Demand for HDDs decreasing more than previously estimated...

M76

M76

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It shouldn't be a surprise that with the reduction of price of SSDs the demand for old-school spinner drives is decreasing. But the pace it is decreasing at surprised even Nidec (largest manufacturer of industrial precision motors) who just revised their market predictions to mirror a steeper decline than previously anticipated.

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According to the data the largest decrease in demand for HDDs is expected in the PC market where they expect a drop of almost 50% from 2018 to 2019 and a further 25% drop into 2020.
 
With how cheap NVME and standard SSDs are, I'm not surprised. Especially with the number of laptops shipping with SSDs standard nowadays.

Looking forward to some cheap 8tb drives to throw into my system though.
 
Tsumi said:
With how cheap NVME and standard SSDs are, I'm not surprised. Especially with the number of laptops shipping with SSDs standard nowadays.

Looking forward to some cheap 8tb drives to throw into my system though.
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Although SSDs have come down in price, I haven't seen a huge shift in HDD prices. With less demand won't we see potentially higher HDD prices?

I personally just have 2 SSD's in my system and it's realistically plenty. 250 + 500 gb drives, and a 2x3TB NAS for general storage.
 
Two things that surprise me:

1.) That hard drives with all their complex microscopic moving parts can actually be cheaper than an SSD.

2.) That people still use them in client machines (I stopped in 2010)

I am not - however - surprised by this decline. Hard rives have for a long time been destined to be storage server only parts.

Heck, some nearline servers are even starting to do all solid state.

Hard drives aren't going anywhere in a hurry. They will still be around for mass storage for a very long time, but I am actually surprised anyone still makes consumer drives.
 
ReaperX22 said:
Although SSDs have come down in price, I haven't seen a huge shift in HDD prices. With less demand won't we see potentially higher HDD prices?

I personally just have 2 SSD's in my system and it's realistically plenty. 250 + 500 gb drives, and a 2x3TB NAS for general storage.
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Yes I've been hearing over 10 years that SSD prices falling will "surely" make HDD prices fall.

And that when larger size drive comes out that it should automatically drop price of smaller sized drives.

And that external drives shouldn't be cheaper than the internal SKU sans enclosure, and this paradox is unacceptable and must be some type of scam the manufacturers are pulling.

Many people don't understand the storage market at all, and yet trying to explain it time and again ends up feeling like fighting a fire in a trailer park - why bother. Yes, I'm an asshole.
 
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odditory said:
Yes I've been hearing over 10 years that SSD prices falling will "totally" make HDD prices fall. Usually the same people that believe when a larger drive size comes out that it will automatically cause downward pressure on price of smaller sized drives. Often also the same people that can't understand why external drives are cheaper than the internal SKU sans enclosure.

Many people don't understand the storage market at all, yet trying to explain it time and again is like fighting a fire in a trailer park - why bother.
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It is not exclusive to the storage market at all. And understanding it doesn't necessitate that one has to like it too.
 
That's units sold. Where's the profits graph? I suppose they are selling a lot of higher margin products to data centers.
 
I’ve bought like... 2 hdds in the last 8 years or so. I also keep finding a few working 1tb drives in the trash every other week or so. Don’t even bother grabbing them for their sweet magnets anymore.
 
ReaperX22 said:
Although SSDs have come down in price, I haven't seen a huge shift in HDD prices. With less demand won't we see potentially higher HDD prices?

I personally just have 2 SSD's in my system and it's realistically plenty. 250 + 500 gb drives, and a 2x3TB NAS for general storage.
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If manufacturers lower production so that there isn't a large surplus of inventory, then ya, prices could possibly go up.
 
Spinning drives should be given an even quicker death... Those pieces of crap had been holding back desktop performance for years... Forever really. ( That and how bloated windows is)
Servers and and things like that... Yeah they SADLY still have a place.
 
I don't see me getting rid of a HDD any time soon myself. While my OS is nvme and game storage is SSD I still keep a couple of spinners for Mass storage where speed doesn't matter.
 
spinners have one significant advantage over SSD and that is capacity for the price...
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
2.) That people still use them in client machines (I stopped in 2010)
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This bugs me to no end.........When will it stop!?

User calls: My computer is slow......
Me: looks at specs of PC, oh it has a spinning drive that's why its slow.
User: But I just bought it yesterday.....
Me: Well yeah, you bought a computer with a slow hard drive so I would expect it to run slow since everything is stored on that slow hard drive. Should've got an SSD like everyone else.
 
