Seagate: SSDs will never match per-gigabyte costs of HDDs

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

Seagate Technology claims that no matter how cheap NAND flash memory will get in the coming years, it will never be able to match the per-gigabyte price of rotating magnetic media used in hard disk drives. In fact, the price of one gigabyte on a HDD will decrease to half of a penny over the next five years, according to one of the world’s largest makers of hard drives.

 

Prices of solid-state drives have declined dramatically in the recent years because NAND flash got significantly cheaper as a result of numerous technological breakthroughs and tough competition between several players. SanDisk Corp. and Toshiba Corp. predict that by 2020 the cost of non-volatile memory will decline so significantly that enterprise-class SSDs will match prices of enterprise-class hard disk drives in terms of per-gigabyte price. Seagate strongly disagrees with this prediction.

 

“In fact, the disparity between the cost on a dollar per gigabyte is upper to 20 to 1,I personally will never foresee the day, when there is a crossover [between the per-gigabyte cost of NAND and rotating magnetic media]. In 2020 we have drives in the portfolio that will be less than half a penny per-gigabyte. I just don’t see how you could get that from the competing technology.” - Dave Morton, senior vice president of finance at Seagate, at Citigroup’s global technology conference. - Dave Morton, senior vice president of finance at Seagate, at Citigroup’s global technology conference. 

 

   

 

Today, an inexpensive consumer-class 3TB HDD costs around $100, or about $0.033 (3 cents) per-gigabyte. A low-cost 120GB SSD retails for approximately $70, which means that its per-gigabyte cost is around $0.58 (58 cents). There is a different arithmetic for datacentre-class SSDs and HDDs, but the per-gigabyte price difference between the two kinds of storage devices is still huge.

 

However, for many datacentre applications per-gigabyte cost does not really matter. What matters is the amount of read/write input/output operations per second (IOPS) a storage solution can perform, its maximum bandwidth and power consumption. SSDs are orders of magnitude faster than HDDs in terms of IOPS (the fastest 15K RPM HDDs support around 200 IOPS, whereas modern high-end SSDs declare around one million IOPS) and they provide significantly higher bandwidth.For many datacentre applications today, HDDs are irrelevant. However, for cold storage and archive applications SSDs are too expensive, which is why datacentres use both solid-state drives and hard disk drives to store different kinds of data.

 

 

 

I personally think he's wrong, it will happen eventually, he's just not willing reduce the price as he sees it as a profit, saying the priced will never match cost per gig is like apple saying 16 gb is more than enough. remember HDD manufacturers said the same thing when they were new.
when SSD's are growing in capacities, ofcourse the price would come down eventually. 


source : http://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-ssds-will-never-match-per-gigabyte-costs-of-hdds/

[Aytex]

well I think it depends if it fails alot or nah

[EChondo]

Well I guess we'll see who is correct.

 

Obviously we all hope that Seagate is wrong here, I want to get rid of my hard drives in both my desktop and servers so badly, but SSD's aren't affordable enough for that kind of switch, yet.

[Trik'Stari]

I seriously doubt this. Tech always gets cheaper and more powerful. Eventually some other form of storage will come along that will knock both out.

[terrytek]

Honestly i kinda agree. I mean, look at how cheap HDDs are now. I hope Seagate isn't wrong at all. I love my hard drives religiously and i never wanna replace them.

[Kirky2k15]

I long for the day ssds become THE standard thing in ALL pcs, that would bring prices down even further IMO, even now, in 2015 go on any dell or hp site and most if not all of their stuff aimed at average joe doesn't come with an ssd as standard, they have to manually configure it to include one

[LegacyStijncat]

Seagate, the only company in the top storage manufacturer (WD, Crucial, Kingston...) who didn't release SSD's for individuals (alongside HGST) bascically says SSD's will never topple Harddrives.

Yeaaaah...

[terrytek]

I long for the day ssds become THE standard thing in ALL pcs, that would bring prices down even further IMO, even now, in 2015 go on any dell or hp site and most if not all of their stuff aimed at average joe doesn't come with an ssd as standard, they have to manually configure it to include one

I honestly cannot picture seeing PCs run SSD only at all. But it's me. I would never run a PC SSD-only. It must have an HDD or else i won't use it.

[terrytek]

Seagate, the only company in the top storage manufacturer (WD, Crucial, Kingston...) who didn't release SSD's for individuals (alongside HGST) bascically says SSD's will never topple Harddrives.

Yeaaaah...

Well, they did release SSDs for individuals. The 600 Series.

[Dimwitted]

What he's not bringing to the table is usage. What will be the average standard size on the average consumer machine in 5 years? 10tb? 20? 50? Ooooor, will it slow down like we're seeing right now to the 1-2tb sizes? A size that the hdd guys will have already passed by and the ssd guys happily playing in at the $30 - 50 price range? With 3D NAND and 4level TLC it won't take long for the price of decent sized drives to plummet. 

