Seagate: Hard Disk Drives Set To Stay Relevant For 20 Years

Megalith

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Do you think Seagate’s claim is out of desperation, or that hard disks will still be the most cost-effective solution in two decades?

Technologies like TDMR, HAMR or BPMR will be commercialized by manufacturers like Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. However, there are many companies and universities, who explore technologies for future hard disk drives. For example, reliability of HAMR-based HDDs is something addressed by the whole industry, not just by Seagate or Western Digital. Such collaborative approach and with continuing investments into fundamental magnetic recording research increases the likelihood of many technological breakthroughs going forward. The latter may guarantee that HDDs will remain relevant for a long time — for at least 15 to 20 years, according to Seagate.
 
I think for mass storage hard drives will still be used , but for OS drives or anything that benefits from the speed of an SSD, it wont be the users first choice.

of course if the price of large SSD drives drops significantly, all bets are off
 
I've still got hard drives from 2000 in daily uses with no problems. I've already had to trash the first SSDs I bought around 5 years ago. I think hard drives will stay be the best choice for anything that doesn't need the speed of an SSD, for a long time.
 
I've still got hard drives from 2000 in daily uses with no problems. I've already had to trash the first SSDs I bought around 5 years ago. I think hard drives will stay be the best choice for anything that doesn't need the speed of an SSD, for a long time.

With a small sample your experience may not be anywhere near what others experience. On average hard drives are less reliable and have shorter lifespans than SSDs.
 
I'm using hdd:s for archiving and ssd:s for anything daily. Works best.
 
I've still got hard drives from 2000 in daily uses with no problems. I've already had to trash the first SSDs I bought around 5 years ago. I think hard drives will stay be the best choice for anything that doesn't need the speed of an SSD, for a long time.

exact opposite experience for me
i have an old ocz vertex 1 and two vertex 2 ssd's and an 840 evo that are still going strong with no issues
i have had 2 seagate barracuda 2tb hard drives and a wd 2tb green die in the time i have had them

like someone else said, a small sample size means nothing in both my case and yours also
 
I have yet to see an SSD fail, and I've bought quite a few from all major brands, and I've been buying them for about five years now. Pretty much every mechanical hard drive I've encountered fails at some point. Many are bad out of the box. If they last more than a couple of years, I consider myself lucky. I've even seen enterprise grade Hitachis fail. No storage medium is completely reliable, but I wouldn't consider mechanical hard drives reliable at all. RAID and a backup are a must for critical data.
 
exact opposite experience for me
i have an old ocz vertex 1 and two vertex 2 ssd's and an 840 evo that are still going strong with no issues
i have had 2 seagate barracuda 2tb hard drives and a wd 2tb green die in the time i have had them

like someone else said, a small sample size means nothing in both my case and yours also

I bought 8 SSD's total. 3 out of 8 died on me within 3 years of purchase. In the same period, I had 4 out of 18 HD's crashed. 2 of them were external HD's.
 
I have RMAd 75+ hard drives over the last 10 years out of about 200 that spin 24 / 7. For SSDs I have not had a single RMA over the 5 years we have had SSDs but that is only 10 to 20.
 
What brands were the SSDs? OCZ drives had a lot of problems, but people kept buying them because they were cheap. I usually stick to Intel and Samsung.
 
I have RMAd 75+ hard drives over the last 10 years out of about 200 that spin 24 / 7. For SSDs I have not had a single RMA over the 5 years we have had SSDs but that is only 10 to 20.

With this said even the 200 that I have is such a small sample. Statistically it is pretty meaningless to describe the population of all drives in use.
 
Samsung already is releasing 16TB SSDs in 2016. In two years ssd capacity will outstrip HDD capacity, and the following two years after that ssds will be cheaper per capacity than HDDs.
 
50TB hard drives are also on the horizon. With that said I do not expect either of these to be consumer priced.
 
I would expect to see continued evolution of hybrid hard drives. Instead of a relatively tiny SSD cache, you could have a cache that is 1/4th or even more of the entire capacity of the drive, dramatically decreasing the number of items that ever get bumped out of cache. Most people only ever access a tiny fraction of the info, even on their SSDs, on a regular basis. Most info stays untouched for weeks if not months/years, so I really feel that this concept still has lots of potential.

I'm also really hoping that HDD capacities begin to significantly increase in the near future. Seems that we've been stuck at the 4-6TB capacity range for affordable drives forever.
 
I'm also really hoping that HDD capacities begin to significantly increase in the near future. Seems that we've been stuck at the 4-6TB capacity range for affordable drives forever.

PMR is pretty much at its limit but HAMR should solve the issue.
 
Formass data storage, yeah I'd wager they will be relevant. For the everyday user in the PC or laptop, nope. We are approaching a point where 500 GB ssds are cheap. Hell i picked up a 240 gb ssd for $62 a month ago (crucial ssd+). For the average user500 gb is plenty of space. The extra speed of an sad will be much more beneficial than gobs of space they won't use.

The real question is how many hard drives are sold in consumer computing devices vs. Upgrades or external? I'd guess this is Seagate cheering on their own products.
 