Rockenrooster said:
This bugs me to no end.........When will it stop!?

User calls: My computer is slow......
Me: looks at specs of PC, oh it has a spinning drive that's why its slow.
User: But I just bought it yesterday.....
Me: Well yeah, you bought a computer with a slow hard drive so I would expect it to run slow since everything is stored on that slow hard drive. Should've got an SSD like everyone else.
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That the problem. People buy the cheapest possible computer and then bitch why it is so slow. Hell even newer iMacs come with a 5400rpm 1TB drive as standard. Upgrading to a 256gb SSD cost $200.
 
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YeuEmMaiMai said:
spinners have one significant advantage over SSD and that is capacity for the price...
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Price per GB between HDD and SSD are about the same today. That advantage HDD had was actually lost a couple years ago.
 
Price per GB between HDD and SSD are about the same today.
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Not yet.

I am still waiting for my 4TB SSD that costs less than $100 US.. When that happens I would replace at least 20 TB of storage at home. And 5 to 10 times that at work.
 
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I am not aware of one being able to get a 8TB SSD for roughly 180

Toshiba MD05ACA800 is $175 on Amazon. The price per GB on the Inland 1TB is 8.50GB per $1 where as the Toshiba gives you 46GB per $1
 
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Other than replacing media drives where size is still more important speed, and basic SATA III speeds are enough, I've got no intention of ever getting another. A lot of the games I play are 30-80GB in size and for some the load times are getting reminiscent of things back in the 90's even on SSD's. I admit though, if I could pick up 4x 6TB for ~$200 total I'd be tempted to RAID them but that's what it would take to get me to go back for gaming purposes.
 
I don't think hdd prices are going to change much. There is already a lot of competition between hdd manufacturers keeping prices as low as they can. As SSDs become cheaper and bigger HDDs will just die off because they can't make a profit on them. That's assuming ssds continue getting cheaper and bigger faster than hdds, maybe they won't.
 
I noticed 4tb drives used to be 100+ now on ebay for 70-80... thinking of getting a bunch of them.
 
Armenius said:
Price per GB between HDD and SSD are about the same today. That advantage HDD had was actually lost a couple years ago.
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Huh? Not even close. There is at least a 4x difference still.
 
Armenius said:
Price per GB between HDD and SSD are about the same today. That advantage HDD had was actually lost a couple years ago.
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Unless you are shopping in the >1TB size range in which case SSD's are still tremendously more expensive than HD's
 
Rockenrooster said:
This bugs me to no end.........When will it stop!?

User calls: My computer is slow......
Me: looks at specs of PC, oh it has a spinning drive that's why its slow.
User: But I just bought it yesterday.....
Me: Well yeah, you bought a computer with a slow hard drive so I would expect it to run slow since everything is stored on that slow hard drive. Should've got an SSD like everyone else.
Click to expand...

It has to do with low knowledge buyers treating laptops like consumer devices and the expectation that any "new" computer will be good.

I'm not saying people are stupid, but most people don't care about these things like we do, so they are not going to be well read on the subject matter, and are not going to possess enough of the terminology to be able to read up on it quickly. Instead they are (incorrectly) assuming that "I have heard of brand X, they wouldn't sell me something shitty and slow brand new in 2019".

The sad part is that my sister asked me my advice on a new computer last year. I agave her all my input, recommending that she get at least 8GB of RAM and a system with an SSD. She ordered it and I hear nothing until I was visiting several months later, and it was mentioned that the laptop was very slow, so I offered to take a look at it. What did I find? 4GB RAM and a spinning hard drive :/

Even when they have advice they assume that those of us who do this all the time are wrong. It can't possibly be such a big deal. I mean, "Dell wouldn't put a slow drive in my new computer in 2018, right?"
 
I still use a few HDDs for storage. Those 1tb SSDs at $90 recently have been tempting.

Send all your spinners to me. I will hang the shiny disks in my fruit trees to scare away vermin. And the magnets to hang tools in the garage.
 
At work we still buy new machines with spinners (1 or 2 TB). The prices that Dell (only approved vendor) charge us to upgrade to a SSD are ridiculous.
 
Regarding the cheap OEM machines, 1TB of "storage" looks way better on the marketing display then 256GB does (roughly comparable-ish by OEM price). Bigger number is always better right?

Every time I see one of these machines, the user has almost 850+GB free too.
 
Wonder if anyone thought that with more and more storage people aren't needing to buy as many "new" drives as trying to fill up their current drive is nearly impossible.
 
