Why have none of the traditional HD mfgs. come out with SSD's?

[Doomer]

Seems like they're all made by memory mfgs and not HD mfgs. I'd guess that SSD capacity will continue to grow and if WD, Seagate, etc. don't join the party they may go the way of the Dodo.

 

[Wall Street]

Because the HD manufacturers don't know the first thing about making/owning fabs. What should they do? Beg Samsung, Intel, Micron and Sandisk to give them cheap flash chips? Those companies each have their own competing SSDs, so they will not make a deal.

 

[tipoo]

They need fabrication plants, and they need to design more complicated controllers than they are used to in HDDs. No one hard drive maker is going to build or buy a fabrication plant, so they'd be stuck buying chips from someone else and slapping their logo on it with few differentiating features, and that would obviously be less cost competitive than a company like Intel who makes their own selling their own. It's a big investment, and hard drive companies may not have that much to invest.

 

[pmv]

They need fabrication plants, and they need to design more complicated controllers than they are used to in HDDs. No one hard drive maker is going to build or buy a fabrication plant, so they'd be stuck buying chips from someone else and slapping their logo on it with few differentiating features, and that would obviously be less cost competitive than a company like Intel who makes their own selling their own. It's a big investment, and hard drive companies may not have that much to invest.

So is there still a future for the HD manufacturers? Or are they going to go the way of photographic film manufacturers and the like? I guess HDs still have a place where sheer volume of data is important, but that might hit a limit no?

Wondering if there's a way of betting on those companies failing in the long run! (not that I know anything about the stock market, but "selling short" is more of a short-term bet, no?).

 

[Phynaz]

Plenty of need for HD makers, the spindle storage market is expanding, not contracting.

 

[corkyg]

I see no failure by HDD OEMs. SSDs are made of memory. No mechanical moving parts. HDDs are made by experts in mechanical moving parts, etc. Little or no manufacturing convergence other than a controller PCB. Product and manufacturing convergence will likely come about through acquisitions and mergers.

 

[dagamer34]

So is there still a future for the HD manufacturers? Or are they going to go the way of photographic film manufacturers and the like? I guess HDs still have a place where sheer volume of data is important, but that might hit a limit no?

Wondering if there's a way of betting on those companies failing in the long run! (not that I know anything about the stock market, but "selling short" is more of a short-term bet, no?).

Anytime you hear the world "cloud", hard drive makers see $$$ because those cloud providers need cheap, reliable storage and SSDs will never be it as long as platter based drives are cheaper.

 

[Hellhammer]

They've just been slow at adapting because they make competing products (i.e. hard drives), so it hasn't made sense for them to be the early birds. The SSD market is still in its early stages and there's lots of changes happening, watching from the side is actually not a bad idea.

Hard drive manufacturers have the potential to get big because they have tons of capital and distribution channels are already in place. It may happen sooner than you think

 

[MrWizzard]

Seems like they're all made by memory mfgs and not HD mfgs. I'd guess that SSD capacity will continue to grow and if WD, Seagate, etc. don't join the party they may go the way of the Dodo.

I doubt they are worried at this point. SSD while being faster still are A LOT smaller and pretty expensive. If they need to they will adapt. Speed is not everything.

 

[sub.mesa]

Western Digital actually did try to bring SSDs to their customers. Instead of joining with a quality brand like Intel; they opted for the shittiest and lowest quality SSD controller one can find: JMicron. The very same brand that brought you 'stuttering' SSDs at the early dawn of modern SSDs which powered the OCZ Core series and lots of other cheap SSDs that never delivered up to their promise.

The explanation corgyg provides is probably very realistic, since harddrive manufacturers require almost the opposite of skills required for building a quality SSD. Those two worlds are very much apart; one reason the so called hybrid harddrives with flash component is not working that well even though this kind of product could benefit harddrives alot to soften the sharp edges like the low random read performance harddrives offer.

If you are smart, you probably already have seen that mechanical harddrives is a declining market. Not that the actual products is declining (3,5" units are dropping, but 2,5" units shipped are still growing). Rather, we see progress slowing to a crawl. It has been more than two years ago when Samsung worked on 1000GB platters. Today this is the latest generation one could buy. 10 years ago, the progress was much faster, with platter densities growing from 80GB to 666GB in a relatively short time.

Due to NVS (non-volatile/mechanical storage) becoming cheaper and cheaper, while harddrives have stagnating price-per-TB, it won't take long until the harddrives will become more expensive. Because we have to understand that a mechanical product that is prone to failure, has a VERY high bill of materials with all that metal inside it, and generally quite low margins... this can only be sustained if the production volume is very high and thus static costs like factories can be spread over a very large amount of shipped harddrives.

However, once most consumers will stop using mechanical storage, i.e. they buy a 1TB SSD and forget about harddrives altogether, this will start hurting the mechanical storage market. With production volume dropping, they probably either have to increase pricing or find some other way to survive. Harddrives will not disppear for quite some time, but it is very likely that the 'golden age' of mechanical storage is behind us, and that progress will halt to a crawl while SSDs are on the rise. It only takes time until it reaches a point where harddrives are no longer an integral part of computer systems. I think that is between now and 10 years in the future already.

