The Wobbly Future of the Hard Disk Drive Industry 

Here's an interesting tidbit: the tracks on a current-generation HDD are so narrow that you can fit ~1,500 tracks on the EDGE of a piece of paper.

As a consumer, most people who use devices wont purchase an HDD unless they buy a tower PC or build their own PC and add an HDD for mass storage. Of course we all use HDDs daily via cloud/streaming services. I appreciate that we have the choice of SSDs for speed and HDDs for capacity.

If they ever solve the laser problem. The new multilayer optical disks would be a worthy successor. To the good old hard drive.

2 months ago: "Why hard drives are dead" Today: "THE FUTURE OF THE HARD DRIVE INDUSTRY!"

Amazing how far we've come from simple cavemen smashing pieces of magnetite together to store low resolution bitmaps of their hunting achievements.

I was wondering why hard drive prices hadn't come down in the last 4 years! I wanted to back up my capture footage and building a NAS is too expensive so I just bought a massive 14TB HDD in 2020 and backed up everything and it cost me $210. Fast forward 4 years and now 14TB costs 250. It's gone up! This makes so much sense now, thanks for the great video!

I live next door with a guy that spent his entire career at Seagate. He told me all about HAMR tech and was working on a new HAMR drive before a layoff. He says the fines for selling drives to china cost Seagate millions with the decline of HDD because of SSD. Tape drives still are the best long term storage.

HDD ain't dead yet.

For what I understand, unpowered, HDD's will store data far longer than SDD's.

for me, there are two advantages: cost per byte is the main, but also an hdd will hold data much longer unpowered. For main computing though, ssd is the only way to go

HAMR TIME!!! Sorry. I had to do it.

Thank god when this channel mentions NFT, it's referencing a technology other than that hype train and some ape.

HDD isn't dead until the cost per TB gets to be about the same for SSD. The gap between SSD and HDD is definitely closing though. Right now the sweet spot for bulk storage, especially for backups and very large files, at affordable prices is HDD at around 13TB. Tape storage isn't nearly as cost effective per TB. Sure you can get 20TB tapes but they are two times as expensive as HDD storage and the tape drives themselves aren't cheap. SSD/NVMe drives are about 6 to 8 times as expensive as HDDs. Used to be closer to 10 times just a few years ago. So there's still a very significant gap in cost per TB between the two technologies.

Magnetic tape still is a good option for backups, even today... I think. Just remember: Do not put magnets near those tapes. 😢

SO, my idea of bringing back PUNCH CARDS just didn't cut it :p

HDDs have never really been on a march to oblivion. If anything, it's the reverse.. HDDs are not what consumers want any more, but in the world of cloud and hyperscale providers, there is nowhere near enough production of SSD storage. HDDs have been where the bulk of all data is stored the whole way along (ignoring tape for archival purposes), and there isn't much sign of that changing (in terms of SSD production catching up). I wouldn't say that the future of HDDs is wobbly! :)

if you dont innovate, you become history

We'll see a spike in HDD if our cloud infrastructure collapses for some reason. I'd like to see a return to local data downloads and ownership. Between all my various services, Google drive, Dropbox, dashcam content, photos, etc I probably have about 12-24TB so an HDD is still key if you need to backup your cloud data with +10TB.

Babe wake up, new Asianometry video has dropped.

I wonder why they aren't building 5.25" disks again. Quantum Bigfoot were huge size back then. Sure, seek times are horrendous ... but sequentials are good, and you could have twice the disk space per platter. For storage of big files, it should be good.

I just watched a video of a lecture by Dr. Grace Hopper about the storage of data in 1982…. A year before I bought my first 10meg Winchester Hard Drive… The topic was the time value of the data being stored… recent entries vs. ancient history… 😃

No thanks to the digital age, we are now in need of never ending ever increasing data storage and thus HDD will NEVER go out of style. The moment you lose a SSD and can't retrieve a bit of data, you'll understand the desire to still have mechanical HDDs.

As the owner of a data recovery company I would like to dispute the fact that SSD's are more reliable and hard drives. I specialise in flash memory, I can tell you with absolute certainty reliability is being sacrificed for cost.

HDD still wins as backup, mass storage and long term data storage. At 10$ per TB it's even cheaper than magnetic tape. SSD have two disadvantages: price and degradation of data in unpowered discs after only few months.

