HDD Sales Crater, Drop 35% Year-over-Year

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sales-of-hdds-drop-35-percent-year-over-year

by ms512 • 3 years ago

81 99 3 years ago

flatiron• 3 years ago

Personally I just find it easier to push everything to the cloud and not deal with RAIDZ and failing disk drives. Maybe I’m just old.

hammyhavoc• 3 years ago

Depends how much data you have. Cloud storage can be incredibly expensive if you work with audio and video.

Cyph0n2• 3 years ago

I have 50 TB useable in my home server. This requires a total of 6 drives (raidz1) for let’s say $300 each.

Upfront storage = $1800

Power consumption (for the entire server) = $20/month

If we bundle storage into the first year’s cost, it comes out to about $2000.

On the other hand, if you use Backblaze B2, storage alone would cost $3000 per year. If you’re downloading content regularly (media), it adds up pretty damn quickly.

ThatMedicIsASpy• 3 years ago

I can get 18TB (Toshiba MG09ACA 512e) for 260€ (tax included) which would put me at usable 90TB. The cheapest drive starting at 10TB is a DC HC520 12TB SAS for 185€

I've considered building a NAS for years but I don't know why I just don't do it. Maybe its just the fear of the storage noise which increases a lot on high capacity drives.

faeriechangling2• 3 years ago

Not your storage, not your data. Ask Justin Roiland.

Never hurts to keep even a USB key of your most essential files and rotate every 5 years. All cloud storage providers have a single point of failure, which is the organisation that runs them acting in obtuse ways. This won't matter the vast majority of the time, but most people have data they care about enough that they shouldn't be trusting just one company to store it. Doesn't need to contain much, maybe family photos, recovery keys, things of that sort.

I also keep a little bit of cash on hand, not much, but history is full of tales of institutions reliably offering essential services until one day they don't, withdrawals are frozen, and people realise that they're screwed.

Also while the cloud is a great value for giving you geo-redundant internet accessible well secured data at a bargain price when you need maybe ~2TB which is more than most people will ever need, once you get up to around ~200TB both the cost and the speed of accessing cloud data gets to be a problem.

lockhouse• 3 years ago

Modern OSes practically require an SSD. The difference in performance is particularly noticeable on Windows. HDDs are great for local backups still.

mirker• 3 years ago

OS needs less than 100GB, though, so mixed drives seems more cost effective.

rbanffy5• 3 years ago

Both Windows and macOS have become impossible to use with HDDs alone. I keep a SFF Windows box with a HDD for testing purposes and I’m constantly shocked by how long simple things like updating software take.

Brian_K_White5• 3 years ago

And everyone's data losing bits on all those ssd's.

hnuser123456• 3 years ago

I had a Crucial SSD with a silicon bug in ~2013 and haven't chosen them for storage since then. Gave them a lot of money for RAM before that though.

TylerE7• 3 years ago

I've had far fewer (read: zero) issue with the dozen or so SSDs I've personally had over the past decade or so. The same is not true for hard drives. Having no moving parts really eliminates a lot of failure modes.

Brian_K_White5• 3 years ago

hdd's can mechanically fail, but so can everything, and so it's a no-op. Sdd's can electrically fail or fail silicon burn-in or have firmware time bomb bugs.

But hdd do not flip random bits to dissipation by merely sitting on the shelf unpowered, which despite your extensive one person decade or so experience does happen.

They also don't lose/flip bits from being read many times but never rewritten, and they don't suffer mechanical or electrical wear from sitting unpowered on the shelf.

sdd's are fine, the problem is only that they are marketed as a replacement for hdd's, and so they are used as replacements for hdd's, instead of as 'medium-term non-volatile ram'

blihp• 3 years ago

While spinning rust was destined to lose the majority of the market to flash, I think the hard disk companies accelerated the move with the SMR fiasco. It got me moving more things to SSDs sooner than I had planned.

rbanffy5• 3 years ago

I have noticed fewer and fewer SMR drives at top capacities lately, but they would be useful for read-dominated workloads provided the ingestion speeds are managed properly (I read somewhere they can be managed at a very low level where you’d be able to write directly to the SMR area for things like replacing a failed RAID unit, where you can write the SMR area at once)

superkuh2• 3 years ago

It's crazy to me how many people will buy a computer with 250 GB of total storage and then end up with a series of rube-goldberg'd in slow/fragile external hard drives just to get close to the performance of a "normal" computer.