Probably the last major innovation in mechanical storage will be HAMR - Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording, which follows the Perpendicular recording that was introduced some years ago. I do not suspect the harddrive manufacturers are keen on heavy investments in R&D - especially now that only two big manufacturers remain - the others have fallen to durst during the cataclysm of harddrive manufacturer acquisition.

 

[MrWizzard]

Due to NVS (non-volatile/mechanical storage) becoming cheaper and cheaper, while harddrives have stagnating price-per-TB, it won't take long until the harddrives will become more expensive.

It's going to be a while before that happens. At the current rate of advancement many years. 1tb platter = $60. 1tb ssd of same theoretical quality a few $1000. 2tb Platter $20 more. 2TB SSD don't ask. Most places that have large volumes of information to be stored, platter is still king. Quick access time is not enough to make them justify the cost neither is the power or heat savings.

SSDs have some technical problems to work out before they can take off.

When they do they will rule, once they get the cost down. When that will be, hopefully in my lifetime.....

 

[sub.mesa]

Well of course I meant more expansive relative to SSDs than they are now. You see, it not about absolute numbers, but in relation to the competition SSDs bring to HDD manufacturers. At this time, harddrives still are a factor 20 cheaper than SSDs per unit of storage. But this gap used to be much much bigger and it is getting smaller all the time. NAND is growing very rapidly as in process scaling.

Just some years ago it was not economically feasible to store everything on SSD. However, many people today already do, buying one 256GB SSD or two 512GB in RAID0. This trend is only going to grow. Once the big mainstream of casual users stop using mechanical storage; the shipped units will drop and costs for the manufacturers will increase. Then we can see an even faster decline of the mechanical storage market.

Today however, things are running pretty smooth for them. Not much money to have to spend on R&D; virtually no competition left. Relative high pricing thanks to the Thailand-flooding and still a comfortable lead over SSDs in terms of storage GB per dollar. But this is going to change! And I think it may happen sooner than many think.

The additional benefits aside performance that SSD bring are often under appreciated by technical persons: no sound, no vibrations, no heat, battery life, potentially much more reliable. For many casual consumers, this translates to a better product. So for these reasons alone they would prefer non-mechanical storage, not just because of the performance aspect.

SSDs have some technical problems to work out before they can take off.

Not that I necessarily disagree, but to what kind of technical problems are you referring?

Personally I see future NVS moving gradually from providing high-performance storage in lower capacities to more of a replacement for harddrives. SSDs with TLC or triple level cell are excellent for casual large file storage and help keep the cost down. Future techniques of error correction may also utilise more of the raw NAND capacities. Because many of you guys do not know that more than half of the raw storage space in all modern SSDs is used for error correction alone. Without this, the SSD would constantly send out corrupt data. Luckily, it can provide as much correction as required to gain 10^-16 uBER specifications - considered to be among the best of storage products. A regular consumer harddrive is specced at 10^-14; meaning it is 100 times more likely to not be able to read a sector of data because of insufficient error correction.

 

[Hellhammer]

1tb ssd of same theoretical quality a few $1000.

Where did you get that number? Because there's absolutely nothing nothing supporting your statement that 1TB SSDs cost "a few $1000". Mushkin offers one for $1000 and once the M500 will become available, you can get 1TB for less than $600 (unless Micron/Crucial lied to every media rep they met at CES).

Also, what's "same theoretical quality"? Yes, a 1TB SSD can be a few thousand dollars if we go to the enterprise market but it's quite obvious that we aren't discussing about that (enterprise HDs are for $60/TB either). All facts indicate that consumer-grade SSDs are at least (if not more) reliable than consumer-grade hard drives.

SSDs have some technical problems to work out before they can take off.

HDs have a ton of technical problems and limitations but that didn't stop them from becoming popular. All technologies have their pros and cons but right now SSDs don't have a technical problem that would seriously limit their adoption. If SSDs had a major technical issue, they wouldn't be used at all.

 

[MrWizzard]

Where did you get that number? Because there's absolutely nothing nothing supporting your statement that 1TB SSDs cost "a few $1000". Mushkin offers one for $1000 and once the M500 will become available, you can get 1TB for less than $600 (unless Micron/Crucial lied to every media rep they met at CES).

Also, what's "same theoretical quality"? Yes, a 1TB SSD can be a few thousand dollars if we go to the enterprise market but it's quite obvious that we aren't discussing about that (enterprise HDs are for $60/TB either). All facts indicate that consumer-grade SSDs are at least (if not more) reliable than consumer-grade hard drives.



HDs have a ton of technical problems and limitations but that didn't stop them from becoming popular. All technologies have their pros and cons but right now SSDs don't have a technical problem that would seriously limit their adoption. If SSDs had a major technical issue, they wouldn't be used at all.