My only criticism of the video is that SSD's are not more reliable than hard drives, I just replaced my 2015 computer that had no issues with the hard drive running 24/7 since the day of purchase AND the secondary drive was from my previous computer bought somewhere in the early 2000's that while slow still worked fine. find me an SSD that will do that

They should just reintroduce the 5.25in HDD. That would give you more capacity. Just like they should make LaserDisc sized Blu-Ray discs. (Because it would be fun. That’s why.)

This technology and industry has come a very, very long way from the first fixed head disk drive I ever worked on. A Data General Corporation 'Novadisk' with 512KB capacity, with a belt driven spindle motor. Then a 2MB Diablo Cartridge Disk Subsystem. The Read/Write head was the size of a dime...Then the 'Zebra'...

Imho, bluray will be back soon. Burning holes in hair-thin metal is the only way to store data for centuries. Yes, 25-50GB is floppy size by today's standards, but with just 10 disks you can sure save a lot of memes for future generations. HDDs will also stick around for "long term" 5-10 years NAS storage.

I love HDD’s just not in my personal machine. Preferably connected to a NAS with dedicated caching.

I enjoy how you say MAMR and HAMR.

HAMR reminds me of magneto-optical tech used in PD, MiniDisc, and DVD-RAM but with data read back magnetically instead of optically.

my PCs haven't had mechanical disks in about 10 years (I've been lucky enough to have most of my computers purchased for me by my Jobs) I have however had many many hard drives in my house at all times, because I keep an external disc array for my PC, and a NAS for my work and family. I don't see either of those facts changing for several years.

So long as SSDs are technically volatile storage (the data will decay in about 5 months if not powered on) then magnetic storage media isn't going anywhere because there will always be a need for cold storage.

Love seeing data storage tech advance.

In my experience HDDs tend to be more reliable, I've had 2 SSDs died on me, but never a HDD

SSDs lose data when not powered on for longer periods of time.

I'm thinking the need for higher HDD densities is so great that perhaps longer seek times and or bigger disks are worth the tradeoff in some applications. 100 -200 TB drives ?

For storage HDD is much cheaper and more reliable. That's why cloud services use HDDs

Don’t underestimate the bandwidth of a wagon full of tapes hurling down the highway (just don’t mention latency)

Tape media endured a big slowdown in the 2015-2019 time period due to some ugly patent battles around the LTO-8 format that effectively stagnated capacity increases and kept prices for existing media higher than they should be. I think this is resolved now, but it definitely put tape on the back foot compared to hard drives in terms of capacity increases over time. The history of tape storage might make an interesting video topic. You briefly mentioned shingled magnetic recording in this video but didn't elaborate. The technology is somewhat niche/controversial, because while it does improve areal density, it vastly complicates the writing of new data to the platters (especially when there's existing data nearby). It's a cool trick, but you need to ensure your whole software stack is aware of the quirks and that your workload is suitable for the restricted write patterns that shingled drives can handle efficiently. In some ways, it's similar to the caveats around rewriting flash storage, except that flash is so much faster than hard drives that they have a lot more tricks available to hide the overhead. Some of the hard drive manufacturers (Western Digital in particular) have gotten in big trouble for selling shingled drives without clearly disclosing them as such, and consumers were understandably very annoyed when their general-purpose workloads performed like junk. One interesting change I've noticed in that last 5-10 years is that while hard drives _have_ gotten larger (although the rate of improvement has slowed) the cost per GB has plateaued quite significantly. Prices per GB used to drop every year (and there was a distinct curve of prices across the size range). These days though, you basically pick any capacity between about 2TB and 20TB and the price per GB will be nearly identical; you just buy the drive size you need for your application and that's that.

I don't about you, but 20TB SSDs even if they exist are too expensive. My server (home made NAS) will still need HDDs because that is only affordable option. The last thing you want is your data to be out on the cloud. You should NEVER trust those MOFOs.

So the solution is Hard Drives with Lasers on their frickin' heads?

The only problem with SSD is if you turn off the power for a year, they will degrade. The little capacitors leak.

At this point, for retail/consumer purposes, I'd think reviving full height, 5.25" drives would be cool.

If ever there was an award for the best combination of simplicity of design, reliability, precision of operation, portability, robustness and cost, it would probably go to the humble present day hard drive. To my mechanically inclined mind, it is an intrinsically trustworthy technology, far more so than any SSD. Much respect, may it continue to exist for many more generations.

