News - Western Digital back as leading HDD maker

[HEXUS]

WD regains No.1 spot a year after the Thailand floods.

Read more.

[3dcandy]

I think on the whole we'll never see hard drive prices driven as low again. SSD's are now entrenched as the performance option and hard drives are now seen as the massive data storage option. Quite shortly I imagine laptops to all have SSD's or at least hybrid drives...

[shaithis]

Personally I see HDDs as a dead-end.

SSDs prices are tumbling, each time they drop their sales increase and it seems to be snow-balling. 480GB SSDs are already for sale and in a years time we will probably have 1-2TB SSDs for ~£500.....while still quite expensive for most it will mean server storage will start to move to SSD almost exclusively and prices will take another huge plummet.

Then we will start to see DNA storage appear for archiving.

I just cannot bring myself to buy another HDD. I just see them as an evolutionary dead-end.....and rightly so...mechanical - urgghh!

[mikerr]

Both WD and seagate have used the percepion of the floods to regain a profit margin on HDDs,
gone are the days of wafer thin margins, as now there are fewer manufacturers (due to all the recent mergers) there's less competition to drive prices down too:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...it-click-death

SSDs have dropped to viable prices at reasonable capacities now, so we're well on the way to the day of all boot drives being SSDs.

I don't see HDDs dying out anytime soon (though I hate the mechanical aspect!), it's been predicted for a long time, but then they find a new way to get higher data density.

[3dcandy]

Oh I don't see HDD's going just yet...but you'll see most desktops with a boot SSD and a terabyte HDD pretty soon...

[K4RIMIN4L]

HDDs won't be leaving anytime soon due to how cheap it is for the higher amount of storage, compard to SSDs for consumers but yes SSDs are rapidly dropping in pricing

[Funkstar]

Regular HDDs won't go any time soon. I can't see mechanical SAS drives hanging around too long though, there isn't much point, SAS based SSDs will be where it's at for servers.

As for bulk storage, you can't beat HDDs, and NAS boxes are supposed to be seeing an increase in sales due to all the SmartTVs we are seeing. It's getting to the point where the general public can really have all their digital content on a home network and viewable through a TV. This used to be the reserve of over the top enthusiasts.

[OilSheikh]

So, only 3 manufacturers remain ?

1TB is £60 at the moment. Used to be £40, not too much of an increase.

[Bugbait]

Just dropped a bit over £200 for another 6TB (2x3TB) of HDD storage for archives. Don't even look at performance figures for HDD's any more, simply get the cheapest per TB. Anything I care about performance wise resides on SSD's. SSD's are great but HDD's will still be around for a while since storage requirements only seem to grow over time. Hoarding mentality and all that.

[kingpotnoodle]

SSDs still suffer on longevity when heavily used, degraded performance under heavy load and cost per GB is still way off competitive if random I/O speed is only a minor factor - think networked mass storage of larger files where the transport medium (typically 1Gb ethernet) is the bottleneck not the drives.

All my machines are SSD boot, and the HDD in my PC goes largely unused except for system image backups. However the RAID5 of 2.5" 1TB drives in my media server is not likely to be retired for several more years yet.

SSD manufacturers would do well to find a technology that reduces cost per GB and making bigger SSDs using it, even if performance is reduced, so long as it's still better than spinning drives then it'll sell.

[Zak33]

in the last year I've had no hard drives break but 2 SSD's fail... go figure!

[SineWave]

For some time now, I see SSD+HDD combo as a great starting point for every PC. For HTPCs, especially. Although I have only SSD in my HTPC, but I have an external 1TB HDD always on stand by...

[marshalex]

So, only 3 manufacturers remain ?

1TB is £60 at the moment. Used to be £40, not too much of an increase.

I'd say a 50% hike in price is a massive increase considering they're selling more than they were pre-flooding!

[spraint]

So, only 3 manufacturers remain ?

1TB is £60 at the moment. Used to be £40, not too much of an increase.

My last F3 1TB was £33, my last F4 2TB was £48, so can't agree.

[Brewster0101]

But you can buy a 3TB drive for under £110 - albeit Seagate.

[TooNice]

Wow, I've missed those mergers last year. Bit annoying because I really liked Samsung's 5400RPM drive for quiet mass storage while Seagate failed to impress me. Well, I do hold the WD Green drive to roughly the same regard as the Samsung, but they tended to be a touch more expensive.