toms hardware Reports Of PC HDDs' Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: 139M Shipped in 2020

[ENTERPRISE]

Quote

In a world where you cannot cram a hard drive into a modern thin-and-light laptop and a cheap high-capacity 2.5-inch SSD can replace an HDD in a desktop, you would expect consumer hard disk drives to go extinct. Yet, while their unit sales are dropping, sales are still strong at nearly 139 million units per year. In fact, capacities and exabytes shipments of client HDDs are setting records. 

 

Unit sales of all hard drives for all kinds of applications totaled 259.81 million units in 2020, a 13.9% drop year over year, according to data from Trendfocus (via StorageNewsletter). 

Source

[schuck6566]

Seagate BarraCuda ST2000DM008 2TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive = $54.99

WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB Internal SSD - SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5"/7mm Solid State Drive - WDS100T2B0A = $109.99

WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB Internal SSD - SATA III 6Gb/s M.2 2280 Solid State Drive - WDS100T2B0B = $99.99

Hard drives will continue to sell as storage as long as the price difference remains like this. Twice the space @ half the price.

prices per newegg.

[Snakecharmed]

There are several use cases where a hard drive still makes more sense. I hit on three of them myself: Ultra-high capacity storage, file backup, and continuous writing.

 

I have a 10 TB Seagate BarraCuda Pro for storage, a 6 TB HGST Ultrastar for backup, and I'm planning on a 4 TB WD Purple for my NVR setup hopefully later this year. My backup drive is almost always an older repurposed drive I formerly bought for storage.

 

Anything that has to do with loading applications into memory rightfully gets put on an SSD, but transfer speed and seek times aren't always the most important factors.

Edited February 14, 2021 by Snakecharmed

[UltraMega]

Always need at least one large hdd for the bulk storage. Unless SSDs get way cheaper in high capacity, that's not changing anytime soon.

[ENTERPRISE]

I will always be using HDD's in my NAS, I just need high storage at sensible prices. That being said as long as you use decent HDD's such as the Seagate EXOS drives you are fairly safe to be honest so fair as performance. I go to the step of putting the HDD's into RAID 0 and I have two SSD's for fast cache. Does well  Oh and yes, I have another NAS that backs up my NAS and cloud storage, so don't worry.

[Diffident]

On 2/14/2021 at 6:50 PM, ENTERPRISE said:

I will always be using HDD's in my NAS, I just need high storage at sensible prices. That being said as long as you use decent HDD's such as the Seagate EXOS drives you are fairly safe to be honest so fair as performance. I go to the step of putting the HDD's into RAID 0 and I have two SSD's for fast cache. Does well  Oh and yes, I have another NAS that backs up my NAS and cloud storage, so don't worry.

I like the EXOS drives.  Prior to putting a drive into service, I run this Burn-in script.  A 16TB drive takes about a week to complete.  If that doesn't kill a new drive, I don't know what will.

 

[ENTERPRISE]

That is a handy script to have ! Thanks for sharing.

[tictoc]

That script basically matches my burn-in procedure for new HDD's, except that I usually do short S.M.A.R.T.->extended S.M.A.R.T.->bad blocks->extended S.M.A.R.T.  

[ENTERPRISE]

8 hours ago, tictoc said:

That script basically matches my burn-in procedure for new HDD's, except that I usually do short S.M.A.R.T.->extended S.M.A.R.T.->bad blocks->extended S.M.A.R.T.  

 

Back in the day I used to do extended S.M.A.R.T on all HDD's I purchased. Admittedly, I have been a little slack on giving HDD's a full test prior to them starting work for the past few years now... woops.

[Darkpriest667]

We ship them with workstations, then I get to field questions as an engineer explaining to customers that bought 2000 systems why the OS takes 3 to 7  minutes to load. We buy them for like 3 dollars a drive (no i'm not shitting you.) That's why so many shipped. OEMs bought a ton of them and ship them as "storage" options, they are TERRIBLE.

[ENTERPRISE]

16 hours ago, Darkpriest667 said:

We ship them with workstations, then I get to field questions as an engineer explaining to customers that bought 2000 systems why the OS takes 3 to 7  minutes to load. We buy them for like 3 dollars a drive (no i'm not shitting you.) That's why so many shipped. OEMs bought a ton of them and ship them as "storage" options, they are TERRIBLE.

 

Yeah no doubt. The actual quality of some of the drives can be piss poor. I still find myself educating users and people getting a HDD for OS or general storage to not just take not of the HDD size but also the specs of the drive. I cringe when I see what people buy.