[AresKrieger]

The size of the hdd is limited to the size of the disc, and whatever trickery they can pull (blueray was an example for optical) can only hold out for so long; will SSD top size of Hdd I think yes but it also has a limit due to size constraints, I personally think molecular structure (likely carbon) based storage needs to become a thing as that would last forever at least in theory (modifying carbon crystal or nanotube lattice) but we don't know how to do such a thing yet to store data, so I see ssd surpassing hdd unless someone makes a hdd with infinite layering potencial

[deviant88]

For fuck sake these people at Seagate are desperate they remind me of Ubisofts "FPS is just a number". What the fuck.

[Guest Kloaked]

Honestly i kinda agree. I mean, look at how cheap HDDs are now. I hope Seagate isn't wrong at all. I love my hard drives religiously and i never wanna replace them.

 

[Sakkura]

Well I guess we'll see who is correct.

 

Obviously we all hope that Seagate is wrong here, I want to get rid of my hard drives in both my desktop and servers so badly, but SSD's aren't affordable enough for that kind of switch, yet.

 

 

I kind of hope Seagate is right, because it means HDDs will have to get a lot cheaper and ramp up capacity aggressively. SSDs are going to keep trucking, if HDD makers can speed up their progress well then that's great.

 

Seagate, the only company in the top storage manufacturer (WD, Crucial, Kingston...) who didn't release SSD's for individuals (alongside HGST) bascically says SSD's will never topple Harddrives.

Yeaaaah...

 

Uh, Seagate has been offering consumer SSDs for a while now...

[terrytek]

 

because it's just me. I grew up with hard drives, i don't want to see them die before me.

[Me1z]

 

SSDs are the future and 'old man' Seagate needs to give in or be left behind. The usefulness of HDDs is reaching its end, and its time to embrace new technologies. What's sad is we don't even need to do anything about this, their declining sales alone will spell out just how wrong they were.

[Sauron]

I don't buy it. Optical discs have physical limits, and we're pretty close to them already. Flash memory on the other hand is much more flexible in this sense. Eventually hdds will hit a brick wall (probably around 16tb) and sit there, whereas ssds are doubling maximum capacity every year. When the prices truly start to drop, and ssds are at 256tb while hdds are stuck at 16, it won't make sense to use hdds anymore. For storing absurd amounts of data tape is still king btw.

[brownninja97]

hmm i think they have a point, you see hdds exploding with massive numbers and ssds are chasing, even if ssds get cheaper to manufacture they will cost more because majority of the consumer will not know that they have a large profit margin.

[LegacyStijncat]

I kind of hope Seagate is right, because it means HDDs will have to get a lot cheaper and ramp up capacity aggressively. SSDs are going to keep trucking, if HDD makers can speed up their progress well then that's great.

 

 

Uh, Seagate has been offering consumer SSDs for a while now...

Well, they did release SSDs for individuals. The 600 Series.

Really? Sorry, didn't see!

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

because it's just me. I grew up with hard drives, i don't want to see them die before me.

70mm reels and shooting in Reels were a thing, but you can create them as such on digital, there's absolutely no use shooting a movie on reel compared to digital, the same way HDD's are gonna go away eventually. 

[EChondo]

I kind of hope Seagate is right, because it means HDDs will have to get a lot cheaper and ramp up capacity aggressively. SSDs are going to keep trucking, if HDD makers can speed up their progress well then that's great.

Well Toshiba is predicting 128TB SSD's by 2018, do you think HD's can get that high by then as well? Of course 128TB won't be available to the masses, but by 2020 or so we should have consumer SSD's close to that capacity and I don't see how HD's can even come close to that.

[Kirky2k15]

I honestly cannot picture seeing PCs run SSD only at all. But it's me. I would never run a PC SSD-only. It must have an HDD or else i won't use it.

I was mainly talking about laptops where there is only room for one drive but the same can be said for desktops but I think you could be in a tiny minority there...

 

Are you talking about redundancy or some other reason? As we all know ssds are superior drives to hdds right? Don't get me wrong I know there WAS a time when SSDs were unreliable (1st and 2nd gen) but now look at some of the usage tests done by Samsung...

[AresKrieger]

 

 

SSDs are the future and 'old man' Seagate needs to give in or be left behind. The usefulness of HDDs is reaching its end, and its time to embrace new technologies. What's sad is we don't even need to do anything about this, their declining sales alone will spell out just how wrong they were.

Capitalism at its finest

[Sakkura]

 

SSDs are the future and 'old man' Seagate needs to give in or be left behind. The usefulness of HDDs is reaching its end, and its time to embrace new technologies. What's sad is we don't even need to do anything about this, their declining sales alone will spell out just how wrong they were.

 

Remember Sandforce? That belongs to Seagate now. They're not entirely clueless about what's happening.

[samcool55]

That's fine, as long as ssd's get cheaper it's good.

I mean we are getting to a point where you can get an ssd with enough storage for most things for quite cheap!

And ssd's aren't great at long-term storage while hdd's are.

 

So SSD for OS and programs, HDD for mass storage. And that's how it's going to be for a looong time.