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The Birth, Boom and Bust of the Hard Disk Drive
(www.youtube.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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What bust? What do you think cloud providers are using for long term storage? SSDs in datacentres are for databases and hot data-sets. Anything that is written for archival purposes or only read infrequently goes to HDDs.
HDDs are still the most cost-effective way of storing data and probably still will be for some time yet.
HDDs won't go away any time soon and that's also exactly what he says but the industry is nowhere close to moving as much product as it did in the past, and the number of companies has been reduced to pretty much three. Technology also isn't going to improve drastically any more while NAND storage only needs that much of a price reduction to match HDDs, currently about 15 vs. 50 Euro/TB. Not spitting distance but it's getting darn close.
It says, after all, "boom and bust" not "rise and fall".
Also, no, tapes are more cost-effective. An LTO-8 tape is about 80 Euros, that's less than seven Euros per TB (uncompressed).
https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/ap-en/company/news/news-topics/2024/05/storage-20240514-1.html
The video covers the history of the hard disk from the very origins, and goes over the boom cycle when there were dozens of hard disk manufacturers innovating and competing (and the established disk manufacturers combined only had single-digit market share vs startups. Now there are only 4 disk manufacturers, total). Adding a few TB every couple years is far from the innovative cycle during the "boom" the video is talking about.
Great, congratulations. Now figure out how to use the tech without increasing per TB costs and find financing for that with large enough ROI so that the capital that be cares. Seagate already ships 24G HDDs at 20 Euro/TB, whether you want to call a step up to 30 "drastic" I'll leave up to you.
Meanwhile, current NAND chips aren't using EUV. The industry can piggyback off the investment and experience of logic chip manufacturers, HDD manufacturers can't. Synergy and all that.
Not to mention quality drives are fast and very durable
Are databases and cloud services more common than office terminals used across almost every industry, though? Losing out on sales of HDDs for regular machines to both businesses and home use still seems like a huge detriment.
Is it though? Customer acquisition is harder with retail customers, so they're probably saving quite a bit of money by selling in bulk to data centers. Also, with capacities getting higher, I don't know if looking at total shipments is all valuable.
They're losing the low margin, low end market and retaining and probably expanding the higher margin, high end market.