Skillz said:
Wonder if anyone thought that with more and more storage people aren't needing to buy as many "new" drives as trying to fill up their current drive is nearly impossible.
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I have 12x 10TB Seagates Enterprise drives in my home NAS server. At this rate I'll be filling them sooner than I'd liked and be looking or upgrades...
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I have 12x 10TB Seagates Enterprise drives in my home NAS server. At this rate I'll be filling them sooner than I'd liked and be looking or upgrades...
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Yeah, always that one person.

You and I are the exception. ;)
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Two things that surprise me:

1.) That hard drives with all their complex microscopic moving parts can actually be cheaper than an SSD.

2.) That people still use them in client machines (I stopped in 2010)

I am not - however - surprised by this decline. Hard rives have for a long time been destined to be storage server only parts.

Heck, some nearline servers are even starting to do all solid state.

Hard drives aren't going anywhere in a hurry. They will still be around for mass storage for a very long time, but I am actually surprised anyone still makes consumer drives.
Click to expand...

It’s because they keep “improving” ssd’s in ways that really only benefit the manufacturers to save money, and they are passing the R&D costs down to the consumer.
 
Rockenrooster said:
If you can't swap them out with a samsung SSD they should be burned at the stake.
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This is generally straight forward on enterprise laptops.

On consumer models however. Goddamned 18 tiny screws, flip it over, pull out the keyboard, and detach flat cables, undo more screws under keyboard, etc. etc., and hope you don't bend or break anything in the process...

I don't know how much dell chooses to include SSD's, but on the consumer side, I'd say its worth it. They have made it so goddamned annoying and difficult to do anything on modern consumer laptops, that I'd personally rather just pay....
 
My P72 came with a 250GB NVMe from the factory ($100 option) over the 500GB spinner. I ordered the mounting bracket to add a 480GB 2.5" SSD I had laying around into the available bay. 3x my space for the cost of the bracket. AND I have a whole 'nother NVMe slot accessible when those get full and prices come down.

Good to have a dedicated steam drive.

Yes, Steam on my work P72. It has a Quadro P3200. :)

Point is, I never even considered getting a high volume spinner for this. I won't put them in anything nowadays. Small host for some VMs at a branch office? A pair of SAMSUNG 500GB 860's in RAID1. Production in the data-center? Pure all-flash SAN. New laptop and desktop orders for our users? The smallest/cheapest SSD available.
 
Still tons of consumer PCs shipping with 1TB hard drives. It makes no sense.
 
Hard drives seem to be relegated to the surveillance and slow bulk storage markets. Pretty much anything enterprise has moved to all solid sate now even on SANs. I haven't seen a spinner in a general use server in a while now... Even at home, my VM server is all NVMe on PCIe adapters with a SATA SSD boot drive, with the prices it would be stupid not to, they're so much faster. My backups and media server with a large NAS array are the only spinners I have left.
 
dgz said:
That's units sold. Where's the profits graph? I suppose they are selling a lot of higher margin products to data centers.
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The graph is from the company who makes most HDD motors, they don't have industry wide profit numbers to share. However profit is probably holding up fairly well, the small cheap laptop drives that have made up most of the PC market over the last decade or so have had very thin margins. Their going away fast doesn't have much impact outside of the manufacturing companies having excess factory floor space which has lead to WD and Seagate slowly consolidating their number of locations over the last few years. OTOH that's mostly been done by closing smaller locations; and most of what's left either has R&D teams that aren't easy to move; or are either the only or one of two large factories doing a specific component/step of the process. That leaves them without much remaining room to close entire sites, although if they've got multiple buildings at a given site (not broken out in any report I've seen) they could still cut facilities costs by mothballing/selling extra buildings.
 
DanNeely said:
The graph is from the company who makes most HDD motors, they don't have industry wide profit numbers to share. However profit is probably holding up fairly well, the small cheap laptop drives that have made up most of the PC market over the last decade or so have had very thin margins. Their going away fast doesn't have much impact outside of the manufacturing companies having excess factory floor space which has lead to WD and Seagate slowly consolidating their number of locations over the last few years. OTOH that's mostly been done by closing smaller locations; and most of what's left either has R&D teams that aren't easy to move; or are either the only or one of two large factories doing a specific component/step of the process. That leaves them without much remaining room to close entire sites, although if they've got multiple buildings at a given site (not broken out in any report I've seen) they could still cut facilities costs by mothballing/selling extra buildings.
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I suppose it is.
 
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