HDD's are needed more than ever for data centers because of the growing demand of storage for cloud

300,000,000 times. When I graduated, one of my engineering friends said he was going into disk drives, because there was no end in sight for them --- 40 years ago --- of course there's still a lot of room at the bottom! ;-)

The lasers in HAMR hammerheads! This must be why my aunt told me to invest in Near-Field Transducers two years ago!

Great lecture on Hard Drives. Thanks.

I'll stay with my rotating hard drives thank you.

In 1971, we got a 128K HDD the size of a golf cart wheel. It cost DFL 50.000, or €200.000 in 2024 money. It means you would be able to buy a couple of Rolls Royce cars for less than one cent.

A lot of people seem to hate tape but I've had a few different tape library's in the home lab for quite a while now and it's been great. Cheap, reliable and offline which in this day and age is very important.

Pour one out for our dead friend - the HDD.

thats how i use my harddrive too. rarely played games, local backup of my phone pictures and videos, ripped movies, whatever.

Shingled magnetic recording serves best as a write once, read multiple times medium. The write delay plays merry hell with e.g. the ZFS file system. A couple of years ago there was a problem with HDD manufacturers selling shingled type disks to consumers and companies without explicitly stating what they were getting.

At this point, quantum physics is going to be an insurmountable problem. Chips are getting to the point quantum fluctuations are going to literally make them useless. We are nearly at the end of lithography, regardless of type.

Anyone else remember the "Get Perpendicular" musical promo animation from Hitachi about PMR?

Capacity isn't the only problem for long term storage (which optical disks and tapes are for), but also the longevity of the reader device itself. 20 years ago the French state had a problem with Sony. Years earlier they had invested in optical drives storage for their national archives. The disks were guaranteed to last at least 50 years, but Sony stopped producing the readers and had no spare parts. Epic fail.

Ssd's can also do orders of magnatude more iops per second Love the triforce chart 😅

My first experiance with computer storeage was 7 hole paper punchtape writing and reading from a TTY 33. If you ever dropped and unspooled a large reel of punchtape the best way to respool it was to use a deep stairwell and throw the tangled reel down it from the highest level. Many years later a 50 mbyte pc hdd got zapped in a lightning strike. The only meyhod I found to retrieve all the data was to place said drive in a freezer for around 10 mins which gave you up to 2 mins of read time before repeating the process.

I'm more surprised that flash pricing doesn't run circle around HDDs by now. The process is simpler, it probably scales a lot better and no moving parts.

9:33 - 9:45 😭 the wording is funny for no reason

HDDs are still useful for NASes given a beefy SSD array cache for data tiering but yeah that's not very general consumer

- Almost 70 years since the first HDD in 1957

Plenty of room at the bottom. ESR - Electron Spin Recording. That should hold us for a little while until they get proton and neutron spin recording PSR / NSR. Unfortunately, there is a bottom.. QSR - Quark Spin Recording.

a video about the future of magnetic tape would be interesting

At this point I have had many very old 2.5" SSDs, and they've all been super reliable, even when used in somewhat heavy duty (for a consumer) roles, like running it in a NAS with torrent running 24/7.

I generate 4k RU-vid content as well as running a business digitising tapes, so I absolutely rely on HDDs for the vast quantities of data. My total capacity is presently about 140TB, but if I could get like 40TB drives at a sensible cost I would certainly want them. SSDs have their uses, but not for every application. They're also not so well suited for applications where data is being written continuously, such as CCTV.

RIP OCZ. Their SSDs had a 100% failure rate in my experience. Those early generation of consumer SSDs were not reliable.

I used to be a firmware programmer for HDD and SSD. Good video.

My computer wants to get HAMR'd

I was a fan of SDDs until my computer died on the pandemic, after that get my pc checked and turns out that my SDD was the problem, HDDs are far more reliable and long lasting

Random unexpected NZ chocolate at 10:30 🤣

The trim function of ssds is a reuse nightmare

I recently upgraded my NAS to 4 x 24 TB using Seagate drives. Maybe the biggest ones that we'll get without using HAMR? 🔨

Storage really isn’t increasing like back in the day. I remember going from 3GB to 120GB to 640GB. These days many computers come with less storage than I had on my computer 20 years ago. Faster of course but if someone had told me 20 years ago that my 2023 budget laptop came with the same 120GB my 2003 PC had I would have laughed. I would have expected Petabytes by now.

