News Hard drive market set for double-digit slump

The thing I find most perplexing is that they still bother to make drives smaller than 1TB. WHY? Especially when they are often the same price, or very close. For example I was looking recently and 500GB was same price as 2TB. Seems like they could lower cost by not offering so many models that I would guess there is little need for.

 

Exactly, I have been holding off on more drives to expand an array for a few years now. To save the money I just increased the amount of high compression 7z files to make more space. (for the type of files I store it can reduce space by >75%).

As I see the price of SSDs drop I am getting to a point where I might rather spend more to just get that b/c I know it is an actual value for my money. The HDD market will continue to feel like a ripoff to me until I see new low prices not simply a return to how they were 5 years ago.

 

+1. People would also benefit from the higher areal density on the larger drives too.

 

I hardly think the dip in price will actually hurt the R & D labs much; if they fall behind the moor's-law curve SSD's will just dominate the market faster. I for one think HDD's still have a long life ahead of them in the PC market. The technology has room to grow, and the data-center market is growing fast. The way I see it, the proliferation of mobile devices like tablets and smart phones, actually increases the amount of data the average person needs to store, thanks to embedded cameras, a constant stream of new apps, and the tendency to duplicate music collections across devices.

As for optical drives, I expect they will die out at about the same rate as the HTPC and smart TV's catch on, slowed of course by the media industry's steadfast opposition to progress, think floppy drives but with anyone at all saying they should stay around.

 

I wouldn't be so pessimistic for optical drives.
How long does it take to press the ~50GB of information on a blueraydisk through your average cheap DSL-line?
Same goes for streaming media, sure you can watch movies online, but if you go for high-quality full HD your looking at ~5-10GB even when compressed.

The same goes for harddisks.
Remember the "Retina" display? resolutions are going to silly levels, levels that will require incredible amounts of data. Imagine a pixeldensity like that (or like the Nexus 10's) on a large screen.
We don't even film on these resolutions yet, but boy are movies going to become storage eaters.

 

I wonder if they're also simply pushing themselves out of the consumer market by releasing such massive drives? Most people don't need terabytes upon terabytes of storage, and they aren't reaching the limits of what they have. Sure there are many people who do need that storage (those with massive video and steam libraries for instance), but I wonder if people are just reaching what they need, much like I swear is happening with CPUs and in the tablet takeover. Could prove interesting a few years down the line though when standards like 4k hit the mainstream markets.

 

Yes, but SSDs are governed by it, hence why magnetic media would need to match it to keep up.

 

We're shooting on average 10-20 GB of video every day we go paddle, which is at least once a week, so, yeah, going to be saving on spinning platters for a while yet. I'm sure there is some kind of batch transcoding I could to do save space and get them all into one file format, but I haven't looked into that yet.

I think when we get back from California it's going to be time to start working on a new NAS box.

 

Actually, those that still actually FILM, shooting at equivilent about 96MP resolution since oh the last 100 years.

 

I picked up a 2TB Spinpoint for $80 not terribly long before the floods. I just checked Newegg, and damn near every 2TB is $110 and up. Mind, this was when the Spinpoints were real Samsung Spinpoints. I haven't checked (because prices are too high), but it used to be no-second-thought. New hard drive? Get a Spinpoint...I'm not certain that would still be the case anymore.

I've got 4TB in my NAS and a 500GB secondary in my desktop, so I'm good for a while. Eventually I'd like to fill the NAS with 3TB or 4TB drives, but not anytime soon, apparently. It was announce way, way back that capacity is back up to pre-flood levels, so now they're just profit mongering. Screw 'em.

As to optical drives - the internal in my desktop now is my last. I'll pick up a cheap USB external at some point, but I'm long past the point of needing an internal drive. I burn backups rarely, and the last time I've used it in the past year was for DVDs that I hadn't gotten around to ripping or torrenting.

 

They are almost there though, I saw last week an ad for $59.99 1TB hitachis.

 

I concede that I misapplied Moor's law, but after a little poking about i came across Kryder's Law, described by one of the top-dogs at Seagate a few years back. Statistically speaking, magnetic storage technology has advances with the same exponential trend as transistor density, but faster.

Based on a statistical analysis I did for a paper in highschool, I'd venture to say the the industry is governed by Moore's Law, I don't have a digital copy of the paper anymore, so I don't recall the specifics, but I found that the correlation between flagship processors' transistor count and numbers projected by moor's law relative the the flagship processor when he made the first assertion, was over 99%. Any statistician will tell you that you don't see correlations that strong by chance. The entire industry had a formula with which they could estimate the performance level of their competitors next product, so the whole industry set their pace by it.

Just some food for thought.

 

Wasn't moore's law more of a self fulfilling prophecy which was based on an observation.

 

In a sense yes. Gordon Moore made the observation in 1965 based on development trends he observed at Intel. However, the prediction has proved accurate for almost 6 decades, across multiple breakthroughs in transistor technology, and for companies that have no affiliation with Intel's R&D. An argument can be made that the industry was influenced by the prediction, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

 

Well if the industry was influenced by his prediction and they matched what he predicted then surely by any accounts its a self fulfilling prophecy. You can replace prophecy with prediction to make it seem less mystical or wizardy.

 

well, my hold-up with calling it a self-fulfilling prophecy is that it was by no means a trivial thing for the industry to match his predictions. It isn't a question of companies choosing to meet those predictions, moore's law essentially states that every 2 years, companies will figure out a way to make chips 2 times better than they were 2 years ago.

What makes moore's law special is not simply that his equation was accurate, it's special because of what that equation entails. No other sort of technology in the history of man kind has experienced such rapid growth for such a long time, and he made the prediction not too long into the life of the transistor. If cars had improved at a similar rate over the last 50 years, you could get a million miles to the gallon in a car you bought with loose change you found in the couch. If it weren't true, the prediction would have made him look like a babbling idiot.

 

Wow, people are being way more hostile to me lately than I think is reasonable. Maybe my memory is failing me and I actually did post a bunch of inflammatory remarks earlier.

I apologize for associating the man who the principle is named for with the slightly more specific connotations said principle.

I actually read the entire article where Moore's Law was first described years back when I was writing a paper on it, I just didn't take such a cynical view of the loose relationship between his statements and the popularized version of Moore's Law. Perhaps because it was not named that by a team of scheming Intel publicists; the term was coined by Carver Mead, Professor Emeritus at Caltech. Or, possibly because it has been called Moore's Law for a long time, everyone knows it by that name, and Dr. Moor is a great man and a pioneer of the industry.

I DID find a formula for 99 percent correlation, for a mandatory research paper in a high school statistics course. I codified the general form of the law (doubling every 2 years) and set its y-intercept to the transistor count of Intel's flagship processor in 1965. I then gathered data points from other flagship processors over the years to create a fit curve. I then used the Chi-squared distribution test (after shifting both equations to a logarithmic scale) to find the correlation coefficient between Moore's 1965 statement and the actual growth of technology since then. The result was an unnaturally high coefficient of 0.99....

I think I was 15 at the time. Currently I'm earning a degree in computer science and working as a web developer, IT rep, and programming consultant for research faculty; where I'm currently helping researchers in the bio-medical engineering department leverage GPGPU computing in one of their more time-consuming simulations.

I was planning on doing something with that in the future, but if you think my afternoon's work all those years ago means I should reconsider my plans, I have some serious thinking to do.