back to article Disk drive shipment numbers set to spin down

Disk drive shipments have a negative CAGR, and will fall by 3.7 per cent between 2013 and 2020, said spindle motor maker Nidec. Within that, traditional enterprise drive shipments will decrease by 17.6 per cent, PC drives will drop 8.1 per cent, consumer electronics drives by 6.9 per cent and external drives by 0.4 per cent, …

  1. Tromos
    Holmes

    disk motor shipments have a high correlation with overall disk drive shipments

    See icon

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Another reason for their decline are the outrageous prices charged by the HDD cartel. Very little choice of manufacturers now and thus little competition.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Outrageous prices ? Really ?

      Let me see :

      1996 : 2.1GB for €285.70, €136/GB

      1997 : 4.3GB for €468.52, €108.96/GB

      1998 : 2GB for €190.63, €95/GB

      1999 : 13GB for €248.65, €19/GB

      2001 : 30GB for €396.38, €13.2/GB

      2001 : 40GB for €272.43, €6.8/GB

      2002 : 80GB for €400, €5/GB

      2002 : 120GB for €254, €2.11/GB

      2003 : 80GB for €145, €1.8/GB

      2004 : 200GB for €169, €0.85/GB

      2005 : 200GB for €120, €0.60/GB

      2007 : 320GB for €89, €0.28/GB

      2010 : 1000GB for €89, €0.09/GB

      2013 : 2000GB for €179.85, €0.09/GB

      2014 : 3000GB for €111.95, €0.04/GB

      Yeah, fucking outrageous.

      (prices based on my personal experience - I still have the tickets)

  3. DropBear

    So, um, does that mean I'll finally get to replace my 90% full, continuously-running-for-over-six-years media box HDD with a slightly larger one at a decent price, or will they rather dump the milk bury heaps of drives under some thrash in an undisclosed location to keep the price up...?

    1. Unicornpiss
      Meh

      @DropBear

      Yes, they can bury the heaps of mechanical drives next to the boatload of E.T. cartridges that Atari consigned to legend 30 years ago. The only difference is no one will ever want to dig them up again. Though if you ever did, you could probably find them from the anomalous magnetic field in the area caused by thousands of neodymium magnets.

  4. Unicornpiss
    Alert

    Don't forget the third reason...

    SSDs rarely fail, unlike spinning rust. At least 40% of the crop of spinning rust we bought a couple of years ago at our company (mostly WD black label laptop drives) have given up the ghost already and/or have been questionable enough to replace with SSDs. We have bought mostly Crucial SSDs, and have had zero failures on the upgrades.

    So the built-in obsolescence you get with mechanical drives, and the need to replace them due to attrition also dries up.

    1. jason 7

      Re: Don't forget the third reason...

      I have to say the quality of HDDs has plummeted over the past 3-4 years.

      When I started up in business 6 years ago it was quite rare to find a HDD with serious issues that wasn't at least 5 years old.

      Now I see many 6 month to a year old HDDs with bad sectors and faults on them already. I have a stack that's built up over the past 2 years that's nearly two feet high and I'm just a one man band.

      I reckon when the floods happened a few years ago the HDD companies lowered their quality controls/standards so they could ship more drives and didn't bother putting them back up after it settled down.

      As for SSDs. I've bought around 30 so far in 3 years and had one fail.

      1. blokedownthepub

        Re: Don't forget the third reason...

        The same happened to floppy disks in that late mid 1990s. The prices fell and so did the quality.

        Floppies from the 80s cost about £1 each (if you bought in bulk) were still good 20 years later. I needed a few floppies around year 2000 and they were barely use-once quality.

    2. Duffy Moon

      Re: Don't forget the third reason...

      Don't those drives have a five year warranty? I always try to buy drives that do. Even if not, perhaps WD should be obliged to replace them as the Sale of Goods Act states that goods should last for a reasonable length of time. Exercise your statutory rights.

      1. Unicornpiss
        FAIL

        Re: Don't forget the third reason...

        Actually, the drives have one and three year warranties. But the thing of it is, assuming I could warranty every mechanical drive that failed and get a free replacement, I just don't want them. Why would I want another mechanical drive that's just going to fail me in a year or two (and probably sooner, as you typically get a "refurbished" drive on warranty claims), inconvenience both the user and our department, and cost my company productivity and possibly even reputation if a user's laptop is acting up when working with a business partner?

        If we have an SSD fail, we will warranty it and get a replacement. (and we have 5 and 10-year warranties on them) But all the mechanical drives can just rot in hell as far as I'm concerned. I'm done with the pathetic fragility, unreliability, and slowness of them. (and I agree with the poster that mentioned that drives used to be better some years ago) I will no more buy another mechanical drive for a laptop or desktop machine than I will stop using digital media and put my music on 8-track tapes. Let them be a monument to the folly of using an obsolete technology to store data.

