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Western Digital Shuts Down Hard Drive Factory - Just not Enough Demand

BluesFanUK said:
Idiots. SSD prices are still obscene.

I just want one giant HDD which I can use to store all my media and never worry about it at a reasonable price.

Get that capacity to stupid sizes like 20TB and it becomes the ultimate media solution with a small SSD for the OS.
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LOL yes and you also lose an obscene amount of data when it craps out. Consumer HDDs of very high capacity are really the worst idea if you care even a little bit about that data. Let alone the task of copying it all to a backup disk at the low sequential speed you get.

2~4 TB is as far as I'd go.
 
Vayra86 said:
LOL yes and you also lose an obscene amount of data when it craps out. Consumer HDDs of very high capacity are really the worst idea if you care even a little bit about that data. Let alone the task of copying it all to a backup disk at the low sequential speed you get.

2~4 TB is as far as I'd go.
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He's describing a NAS and doesn't know it?
 
u2konline said:
um do you have a ebay account?

I don't even use SSD, i use sata hard drives, internal and external. probably always will for a long time, i don't think my desktop even supports SSD anyway.
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Why it wouldn't support? I ran a SSD with an old AM2 motherboard a few years ago. And like said above, there are even PATA SSDs, which work just like a normal HDD.

Myself I still have one HDD for media, though it would be time to get rid of that also.
 
Its hard to keep demand, when you inflate prices, WD.

A little flood here, a little flood there, oops 3x the price, 5 years later its still move expensive than before the floods..

Shocking, shocking i say!
 
FordGT90Concept said:
SSDs are billions of switches. Which ever switches fail, that data is gone.
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I am not sure that's a convincing argument. I mean I agree with you re the longevity of magnetic fields vs flash, but everything we are dealing with here iems digital, hence "little switches"
 
Axaion said:
Its hard to keep demand, when you inflate prices, WD.

A little flood here, a little flood there, oops 3x the price, 5 years later its still move expensive than before the floods..

Shocking, shocking i say!
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THIS! I wonder why nobody else said that. It's true, even in the face of extinction the HDD prices are callously high, making the purchase of SSDs a no brainer....
 
R-T-B said:
I am not sure that's a convincing argument. I mean I agree with you re the longevity of magnetic fields vs flash, but everything we are dealing with here iems digital, hence "little switches"
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Volatile switches (found in hard drive circuit boards) are far more durable than non-volatile (found in the storage media of SSDs). Hard drive circuit boards can also be replaced and the data retained in full on the platters.
 
um, i just looked at these SSD drives, no thanks. Think i will stick with Sata's internal and externals, SSDs are expensive. I can find a 4TB external for under 89 dollars. I just bought a 500GB external drive for only 24 dollars. a 500 SSD cost around 200 bucks lol
 
FordGT90Concept said:
Volatile switches (found in hard drive circuit boards) are far more durable than non-volatile (found in the storage media of SSDs). Hard drive circuit boards can also be replaced and the data retained in full on the platters.
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Good point. That's a convincing statement to retain HDDs data for archival purposes on..... HDDs.

Optical storage has proven longevity as well. But of course, depends how it's stored. I got CDs made up 15 yrs ago, still working just fine.
 
FordGT90Concept said:
Volatile switches (found in hard drive circuit boards) are far more durable than non-volatile (found in the storage media of SSDs). Hard drive circuit boards can also be replaced and the data retained in full on the platters.
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I wasn't referring to the controller boards at all, nor did it sound like what I quoted was. And you really can't just hotswap HDD circuit boards without a lot of hackery (believe me, I've tried).

AlwaysHope said:
Good point. That's a convincing statement to retain HDDs data for archival purposes on..... HDDs.
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It's actually a more convincing argument for tape. Unless you fancy cloning drive parameters between chips on HDDs when a logic board goes out. Speaking from experience here trying at home data recovery.

AlwaysHope said:
Optical storage has proven longevity as well.
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Some. Most is actually not that good. You are right at the end shelf life for most standard media.
 
I'm planning to buy 6TB WD Gold for my game library. No SSDs can accommodate over 300 steam games plus 50+ origin & uplay games.
HDD is still a viable choice for mass storage, especially nowadays that games are 50+ GB.
 
I can't understand why they can't simply just make the highest single platter drive you can and pair it with like 1GB for every TB and have it connect directly to a PCIe x4 slot. Problem solved fast w/plenty of storage. Half the reason cache size on a HDD doesn't do that much is the antique SATA interface is slow trash. StoreMI is a perfect example of how they've failed themselves at a progressing the HDD's speed and value proposition over flash storage.

u2konline said:
um, i just looked at these SSD drives, no thanks. Think i will stick with Sata's internal and externals, SSDs are expensive. I can find a 4TB external for under 89 dollars. I just bought a 500GB external drive for only 24 dollars. a 500 SSD cost around 200 bucks lol
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Exactly for most people they are pretty much only useful to boot quickly off of and for the OS to run more responsively on. That's exactly why for NVMe drives the Samsung PM961 Polaris 128GB M.2 NGFF PCIe Gen3 x4 is really one of the better value drives. It's nearly on par with the Samsung EVO 970/960 at a much reduced price, but half the capacity. For just a OS install though it's a no brain win comparatively though and even otherwise that w/StoreMI or software raid while marginally more costly is probably still the better value for dollar if the performance is a concern. Now if storage is the concern you still can't be a old fashion HDD especially w/StoreMI for AMD Ryzen users.
 