960Gb is not 1TB but I digress. Hey I hope I am wrong, I just think it will be a while before they come down in cost enough.

 

[Hellhammer]

960Gb is not 1TB but I digress. Hey I hope I am wrong, I just think it will be a while before they come down in cost enough.

The raw NAND capacity is 1024GiB, 12% of the NAND is just used for OP.

 

[sub.mesa]

Not just as spare space ('OP') but a part of that space is allocated to the RAID5-like bitcorrection on NAND chips. I believe it is common to utilise 16-way interleave, so 1/16th of your drive is going to be used for 'RAID5 redundancy' so to speak. This amounts to 6,25% of overhead for the NAND bitcorrection alone.

The older Crucial M4 (Marvell 88SS9174) did not support or employ NAND bitcorrection, thus its channels were used in 'RAID0' mode, in the sense that there is no 'overhead' and all of the NAND can be utilised for effective storage.

The newer Crucial M500 (Marvell 88SS9184) is supporting bitcorrection hence the lower capacity versus its M4 cousin: 64GB becomes 60GB, 128GB becomes 120GB, etc.

As manufacturer of the firmware, you basically have several options:
1) accept the fact that more space is required for 'RAID5 overhead' and sell the drives as 60/120/240/480/960GB
2) limit the amount of spare space ('overprovisioning') so that the SSD can be sold as 64/128/256GB anyway but at the cost of degraded performance after use as well as higher write amplification and thus shorter potential lifetime.

I'm happy Crucial is opting for the first option, which to me seems to be the most honest one. It is in the interests of the user to employ those protections and sacrifice a little bit of storage space.

 

[tweakboy]

Cuz they cant. Costs lots of money... gl

 

[jaqie]

Ill put my views on this subject in a simple way:
HDDs have near infinite writes and near infinite life, compared to SSDs. Their cost/capacity is and will always keep lowering despite naysayers. Their arial density will eventually hit a wall, but that is still a ways off. Their arial density increases their platter-capable speed, and thus their performance will scale as they ramp up arial density.

Hard drives are mass storage and will continue to be for many years. Their cost per capacity is far from stagnating, and they will continue to be the best at write many read many reliability for many years, many decades. They will become the slow but very cheap and reliable storage choice for massive files, massive files collections, and backups of faster storage like SSDs.

 

[MrWizzard]

Ill put my views on this subject in a simple way:
HDDs have near infinite writes and near infinite life, compared to SSDs. Their cost/capacity is and will always keep lowering despite naysayers. Their arial density will eventually hit a wall, but that is still a ways off. Their arial density increases their platter-capable speed, and thus their performance will scale as they ramp up arial density.

Hard drives are mass storage and will continue to be for many years. Their cost per capacity is far from stagnating, and they will continue to be the best at write many read many reliability for many years, many decades. They will become the slow but very cheap and reliable storage choice for massive files, massive files collections, and backups of faster storage like SSDs.

I concur with this point.

 

[Rakehellion]

harddrives still are a factor 20 cheaper than SSDs per unit of storage

Not even close. At the consumer level, SSDs cost maybe five times what hard drives do now.

 

[Rakehellion]

Ill put my views on this subject in a simple way:
HDDs have near infinite writes and near infinite life, compared to SSDs.

"Near infinite" is a meaningless term. SLC SSDs will give you about 100k writes, whereas HDs will give you about 1mil writes.

 

[Rakehellion]

Hard drives are mass storage and will continue to be for many years. Their cost per capacity is far from stagnating, and they will continue to be the best at write many read many reliability for many years, many decades. They will become the slow but very cheap and reliable storage choice for massive files, massive files collections, and backups of faster storage like SSDs.

Like tape drives.

 

[tweakboy]

I think its obvious, the capacity goes up price is high. Then slowly it comes down in price, nothing less then 60 dollars ,,,,, and some expensive sata 3 drivers from WDC for 100 ish. gl

 

[sub.mesa]

Not even close. At the consumer level, SSDs cost maybe five times what hard drives do now.

Can you give some examples?

I can only confirm such low factors for low-capacity harddrives. These obviously cannot be that much cheaper than the current generation of 2TB/3TB (the sweet spot) which have a far better storage/dollar ratio. A small disk with low-capacity platter would still involve a fair amount of physical material and processing and shipping costs, making low-capacity harddrives having a far lower capacity per dollar ratio.

If we compare 3TB Seagate harddrive against 128GiB Crucial M4 SSD:

Crucial M4 128GiB - 129.99
Seagate 3TB - 139.99

In this comparison, the harddrive provides 30 times more storage while only being 10 dollars more expensive. Comparisons with smaller disks will give lower factors, but generally an average factor of 20 would certainly seem fair to me.

 

[jaqie]

"Near infinite" is a meaningless term. SLC SSDs will give you about 100k writes, whereas HDs will give you about 1mil writes.

I dunno bout you but I have hard drives that have done far more writes than that.