SSD only pre-built commercial computer offerings have set back the average computer's ability to do useful work by 15 years. SSD are just too expensive for most people to use for useful amounts of storage (say, family photos+system backups). And even if it's a pre-built desktop the emergence of SSDs has made it somehow acceptable to sell a 1TB HDD in a modern computer. It's scammy.

kitsunesoba• 3 years ago

I wouldn't say things were all that much better before, with low end machines shipping with 5400RPM (or even 4200RPM) laptop drives. Those things were so slow that even if their capacities were far more voluminous than the SSDs that ship in modern low end machines, their usefulness was questionable because e.g. sifting through a massive photo collection was miserable even then and would've only gotten worse as average photo filesizes increased.

Base configs should absolutely come at least double the SSD capacity they currently do, though, in everything but maybe bargain bin Chromebooks.

wtallis13• 3 years ago

WTF are you going on about? Adding external drives has nothing to do with "performance of a 'normal' computer".

Many people genuinely don't need more than 250GB in their computer; many more will never need more than 1TB. If you're having trouble believing that such users exist, you need a serious reality check about how normal people use their computers. Most people who buy a pre-built computer with 1TB or less of storage are not being meaningfully constrained in their ability to do useful work with that computer.

And regardless of how much storage is in your computer, you need storage that's not in the computer to hold backups. Are you basing your expectations for how much storage a computer should come equipped with on the needs for primary storage and backup/archival storage done in defiance of all common sense and recommendations about where and how to store backups?

kcplate2• 3 years ago

In 1990 I thought that I would never ever fill up my brand new 20mb hard drive

superkuh2• 3 years ago

If you can't store the data you can't do the task. It doesn't matter how fast your storage is if you can't fit the required files. That's bad performance. Additionally then they have to load over USB3 external HDD or network storage (which is probably over wifi!) and that's awkward and slow in both the physical and digital sense.

My experience is based mostly off doing IT support for mostly non-technical family and friends. By backups I meant OS features that do system file restorations from checkpoints like common in Windows and Apple. It is also common to have these on the same computer. Even if they're stored externally the computer running time machine must have that much local space free. So many of my tech support visits are helping people who run out out the tiny disk space on their affordable model Apple laptops and are no longer able to make time machine back-ups to their external HDD storage till they free the required space.

People commonly run out of 250 GB storage without even doing data intensive hobbies. I don't think my experience is unique.

moffkalast• 3 years ago

It absolutely amazes me how many people spent good money on a 128 GB NVMe boot drive that speeds up their initial OS loading a tiny bit... which represents probably a fraction of a percent of the total time spent waiting for disk operations in total, and then spend the entire time working from a slow HDD instead. Like congrats for spending all your budget on your garage door instead of your car.

agumonkey• 3 years ago

doesn't surprise me much, boot/resume are part of context switching and it's psychologically very important; you often want the cost of getting in and out as cheap as possible

xigency• 3 years ago

I don’t know about you but when I switched over from HDD to SSD years back I did some crude measurements and found the time it took to boot into a usable environment went from >= 90 seconds to < 25 seconds.

And it’s not just booting the system that was noticeable. Everything became more responsive. It was like night and day.

I have no problem separating my OS drive from my games/photos/backups. It’s actually what I prefer to do. And I like to see that the operating system isn’t so bloated it can’t fit in 100 GB.

sbierwagen• 3 years ago

Your information is out of date. Here is a 2 TB NVMe drive for US$69: https://www.microcenter.com/product/651303/inland-qn322-2tb-...

tbyehl3• 3 years ago

The QN322 is a garbage-tier drive, equivalent to the QLC-refreshed Crucial P2 that "averaged USB 2.0-like speeds of just 40 MBps after the SLC cache was full."[1] Lots of value drives out there for $10-$30 more than won't perform worse than a mechanical hard drive after exhausting SLC.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/features/crucial-p2-ssd-qlc-fla...

rektide2• 3 years ago

Phones being 64 or 128GB and no SD card is same level absurdity. What a shitty act. Given how cheap SD cards are it's just such a misservice.

