bare minimum you have to spend $2,879.00AU and upgrade several other components I don't care about.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  However for devices with a standard 2.5" bay, a 500gb ssd only cost £99 (and an hhd is £50)
  - wtallis 8y ago
    You must not have checked SSD prices since last fall or earlier. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0786QNS9B https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0786QNS9B 500GB SSD for £49.98. M.2 SATA versions are £5-10 more.

mrob 8y ago

Consumer hard drives are already getting more expensive in some cases. I bought a 8TB shingled magnetic recording[0] hard drive about two years ago, and recently tried to buy another one but I couldn't find any in stock. I bought a more expensive non-shingled drive instead. I assume nobody sells shingled drives to consumers anymore because people are too stupid to understand what it means and think the very slow random write performance is a defect. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

wtallis 8y ago

> I keep reading about people predicting SSDs are going to hit the same price/capacity as spinning disks, but I just don't see it with the large >10TB volumes any time soon. To elaborate on this: $/TB varies widely depending on total drive capacity. The fixed costs of hard drive spindle motors, actuators, etc. are higher than the costs of an SSD controller and PCB. Adding a platter to a hard drive is cheaper on a per-GB basis than adding more NAND flash to an SSD, but there's a crossover point below which SSDs have cheaper price per GB and small hard drives are no longer economical to manufacture. That crossover point has now risen to encompass the majority of consumer use cases, but it is nowhere near 10TB and won't be anytime soon. That crossover point also seems to be moving upward much faster than typical consumer storage needs, so we can expect this segment of the hard drive market to continue to wither.

the8472 8y ago
> That crossover point has now risen to encompass the majority of consumer use cases cheapest drives measured in price/capacity HDDs: 2TB @ 0.017€/GB M.2 SSDs: 2TB @ 0.1€/GB I see no crossover point here. SSDs are not even touching the the same order of magnitude.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  The crossover point is currently around 256gb. 500gb is close. 1tb/2tb isn't there yet. But it likely won't be too long.
  - the8472 8y ago
    2.5" HDD, 250GB @ 0.059€/GB 2.5" SSD, 256GB @ 0.108€/GB Still not seeing it. And I don't consider these ranges practical. But I guess some people must since they're still made.
    - wtallis 8y ago
      Pay a little more attention to the hard drives you're looking at. Almost all the product listings for tiny hard drives are for models that are several generations old, usually with branding that the manufacturers have long since retired (WD Caviar, Seagate Momentus). The cheapest listings are often grey market sellers of old stock with no manufacturer's warranty. Seagate has abandoned all capacities below 500GB, and they offer limited options for form factor and RPM at 500GB. Western Digital still lists one 250GB model and two 320GB models, but none of them are cheaper than a 480GB-class SATA SSD. Current 500GB hard drives start at $38-40, and 480GB SSDs start around $48-50. These capacities are sufficient for typical consumers.

walterbell 8y ago

From another thread: http://serverbuilds.net http://serverbuilds.net and associated forum/chat is an active community for affordable DIY NAS with used enterprise hardware and FreeNAS, Unraid, ESXi, etc.

blihp 8y ago

The good news is the mid- to high-end of the hard drive market will be the last to go as SSD can't compete there (yet). The bad news is that in the short term I would expect progress in mechanical drives (both cost and absolute capacity) to slow even more than it already has over the last decade as the market opportunity will warrant less investment by storage companies. By the time the end game plays out, there will be cost effective alternatives. (whether or not they'll be available to consumers is a different question) Look at it this way: the optical drive/disc market has been 'dead' for years but you can still pick up a new DVD burner for ~$20. Hard drives will likely follow suit: at some point it won't make sense for hard drive manufacturers to invest in developing new drives, but they'll keep churning out the existing stuff for years and years until demand dries up. They've already done the expensive part (developing the drives, establishing supply chains, building the plants and setting up the manufacturing lines), and will keep doing the cheap part (actually making them) as long as there's a market.

mixmastamyk 8y ago
Yes, I recently looked up the BR burner and discs I bought circa 2010 for large backups of photos, etc. Drives, capacities, speeds all about the same, which was mildly surprising.

d1zzy 8y ago

Recently I've joined the home NAS crowd. I never thought I would but it just happened naturally. I was rewatching the GoT BluRays to prepare for the new season and it was very frustrating having to change discs every 2 episodes, taking forever to load a disc, printing the same stupid copyright warning every disc. So instead I went and ripped them (funny that the copyright message saying not to copy them was a factor in convincing me to actually do so). But then I started running out of disk space so here I am a few weeks later using RAID5 and multiple drives exposed through the LAN and having ripped my entire BluRay library. It's actually quite cool in that I now get both the benefits of streaming (can play any ripped title on demand whenever I feel like it) and none of the drawbacks: doesn't need Internet nor does it use my monthly traffic limit, it's at much higher quality than any Internet stream (GoT BluRay episodes average at around 35mbit/sec while an Internet stream doesn't go above 5mbit) and there are no "concurrent streams" limit (well, other than the one inherent to the speed of my LAN/NAS but I've yet to hit that one).