    3. Sandtitz Silver badge

      Re: Don't forget the third reason...

      "SSDs rarely fail, unlike spinning rust. At least 40% of the crop of spinning rust we bought a couple of years ago at our company"

      It could have been a bad batch from the factory. So how many WD drives was that, 10/100/1000?

      Do you think that 40% of all WD drives die within couple of years based on your sample size?

      Take a look at this set of 30k+ drives and the failure trends on WD and other drives. The failure rate seem to be under 10% for most drives.

      The rather short history of modern SSD's (=SAS/SATA or later) is plaqued with firmware issues. From EVERY single manufacturer. I've had several Kingstons die and brick suddenly with no recourse to extract data. OCZ folded and was sold to Toshiba because they produced shitty drives. Intel had the 8MB bug. Samsung 840 EVOs are slowing down. Some Crucials had the rather comical 5000 hour bug.

      I certainly couldn't say whether HDDs are more (or less) prone to failure than SSDs since I haven't seen any studies on this.

  5. Jim 59

    Not sure why people are down on disk drives. They still offer capacities larger than SSD at a fraction of the price. 2 TB for 50 quid. How long will it take SSD to match that? If you want more reliability, RAID.

    In the enterprise, of about 180 HP drives here (HP 2.5"), only one has failed in 2 years, and that was only degraded. The failure rate of older 3" units has been a lot higher.

    1. jason 7

      I take it those 2.5" HDDs are enterprise SAS drives? That could be why they have lasted a bit better as they are built and tested to higher standards.

      As I mentioned earlier I think that tolerances have been lowered over the past few years for most tiers of HDD. Warranties have also reduced...a coincidence?

      Another factor is that 15 years ago a lot of us were always needing more storage so we were buying constantly. Now? Not so much - with 4TB+ being readily available. Again another case of sales down due to the tech being big or fast enough. So reduce the reliability to help build churn. Only works if they all do it though but in my experience that possibly seems to be the case.

  6. All names Taken
    Alien

    Another factor?

    Who wants all those wires, power bricks, screwdrivers n stuff turning the room from a room into a lo-tek hell den when you can have the cloud?

    No more - Oops I left my disk/usb thingy at home in the lo-tek hell den and more of - Nos problems - all I need do is remember my login username and password (always assuming a human RFID was not/has not/will never likely be becoming or became widespread (last bit with acknowledgements to The Big Bang Theory Sheldon, Hoffie, Wolly n Raj :-) )

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Another factor?

      Yeah, let's invent a thing called SATA-over-Cloud-over-SATA and since the ${probably_motorola} DOCSIS turd needs power-cycled far too often, my ${everything_important} goes straight to hell. Thanks, but no thanks.

      P.S.: well, ATA over Ethernet already exists but UEFIii and BIOSen quite often look for a so-called "boot loader" somewhere closer to Reality a.k.a. My Desk which currently both holds and provides a... wait for it... DESKTOP COMPUTING PLATFORM including, but not limited to, an indispensable slice or two of rapidly rotating rust

      P.P.S.: FTC: maybe they should have called it Inordinately TransGenerous Blackhole since you seem to keep getting your stuff back often enough to keep putting it there

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Another factor?

      so you go on site to a customer and BANG. all AWS (or other Cloud providers) are blocked by the customer's firewall.

      What the hell do you then!

      Cloud? Are you having a laugh?

      I travel abroad to my customers. Off to Japan in a couple of weeks to do a major system upgrade. I know that I won't have any Internet access while I'm on site. No phone either because I'll be working 90% of the time in the basement. PMR? maybe.

      So I take three copies of everything I need on Portable HDD's. Two rotating rust, 1 SSD (you can't be two careful you know).

      What price the Cloud then eh?

      While putting stuff in the cloud might be right for some situations I see more and more companies getting wise to it and blocking suppliers. Only yesterday, one blocked Rackspace from all internal access.

      Why?

      Because it all to easy for employees to upload the company secrets to the cloud without anyone knowing.

      1. Tom 13

        Re: What price the Cloud then eh?

        I think there's an Alan Parson's song in there somewhere:

        What price the Cloud of a tech at his desk, when he's trapped in the dark all alone?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SAS is Dead; High Density Rules

    So basically this confirms that High Capacity HDDs, most likely fronted by a caching layer will continue to fair very well in the datacenter in the foreseeable future and increase market share at the expense of SAS

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