Global HDD sales drop another 12% to 77 million devices for Q1 2019

Who would have throught only 25 years ago that the sci-fi futuristic marvel called the 700mb cdrom disc, would now look as ancient today as the wax cylinder is to todays digital music. lol

 

There will be mechanical issue with HDD before SSD reaches its limit.

Depends on luck.

 

Where I live, HDD offer is so basic you don't even want to look at t hem, let alone buy one unless you have to. I wanted a new generation hybrid HDD but no one is importing them. You can just get WD green/blue/black and that's about it. Snooze fest.

edit: they stocked seagate firecuda 2tb, just looked. Hell no, 100 euros for 2tb hdd...smh ...will stack sata ssd's instead...

 

Not surprising. I just bought a Samsung 1TB 860 QVO for £98 delivered. Now I'm waiting for the 2TB to come down in price to replace the final HDD in my PC.

 

I bought 16TB this year alone. But it's sad to see that the prices are not really going down, 4TB drives have had the same cost for ages.

 

Depends what SSD type, MLC or SLC last for ages, most normal users wont ever reach the life-span of it, QLC on the other hand yeah isn't great.... Kinda depends what you want to do on such things, i mean for achieve data they would last for ages right? since you put the data on and mostly leave it alone. its only for people putting loads of data on and off it that run into any issue.

I've got 10.6TB written atm on my main boot drive after about a year and a half give or take, considering it MLC, i think it'll last another 20 years without much worry at the going rate... and by then i'm 99% sure i'd have gone onto whatever the newer format is or just a better drive. Least in my experience HDD's have failed me far more often, in about a decade of owning SSD's not a single one has failed me yet, but i've had mutiple HDD's fail due to multiple reasons

 

if by "HDD "becoming more expensive you mean they raise the prices of HDD again, and SSD stay at there prices then meh...

SSD have to come to about 50$ for 1TB if not lower to match current HDD prices total capacity wise. I still think that is long way away if it ever happens.

 

not really i got my 250 gb 860 evo about 100 euros late 2017 now you can find 500gb ssd's on 50 euros with ease ... i would say ssd prices coming down rapidly ! while hdd's are kind of stale for a while now ! Sure hdd's still win by a lot on price/capacity but the diference month after month shrinking there was a time we where celebrating ssd's with lees than 1 $ per gb now we are between 0.15~0.20 $ per gb !

 

you can get dramless 480GB/~50$ ssd's that loose transfer speed after a few hundred MB of sustained transfer, or you can get samsung 250gb/~60$. Which $/GB ones are we talking about? I am guessing the dramless junk ones...

 

@gx-x Ok i was a bit off right now you can get western digital blue 500gb for 59 euro vat (24%) included.and crushial mx500 62 euro ...and Samsung 860 evo 500gb 72 euro , when i got my 860 evo it replaced my beloved from2012/13 intel 330 120gb as os drive ....the evo is vastly faster....the difference i noticed in normal use as os drive was literally 0, so wd blue ssd seems a better buy than the evo , correct me if i am wrong.

 

It depends on the usage of the drive. 500gb, even 256 gb is too big (a waste) for an OS. And if you are going to store large files they make no sense in TLC ramless variant because after 100-300mb they are no longer copying 300~400MB/s but fall down to 150ish or even lower if it's real junk drive. This is pointless then, since you can have, say, WD blue single platter 1TB drive do 130MB/s constantly for 30$...

PS. I don't know how WD SSD blue performs. I imagine badly, it's ramless TLC...like the rest of the herd. It's good enough for OS and application launches I guess...Only good solution atm seems to be nvme ssd. As much as the speed is a waste, they are not slowed down by cheap chips and controllers for some reason. So storage wise, I'd pay extra for that. Actually, not yet. HDD is still fine for large files and large games.

PPS. prices vary depending in which country you live. Where I live, you cant get 500gb ssd of any kind under 100€ 250gb samsung 860 is 70e aprox.

 

@gx-x Really expensive and i thought in greece the prices are high!
https://www.skroutz.gr/s/13867020/Samsung-860-Evo-500GB.html

And the wd blue
https://www.skroutz.gr/s/12658338/Western-Digital-Blue-3D-500GB.html

In general the write speed is rarerly relevant read speeds on game and programs are much more important and i feel the biggest speed increase comes from the average seek time of a file where any kind of ssd would smoke an hdd out of the water i would agree bulk storage movies etc an hdd is the way to go still and an ssd of this type will just save you very little time to a point that makes it irrelevant. Then an ssd of this type will make game loading times from 1 min (hdd)to 20 seconds a fast nvme pci express ssd would bring that down to 18 sec maaaaaaybe 17 (and i am generus) . Ofcourse if you deal with editing 4k video on very high bitrates writing and reading then yes there is no contest there also some databases and neural networks will love the extra speed and will suck up every single bit you can give em !
But when it comes to program install and game install or os install the expensive "fast" models not really worth it.