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It's so funny that tape is going to outlast HDDs.
 
uhh prices don't match yet
 
jeez hds arent on their deathbead yet. sure i use multiple ssds as primary drives in all my builds but i also use spinners in raid 1 as bulk data storage on some of them too (backups, media). as well as a nas in raid 5. thats backed up up every few weeks to rotated 8 tb drives one of which is stored off site.

and i can leave a spinner unpowered for years and not worry about the data rot ssds can have after years of unpowered storage (well pretty much anyway, as long as i can get it to spin it up again heh).
 
Jonathan Marcus said:
Japanese Toshiba invented NAND flash in 1987. They have always been the pioneer of the FLASH Memory. Toshiba NAND has always been the best of the best among the other NAND brands (Samsung, Hynix and Micron). But they sold the NAND devision of the company. They continue to produce useless! HDD drives. I can not understand that. Why they didn't sell the HDD division of the company rather than the NAND division? SSD technology is the future of the storage. But inventor of the NAND flash sold its NAND devision.
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Same reason AMD sold their mobile division: they needed cold hard cash as they were staring bankruptcy in the face. NAND at the time wasn't as profitable, was also a huge R&D sink, and they had no crystal ball to tell them "hold on to this assest for dear life because it's going to print money like it's no one's business in a couple years."
 
u2konline said:
um, i just looked at these SSD drives, no thanks. Think i will stick with Sata's internal and externals, SSDs are expensive. I can find a 4TB external for under 89 dollars. I just bought a 500GB external drive for only 24 dollars. a 500 SSD cost around 200 bucks lol
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No... even 1TB SSDs can be found for less than that, and you don't even have to look hard (newegg). Your point that HDD storage is cheaper per GB is still very much true, but SSDs aren't that expensive.

HDDs and SSDs have their own use cases. Nobody in their right mind without a very heavy wallet is building an SSD NAS. When you have big data, you need storage at a reasonable price, even more so if you want redundancy, which you probably do. SSDs aren't gonna give you that. However, the vast majority of people would prefer to pony up a little for a SSD to at least boot off of, because hard drives are slow.
 
Vayra86 said:
LOL yes and you also lose an obscene amount of data when it craps out. Consumer HDDs of very high capacity are really the worst idea if you care even a little bit about that data. Let alone the task of copying it all to a backup disk at the low sequential speed you get.

2~4 TB is as far as I'd go.
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I got news buddy, you can lose data on just about anything, the capacity of the drives makes zero difference. If you're fearful of losing large quantities of data then that's your problem.

For me high capacity drives are great, they reduce the number of drives sitting in the PC, overall using less power, creating less heat, and not generating as much noise. This then frees up space to add more drives if needed without resorting to external devices and you can store more data in one central repository rather than spreading them out over several drives.

The drawbacks? Sure, copying say 10TB from drive to drive is going to take a long time, but you're talking a couple days at most. If you look after your PC and have something like HD Sentinel installed it will warn you well before your drive 'craps out'. You've got to be the unluckiest person in the world if you turn your machine on and your storage drive is dead.
 
noooooooo....even though I don't like the operational noise of the black series but still...at least Toshiba continues to strive for higher capacities
 
u2konline said:
um, i just looked at these SSD drives, no thanks. Think i will stick with Sata's internal and externals, SSDs are expensive. I can find a 4TB external for under 89 dollars. I just bought a 500GB external drive for only 24 dollars. a 500 SSD cost around 200 bucks lol
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You can buy a crucial MX500 1TB for $199, $185 on amazon. Not sure where you are getting $200 for a 500GB SSD, unless you are looking at a bizarrely overpriced website.
 
TheinsanegamerN said:
You can buy a crucial MX500 1TB for $199, $185 on amazon. Not sure where you are getting $200 for a 500GB SSD, unless you are looking at a bizarrely overpriced website.
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He was comparing to external drives, so this is what you should be looking at. And Samsung T3 500GB is $196 @ Amazon at this very moment.
 
My thoughts are that in the consumer space, hard drives are going to mostly go the way of the Dodo bird especially in the new world of digital, on-demand media along with cloud storage. It used to be that you needed a lot of hard drives at the consumer level to hold your pictures, documents, music, movies, etc. but now with the advent of digital on-demand media (NetFlix, Amazon Prime Video, Google Music, Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) the idea of having a lot of hard drive space is becoming an old fashioned idea. And as for backups, a lot of people are turning to the cloud now that you can get cloud storage for really cheap (about the cost of a cup of coffee).

Hard drives will always be the mass storage type of device but it's mainly going to be a data center only kind of thing, something only the huge cloud services companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Rackspace buy to store massive amounts of data. As for consumers, SSDs will probably be the only thing you'll find in consumer systems.
u2konline said:
um, i just looked at these SSD drives, no thanks. Think i will stick with Sata's internal and externals, SSDs are expensive. I can find a 4TB external for under 89 dollars. I just bought a 500GB external drive for only 24 dollars. a 500 SSD cost around 200 bucks lol
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Yes, but that 500 GB hard drive is slow as shit when it comes to booting Windows and loading your programs. SSDs, even a 256 GB SSD (which is cheaper), will boot your system and load your programs in a fraction of the time. Yes, hard drives will always remain the mass storage device type but SSDs is where it's at if you want really fast, random access, high capacity storage such as one needs for booting Windows and loading programs. Most boot benchmarks put loading Windows on a hard drive at around 30 seconds, with an SSD I can have Windows booted in less than 10 seconds.
 
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