Seagate execs remind me of Blackberry execs. Nice to know denial is alive and well in America,and not just in the government sector.
 
I'd be happy if my Seagate HD's would last 2 years :(
I have about 20 HD's in use - I have had 5 drives fail on me in the last 2 years. All were Seagates. I switched to Western Digital Reds to replace them. I think my experience has been matching BackBlazes results they published. (I should also states that my Seagates were the consumer variety, so I got what I paid for.)

Back to the article, I think we will still have mechanical drives - they still have far greater storage/much cheaper cost than SSDs.
 
To be honest, how do you lot make SSDs work? Seriously, a single SSD is only good for storing the OS and applications, and nothing more. Unless you buy a 512GB SSD, which are $150 right now. Even then, you'd only be able to install a handful of AAA games on that drive before filling it up.

You need a hard drive in order to store your movies, games, or whatever cause right now a SSD is just too expensive. Especially when you consider that a 2TB drive is like $70. So anyone who owns a SSD must have a 2TB, or likes deleting applications often. I don't know about 20 years, but at another 10 years we'll still be using hard drives.
 
To be honest, how do you lot make SSDs work? Seriously, a single SSD is only good for storing the OS and applications, and nothing more. Unless you buy a 512GB SSD, which are $150 right now. Even then, you'd only be able to install a handful of AAA games on that drive before filling it up.

You need a hard drive in order to store your movies, games, or whatever cause right now a SSD is just too expensive. Especially when you consider that a 2TB drive is like $70. So anyone who owns a SSD must have a 2TB, or likes deleting applications often. I don't know about 20 years, but at another 10 years we'll still be using hard drives.

I too was waiting for 1TB to become $150 or less, but realized it wasn't coming for another year or more. Got a 500GB to go with my 240GB. I am running low on space, but could uninstall a few games... but I'll still be low on space when I get updates to my current games.
 
With a small sample your experience may not be anywhere near what others experience. On average hard drives are less reliable and have shorter lifespans than SSDs.
I have never had a hard drive complelely fail on me. Even if it did, the data is always still recoverable.

On the other hand, I have had around 1/3 of SSDs fail (7-8 drives) and many flash based USB drives. Once the controller fails, the data is gone. There is no recovery.

Modern drives have been less of an issue, but reliability of TLC is worse than alternatives.

While I think Seagate was extremely late to the party, I don't see magneto optical drives disappearing overnight until that issue is addressed. SLC drives need to regain importance for long term storage options.
 
Spinners have physical limitations on capacity. We can only pack so many physical 1s and 0s on a surface and we can only stack so many platters on top of each other before we run out of space in the 3.25" standard. It's why we have hit a bit of a wall at the 6-8TB mark. They're even filling those high capacity drives with special gases like nitrogen to improve performance/lifespan. While SSDs have physical limitations as well, we can shrink transistors down a lot better than we can magnetically read pits...we've gone from low density 50GB capacities in 2.5" form factor to 512GB capacities in the new M.2 standard in the span of a decade. Not to mention that, even in their relative infancy, they're insanely more responsive than mechanical drives and very robust.


As far as anecdotal evidence goes, I've gone through a couple HDDs over the last 3-4 years while my original OCZ Agility 60GB drive is still running strong. I've actually moved it into my PS3 recently...my original PS3 had a 40GB HDD...so it was an upgrade still. I've got an OCZ Agility, Vertex, Vertex 2, Vertex 4, Samsung 840, and Samsung 850 in various systems
 
To be honest, how do you lot make SSDs work? Seriously, a single SSD is only good for storing the OS and applications, and nothing more. Unless you buy a 512GB SSD, which are $150 right now. Even then, you'd only be able to install a handful of AAA games on that drive before filling it up.

You need a hard drive in order to store your movies, games, or whatever cause right now a SSD is just too expensive. Especially when you consider that a 2TB drive is like $70. So anyone who owns a SSD must have a 2TB, or likes deleting applications often. I don't know about 20 years, but at another 10 years we'll still be using hard drives.

I went with 3 SSD drives and then storage goes on a Freenas server. My first WD Red died in that 5x3TB config within a year. Wish I went more out there and had doubled that storage from the beginning. Crashplan & Freenas are my photos and videos best friends.

Is there a reason the 3.5" drives can't go to a physically larger standard in the consumer area? Small SSD's for a laptop are good, but I don't care how big a drive is on a desktop.
 
They are looking at the enterprise market almost exclusively I don’t expect to see much more then 1 or 2 high performance magnetic drives on the shelf in another year. you can have a Big 7200 with lots of cache or a huge 7200 with lots of cache. nas drives, low power and usb drives are all that will be on shelfs soon. In the enterprise that’s another story as long as magnetic is cheaper per TB or Per slot hard drives will have a home. In the data center storage per slot is more important than speed most of the time you have fast often equipment and slow sometimes storage due to limitations in the bus and addressing you can only attach so many drives as long as 24 HHD > 24 ssd in storage there is room. The HDD makers have already given up on the high speed SAS market small size 10k's are getting hard to come by 1.2s will be gone in another year or 2 15k is weak due to price per gig, heat and size they won’t make it 4 years ssd are already better.