 

Since I am having trouble explaining this, here's what you do: download AS SSD benchmark toll (it's free), select 3GB for size (default is 1gb) go to tools menu and select copy-benchmark. This simulates some real world application.

Now, I don't have fancy ssd, but I think one of the better cheap 3D nand (TLC) ones that in regular benchmark gets over 500MB/s but in "real life" it get's


Samsung would be much better with this, but if you look reviews for some cheapo tlc drives, like kingstone and such (WD Blue probably) you'll see those speeds even 50% lower.


PS. This does not affect OS boot time, but will affect moving files around or streaming big files (less important, speed is good enough)

 

@gx-x So we are saying give or take the same thing then !
intel 330 120gb

Spoiler

and my Evo 850 250gb (( i was remembering i have the 860 ...oh well ))

Spoiler

i never questioned that the speed of the more expensive drives what i questioned is their value over their cheaper competitors when the use case scenario is for OS and programs or games what is the big jump over the hdd's is the Acc.time , obviously the evo will be faster i tried path of exile and world of tanks on both intel 330 and 850 evo and i could not tell the difference on the loading times also before i get the evo i had em on my 2tb hdd toshiba had no space to spare on the 120gb os drive since i wanted to have 50 gb free at all times ,i could tell instantly on the loading times when i moved em to ssd but i could not tell em apart(between the ssd's) ... funny thing is that the intel 330 is just my path of exile + world of tanks drive and 20 gb to spare just cause well i do not need the sata port for anything else ...yet

and sorry if i am so stuck with the intel 330 and 850 evo ...is what i have and i have hands on experience day after day

 

it's ok to be stuck with things you know for comparisons. I do the same thing. Samsung is not a gamble, Crucial is, if you don't know exact series or model, you might just end up overpaying for another slow TLC model. Same with A-Data...
and again, my point is, the cheapo SSDs are not really super faster when it comes to large files and still are a lot more expensive than HDDs (but they are quite faster nevertheless) which brings me to my desire of having SSHD to replace HDD. But those have worst pricing ever. I guess HDD industry just wants to die...

 

@gx-x yes i tottaly agree for big files an hdd is better than a cheap ssd !
but when it comes to loading times etc even a cheap or old ssd will blow any hdd out of the water ! sshd are a good middle ground !
here is belated my hdd benchmark 3tb toshiba it does remarkably on squencial speeds for an hdd but when it comes to access time ... when it has to find few hundred files +their fragments in some cases ... even cheap ssd's blowing it out of the water thats from 14ms to 0.2 ms ...or lower ! there is where the snappiness comes when is used as os drive !

Spoiler

sorry it took so long for that but this test took the hdd LITERALLY 2 hours !
and to note that the game might seem faster than my intel 330 ...but when i use path of exile on hdd ... and i do speed clearing maps for currency .... on hdd goes like this loading the map (15-20 sec) running it 1.5 ~2 mins (loading screen back to my hideout 15~20 sec ) opening new map ...repeat ..
on the intel 330 and 850 evo .... it is loading the map (2-3 seconds ) running it 1.5~2mins (loading screen back to my hideout 2-3 seconnds ) pretty much on ssd i would run 4 maps roughly on the same time i would run 3 on hdd !

 

it should have not taken any more than seconds combined on the test, I did the test with mine, it took like, 5 minutes, maybe 7? And I was doing those with 3GB selected on main window, since 1TB is typical and drives (both hdd and ssd) are often "rigged" to do those well Maybe check your sata cable?

I also play PoE and have it on SSD, but had it on HDD too. It is slower on HDD (not as slow as in your case, again, there is something wrong that), but most loading is done from their servers (items on my char when I first open the inventory take almost a minute to load, but that's the minute while everything is downloaded, including vendor inventory and such. This time is always the same, SSD, HDD, doesn't really matter). If you really want to speed up PoE loading times (10x+ faster even on HDD) unpack Content.ggpk archive (there is a tool) with all the data. It's due to PoE, not HDD (exclusively) since, say, Destiny 2 runs almost the same from SSD and HDD (tested it) and it loads slow on both. D3 loads maps faster, otherwise it's the same, etc.

edit: took less than 3 minutes, if even 2...

 

@gx-x yes the gaming Benchmark does 2-3 mins ! but see what happens when you do the Seq 4k etc benchmark ! i know i did not had to do that one but i wanted to show you the acc time !
each 4k piece does 1gb on less than 1mb sec ..... fun ! i have to check the gppk unpack i was not aware !!!

 

it says in the bottom of the app screen aprox. how long will it take, that one takes ~19 minutes for 1GB.

Thanks for the contribution That Toshiba is interesting drive indeed. Very fast.

 

the 4k write starts at about 1.5mb and drops down to what you see ! and thats just the write ! then it does the same time for the read ! another half hour and another for 4k-64 write ...and then like 15 mins for the 4k-64 read !