Here we hear the endless appetite of storing bits in the smallest form factor, however the human real talent is to generate even more junk information to be stored -- until we simply cannot remember what we are actually storing there in that little packed universe.

when i bought my new gaming pc in 2019 i saw the 1TB SSD and figured i didn't need more, a year or two later i bought another one. However pretty quickly i realized just how easily a steam library eats away at the available space. Then there's all the cruel updates, tearing away at the poor SSD's life expectancy. So i was pretty happy finding a highly reviewed HDD with 18(!) TB of storage space :D

I'm still waiting for that race track memory! 😭

RAMAC (RAM-ACK): Random Access Method of Accounting and Control.

Missed opportunity to call it the floppy future

Hammer, Mammer and Nammer. What's Nammer? Heck if I know. It just roll off the toungue.

i'll trust my data with HDD.

the correct statement would be "SSD COULD be faster and more reliable than HDD, if manifacturer didn't cheap out on every thousandth of a penny". There have been plenty of SSD significantly slower than HDD, and even reliability is arguable, especially in applications where data is continuosly overwritten (security cameras, just to name one)

Data rot is something that must be considered, but I don't believe it will ever be a deciding criterion for much of anything. Whatever the time to rot is, you just need to refresh the data often enough to avoid it.

Huray someone got my surname pronunciation right 😮

I still use tape (ex office LTO setup) to back up my video collection and photo gubbins. Slow, but it just does a job overnight, and it's not every night, just once in the blue moon. Handy thing about tape, is I can pick up ex small enterprise systems for next to nothing, and the tapes for nearly free - nobody else wants them. The tape setup is more of a fallback of last resort, but they're there and will remain readable - I hope. My main offline storage is larger and larger SAS and SATA discs, but even they will eventually be replaced by solid state, I suppose. For the meantime, they do the job and ex-enterprise ones are cheap with lots of life left in them. I'm waiting for the eventual price break where it will be cheaper to SSD them than replace with more spinning rust.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I basically don't care about how much data can be stored on a drive or per unit area ... I care about durability, reliability, TCO, and ability to securely / permanently wipe the drive (e.g., degaussing). It's fine if I need to buy and RAID up a large quantity of drives.

Fascinating stuff, thank you! But you seem to have barely mentioned SMR.

at the moment (sep 2024), a 20T HDD (WD gold) runs $450. a 8T SSD (also wd gold) is $1800. that's ~10x variance from one to the next, but it's shrinking. when it's 2x, i can't see buying spinning rust

Thanks for the MAMRies, even if they're not in RAID.

As long as the storage cost per bit is a lot lower than SSD, HDD will live on. All about the $$$$ It's just that "smaller" hard drives aren't attractive anymore as SSD outperforms them by at least an order of magnitude. When large SSDs become affordable, that's the day HDD dies.

I looked at that LTO tape image and realized it only has one reel, so the drives that read it must have a take up reel inside them. I guess that's handy otherwise the tapes would be twice as big, half empty space. But you always have to fully rewind it before removing it from the reader (some drives hold multiple tapes with a single drive).

In a few years a presentation like this will have many mentions of China, a few of Japan and probably none of ...

With a combination of stalled technology progress and high inflation... I think we are seeing the beginnings of the first ever increase in price per gigabyte. Lets hope it was just a 9-12 month stagnation due to "ai" server demand, and that prices in this next quarter manage to decrease again or even hit new all time lows. admittedly I am mostly talking about ssd pricing, I do think hard drives may have been more consistent in price per gig in comparison.

SSD/M.2 for games, HDD for storage and backups. If I were to build a NAS with SSD's to replace my current NAS that has HDD's it would cost more than a new car, Nothing beats HDD's for price per TB yet for the average consumer.

Given the price drops during Covid, I expected 4 tb NVMe 3.0 SSD’s at $140 by 2022 but it seemed the driving forces stalled it out

😊What a timing, just done reading The Innovator's Dilemma !

So I bought HDD to store my vacation 4k videos. Each trip uses something like 1TB and I really need to edit those videos and transcode to AV1, which is 10 times smaller.

big fan of MAMR-E’s personally