It's indeed getting harder because some phones are literally now eSIM only. Before, there was near no excuse. My last phone's sim caddy had a SSD caddy on the other side, which just takes up so little extra volume & requires so little extra design/features.

z3t4• 3 years ago

HDDs are cheap and last a long time. Perfect for redundant configurations.

BooneJS• 3 years ago

I have 4 HDDs in NAS and one 12 TB drive for Time Machine. It’s great to have 4 TB in your MacBook, but it’s so expensive and I personally don’t need to actively have more than 1 TB at any one time (and maybe not even half that), meaning the rest can be offloaded to a NAS.

ilamont• 3 years ago

Can anyone give some insights into what trends are driving this beyond a global drop in PC shipments? For instance, longer-lasting hardware, shift to cloud storage, decline in crypto mining (see reqs https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/features/requirements), other factors?

ThrowawayTestr• 3 years ago

0.5-1TB SSDs are cheap now. The only HDDs being bought are really big drives.

TylerE7• 3 years ago

2TB drives are often cheaper (per TB) than 1TB drives these days.

loeg2• 3 years ago

Cost cutting measures by hyperscalers in response to non-zero interest rates.

ms5122• 3 years ago

Essentially this; drive manufacturers' financial reports are a good source of data here.

For example, WD's Q2 financial report [1] shows:

Q1 2023 Cloud Revenue: $1,829M

Q2 2023 Cloud Revenue: $1,224M (down 33%)

Q1 2023 Customer Revenue: $679M

Q2 2023 Customer Revenue: $794M (up 17%)

[1] https://investor.wdc.com/static-files/5c73f7fb-869a-4850-bd2...

wolongong942• 3 years ago

In my case i just buy used HDDs from the local PC repair shop for pennies, and use them for my long term storage and offsite backups. Shops usually swap people's HDDs out for SSDs to speed up their PC, so they have a ton of ~1tb ones to sell for cheap. I doubt people like myself are impacting the market for HDDs though.

MrFoof3• 3 years ago

HDD still has a point, but as SSD prices diminish, we'll continue to see it drop off.

One of the main reasons is density. You can put 32 E1.S EDSFF SSDs in a single rack unit fairly commonly nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me if some 1U chassis did 40.

There's also reliability. They're not infallible, but it's looking like AFRs for SSDs might be half that of HDDs. That's a big deal.

Of course there's also cost. Prosumer SSDs are about $70-75/TB now, and common PCIe 4.0 U.2/U.3 enterprise and datacenter SSDs are in the $90/TB range. PCIe 5.0 enterprise and datacenter SSDs? "Yikes", is what I'll say. Have fun negotiating with your rep on those. ;) Meanwhile, 7200rpm SATA HDDs can be had for $15/TB. These are retail end-user prices. If you're doing huge volumes as a cloud provider or a huge SAAS business, pricing goes quite a bit lower.

-- -----

Where do HDDs still make sense? Sustained transfer operations, nearline storage, and as part of a storage tier where you can intelligently hide the HDDs behind SSDs (lots of solutions for this) and get SSD performance most of the time, and guarantee it where it matters. There's many use cases where they just dominate because of their low cost, and the ability to get the performance required for a lot cheaper.

Though compared to high-end enterprise SSDs, 7200rpm SATA HDDs are actually still fine for power, typically pulling 6-7W per HDD instead of 11-15W for fairly common enterprise SSDs. Some enterprise SSDs (mostly PCIe 5, mostly E3-based form factors) can pull 25W, if not 40W. Remember, enterprise SSDs don't do things like SLC cache much -- they just have a MOUNTAIN of NAND (plus PLP capacitors) you can read/write from in massive parallelization. There's no ingest drop-off as a result, but you do have to power all that NAND.