SSD have growth limits as well we are getting close to the end of silicon you can only get so small and even with improvements every time they stack more reliability goes down. they have already gone to the age old hard drive system of increasing space and speed RAID\striping the memory is not getting that much faster or denser.
 
SSD have growth limits as well we are getting close to the end of silicon you can only get so small and even with improvements every time they stack more reliability goes down. they have already gone to the age old hard drive system of increasing space and speed RAID\striping the memory is not getting that much faster or denser.

They can still move from 2.5" to 3.5" form factor to get more/bigger chips on a PCB to increase density...at least for the desktop/non-2.5" server sectors. At the 3.5" standard I bet there's enough height in the standard to stack two PCBs in a single enclosure.
 
With a small sample your experience may not be anywhere near what others experience. On average hard drives are less reliable and have shorter lifespans than SSDs.

Depends on how much you write to them.

Desktops/laptops maybe, but not servers.

Many of my servers at the office would wear out a pro consumer level SSD's in months, and even a very expensive server level SSD would wouldn't last half as long as many of my existing mechanical drives have already been in use.

Until the prices drops a lot more, or the write levels improve significantly, I don't see replacing most my server drives. Especially since I've been buying 4+ TB drives lately, and a pair of 4TB SSD server level drives would cost more than many of my servers.
 
Shame really, Seagate used to be all I'd use, have some from the 1980s and 1990s that are still working.....I haven't bought a new Seagate in years though, and don't see myself doing it anytime soon.
 
To be honest, how do you lot make SSDs work? Seriously, a single SSD is only good for storing the OS and applications, and nothing more. Unless you buy a 512GB SSD, which are $150 right now. Even then, you'd only be able to install a handful of AAA games on that drive before filling it up.

You need a hard drive in order to store your movies, games, or whatever cause right now a SSD is just too expensive. Especially when you consider that a 2TB drive is like $70. So anyone who owns a SSD must have a 2TB, or likes deleting applications often. I don't know about 20 years, but at another 10 years we'll still be using hard drives.

We make SSDs work by not hoarding data all in one place. I only have a 500MB HDD in my desktop. Everything else gets dumped onto the NAS when I'm done with it. So I could easily subsist on "only 512GB" for a single SSD in my system.
 
I see them becoming more relevant in the future for data centers. A lot less relevant for the end user. The end user only needs a small SSD. And real storage is going to move to the cloud. More and more people are going to move their data into the cloud and the local SSD is going to be for offline cached stuff and OS (which most will be hosted within the cloud, as well).

Ok, that was a shitty troll attempt. I see standard HDD's being less relevant in the future. SSD's are increasing in size and for the average user (non-[H] user), a 1TB is more than enough. I know this gets said a lot and we always go over. But, if a typical user is using 10% of that on average even with downloading stuff, in 20 years we could have 10TB drives as normal, and 1TB being the average use. Of course, I don't see file sizes increasing that much lately. It's for storing MORE data, not better data (movies, music, PDF's, pictures) as we did in the past.
 
absolutely not. We are almost to the point of not needing spinning disks now. I can definitely see 3-5 years, maybe a few more straggling, but wth SSDs capacity reaching far beyond spinning disks, albeit stupid expensive, only a matter of time until its as cheap/cheaper. See Samsungs 16TB ssds. Stupid expensive now, but spinning disks are nowhere near that. Writing on the wall.
 
Think about this....we have thumbdrives...first off, the closest we could get to flash drives prior to nonvolatile RAM was Iomega Drives or floppy discs. Back to my point, we have thumbdrives that pack a high speed USB controller and 128GB of storage into something smaller than a cigarette lighter and costs less than a tank of gas. This is only 15 years after the first thumbdrives became commercially available storing 8MB of data. The floppy drive came out in the mid-70s in 5.25 form factor and held about 100KB worth of data. In the 25 years that the format was around, the best they managed to do with it was shrink it down to the 3.25" standard and increase capacity to 1.44MB. You could argue for ZIP drives since they were the same technology but it was never as hugely successful as the floppy standard. Regardless, NVRAM has been a huge success and still has plenty of room to grow and improve.

Mechanical drives are well past their twilight years and need to be put to pasture...and shot with high powered rifles :D .
 
With a small sample your experience may not be anywhere near what others experience. On average hard drives are less reliable and have shorter lifespans than SSDs.

Depends how much data you are writing to them. Hard drive lifetime seems to be more predictable than SSD's in my experience.
 
I still see a need for HDDs for a while. Maybe not 20 years, but I run both for many different tasks.
 
I don't think the cost advantage that HDD have will last that long. We are at the point where they have to take new approach such as helium-sealed drive to further increase HDD's capacity. And then there's also talk about stuff like heat assisted recording to further improve on capacity. These stuff adds to the cost of HDD.

For SSD, its just a matter of waiting for the semiconductor cost to get cheap enough for 16TB to be viable. There are no physical barrier to deal with, Samsung already build them, it's just a matter of cost now.
 
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