4 ms·

I'd appreciate more capacity, but at this point my big complaint is price per TB. I've been paying $15/TB for drives for, I think, 3-4 years. I'm beginning to w

by Exmoor 6y ago

I'd appreciate more capacity, but at this point my big complaint is price per TB. I've been paying $15/TB for drives for, I think, 3-4 years. I'm beginning to wonder if we've hit the end of the line for decreasing storage costs.

magicalhippo 6y ago
Speed is also getting to be an issue. Replacing a 14TB disk in a mirror can take almost a day (mine do ~220MB/s average). SATA is maximum of 6Gbps, but even maxing that (750MB/s) for a 100TB drive it would still take 37 hours to mirror a full disk.
- bcrl 6y ago
  HDDs will always have the constraint that they are dealing with media in 2 dimensions. Tape has the benefit that the magnetic media is thin enough that it can be rolled up inside the cartridge to take advantage of the 3rd dimension. Unless there is a significant breakthrough, HDDs in 10 years still won't be able to take advantage of the 3rd dimension. Flash has gone from SLC to MLC to TLC to QLC, and from 1 layer to 144+ layers. I think SSDs will pull even further ahead from HDDs over the next decade thanks to improved manufacturing techniques enabling more and more layers of nanometer scale features.
ksec 6y ago
The problem is for years the platter density increase has been dismal. They were simply getting more platter for HDD capacity increase. I remember seagate talking about HAMR since early 2010s. And it is only now we got it working. It is sort of funny if we look at the tech how ~2014-2020ish seems to be the point where cost reduction in technology stopped or slowed down dramatically. Although I am quite optimistic that we will see $10/TB within this decade.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
It's almost like the market is a cartel with just a few players that don't really compete with each other, and are more likely to collude to increase or maintain prices like the DRAM makers.

4 ms·

I'd appreciate more capacity, but at this point my big complaint is price per TB. I've been paying $15/TB for drives for, I think, 3-4 years. I'm beginning to w

by Exmoor 6y ago

magicalhippo 6y ago
Speed is also getting to be an issue. Replacing a 14TB disk in a mirror can take almost a day (mine do ~220MB/s average). SATA is maximum of 6Gbps, but even maxing that (750MB/s) for a 100TB drive it would still take 37 hours to mirror a full disk.
- bcrl 6y ago
  HDDs will always have the constraint that they are dealing with media in 2 dimensions. Tape has the benefit that the magnetic media is thin enough that it can be rolled up inside the cartridge to take advantage of the 3rd dimension. Unless there is a significant breakthrough, HDDs in 10 years still won't be able to take advantage of the 3rd dimension. Flash has gone from SLC to MLC to TLC to QLC, and from 1 layer to 144+ layers. I think SSDs will pull even further ahead from HDDs over the next decade thanks to improved manufacturing techniques enabling more and more layers of nanometer scale features.
ksec 6y ago
The problem is for years the platter density increase has been dismal. They were simply getting more platter for HDD capacity increase. I remember seagate talking about HAMR since early 2010s. And it is only now we got it working. It is sort of funny if we look at the tech how ~2014-2020ish seems to be the point where cost reduction in technology stopped or slowed down dramatically. Although I am quite optimistic that we will see $10/TB within this decade.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
It's almost like the market is a cartel with just a few players that don't really compete with each other, and are more likely to collude to increase or maintain prices like the DRAM makers.