Eisenstein3• 3 years ago

Where do HDDs still make sense?

You forgot 'cold storage'. The data on SSDs will degrade if they are not powered on.

MrFoof3• 3 years ago

Yep, though it depends on the use case. If you want truly cold storage that's super rarely accessed, LTO tape is really hard to beat on $/TB!

KronisLV• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity, I had a look at the current SSD and HDD prices available in a local e-commerce site:

  Capacity  HDD      SSD
  500 GB    47 EUR   36 EUR
  1 TB      41 EUR   49 EUR
  2 TB      54 EUR   89 EUR
  4 TB      77 EUR   264 EUR
  8 TB      161 EUR  531 EUR
  16 TB     313 EUR  none

So it seems like HDDs are still more cost effective for storing larger amounts of data, as long as your workloads permit that, but for smaller capacities SSDs now reign supreme, cost wise. There's also the fact that most of these HDDs that I looked at were 3.5" but SSDs were either 2.5" or of the M.2 variety, which may or may not matter, depending on what you want to put them in.

I still think that an SSD for your boot drive is a no-brainer, but for other data storage HDDs still make sense. If the trend of affordable SSDs keeps up, that view might change in the future.

ms5122• 3 years ago

A decent aggregator for current HDD/SSD prices is https://diskprices.com/

It essentially backs up the parent poster's data, just lets us navigate across a larger set of data.

rasz• 3 years ago

You have to take this site with a grain of salt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33381053 Its been 5 months and they still list clearly fraudulent listings.

wtallis13• 3 years ago

It's also interesting to look at the trend over time for what capacity the price crossover point is at. Right now, it's around 1TB, but it's been moving steadily upward ever since small SSDs first started to reach "cheap" prices. Hard drive spindle motors, actuators, and clean-room assembly aren't getting cheaper, but every time flash gets denser the capacity of a cheap SSD consisting of a controller and two or four NAND dies gets bigger.

When you analyze that trend in light of how many consumer use cases show little or no growth in capacity requirements over time (due to factors like cloud storage and video streaming), it's hard to see any long-term future for hard drives in consumer PCs.

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

For the average consumer, 1TB is more than enough storage. All of my photos, videos, and important documents added up comes out to 50GB. Everything else is just programs and games which can easily be deleted and redownloaded.

grogenaut• 3 years ago

So I got a good deal at $121 for my 8tb wd iron wolf reds then

Eisenstein3• 3 years ago

Don't forget that most all HDDs at or under 4TB not explicitly 'Pro' or 'Plus' branded are SMR, which means they have to re-write over the old tracks when the data gets dense or sustained, so they completely suck for even the typical HDD use-cases.

ncann• 3 years ago

That's true, but for SSD you have to deal with TLC and QLC. Pick your poison I guess.

_hypx• 3 years ago

The problem with HDDs is that they're not keeping up with Moore's Law. I remember buying an 8TB HDD years ago at nearly the same price as current 8TB HDDs. If there were 32TB and 64TB available now, the argument over HDDs and SSDs would be very different.

redder23• 3 years ago

Should that not be reflect in the price? Maybe I should w8 a while, I kind of plan of buying a HDD but not sure what size.

loeg2• 3 years ago

It is very much reflected in prices.

nubinetwork• 3 years ago

So I just bought a 256gb nvme drive for a build, but I've been waiting for large capacity ssds for years...

It seems the ssd market isn't interested in making large drives unless they are dram-less (anything cheap) or have very limited write cycles (eg samsung qvo).

wtallis13• 3 years ago

It's more accurate to say that the SSD vendors aren't interested in trying to market consumer drives that cost upwards of $1500, because there really isn't a market for such drives. Plenty of enthusiasts will say they would like an 8+ TB high-end drive, but few people are willing to spend more on their SSD than on their GPU.

fmajid• 3 years ago

My main data drive is a £1300 Sabrent 8TB Thunderbolt drive. Previously I used an OWC enclosure with 2x4TB drives.

imtringued2• 3 years ago

What's wrong with a Samsung 980 Pro (with 1 TB or more)?

mastax• 3 years ago

The 14TB HGST Ultrastar DC HC530 drives I bought in server builds eighteen months ago (delivered one year ago) have gone down from $330 to $200 in that time period. Pretty amazing. 16-20TB drives are starting to lose their premium as well[0].

SSDs may have dropped even further. I had to unsubscribe from /r/buildapcsales[1] because I couldn't stop buying the SSD deals that popped up. I wanted to avoid juggling multiple storage drives in this machine, but now all my M.2 slots are full. Stuck one in a cheap USB enclosure to make a damn good flash drive.

QLC drives are starting to approach HDD prices. Here's an extreme example. Two months ago $100 was a good deal for a 2TB QLC drive[2]. Now you can get them (in limited circumstances) for $45[3].

[0] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#f=2&s...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/111b8n8/ssd_...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/12fv841/ssd_...

kevviiinn• 3 years ago

If you're willing to get used you can get 14tb for 115 on eBay or 16tb for 160, one hell of a steal for a homelab IMO and it complements having some ssds for fast storage as well for some services

1letterunixname• 3 years ago

WUH721414ALE6L4 $330.00 USD 04/10/2020

sdenton4• 3 years ago

Curiously, I just bought an hdd for the first time in years, after noticing I could get 22TB of storage for $300.

My use case is penalty a bit particular, though... It's really just for localized copies of large datasets that exist elsewhere. So it's totally ok if the drive dies, since the data lives somewhere else. I doubt most people have a real need for that much localized data these days.

rektide2• 3 years ago

I hope the HDD market can survive. I really really appreciate being able to buy a 20TB Exos for $400. SSDs are so absurdly great, but I really like being able to have a nice data-archive. When Covid hit and the whole PC parts market dried up, and the Chia chain thing was happening, there were days where I was thinking I'll never be able to have affordable bulk storage again.

GalenErso• 3 years ago

SDDs can be destroyed by EMP events, whereas HDDs are safe. So I could see HDDs become prized by preppers and governments for critical purposes.

skissane• 3 years ago

SDDs can be destroyed by EMP events, whereas HDDs are safe.

Really? Maybe the data on the disk platters will be fine, but an EMP which wipes SSDs could just as easily fry the HDD electronics and firmware flash memory. Your data may well be intact, but you are never seeing it again without some highly specialised data recovery equipment - and will that equipment survive the EMP apocalypse?

wtallis13• 3 years ago

That is not at all believable: both the worry about EMPs and the claim that HDDs would be meaningfully more resilient than SSDs.

wolpoli• 3 years ago

HDD is losing economy of scale. I wonder when will HDD become completely uncompetitive at any size in terms of $/TD.

faeriechangling2• 3 years ago

We have HAMR coming out which will improve density & cost competitiveness a lot, and there's recent technologies like dRAID which makes the low speed less of an issue, but to me hard drives getting squeezed to death between tape and flash seems like an inevitability.

I'd be surprised to see hard drive sales become obsolete in the next decade, but I wouldn't be shocked to see the technology collapse in two. The market for them in terms of units sold peaked in 2010. Personally I'm just excited about all the cheap drives enterprises are going to offload onto the used market.

ls612• 3 years ago

I replaced all of my hard drives with 2 large SSDs and haven’t looked back. Sure it cost a bit more but spinning rust just sucks and the cost difference is far smaller now.

IYasha• 3 years ago

Someone please save HDDs! They're awesome!

Coincidentally, only few hours ago my SSD was saved by HDD! I booted up my PC and went away for a few minutes. Returned only to be welcomed by busy HDD noises. I quickly turned by WTF into resource monitor - and (not)surprise! - PID 4 was munching D:\System Volume Information. That's really annoying, but what really terrified me - the same was happening to SSD C:! I have explicitly turned off defrag, updates and other stuff for it, but still. And I would never spot it because SSDS DON'T MAKE NOISE!!

HDD Sales Crater, Drop 35% Year-over-Year

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