Hitachi Data Systems to spin of storage division

jtr1962

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Translation: Hitachi sees magnetic storage as a dying technology and wants to sell off its disk division while they can still get something for it. In ten years time tops, magnetic disks will be as obsolete as CRTs are now.
 

sechs

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Frankly, I had expected that the spinning disk manufacturers would merge or joint venture themselves out of existence.
 

LunarMist

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So whatever happened to that 4Tb Hibachi drive?
 

Chewy509

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Frankly, I had expected that the spinning disk manufacturers would merge or joint venture themselves out of existence.

That's my feeling as well. None of the traditional large HDD makers have moved portions of their operations to SSDs yet, despite having years of experience with drive firmware and compatiability with ATA/SCSI/SAS/SATA controllers.

Anyway who's left in the traditional HDD market?
Seagate, Hitachi, Samsung, WDC?

Yet with SSDs we have over a dozern manufacturers, including Intel...
 

Stereodude

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That's my feeling as well. None of the traditional large HDD makers have moved portions of their operations to SSDs yet, despite having years of experience with drive firmware and compatiability with ATA/SCSI/SAS/SATA controllers.
Uh... WD bought Silicon Systems and now sells SSDs. Samsung also makes SSDs.
Yet with SSDs we have over a dozern manufacturers, including Intel...
Yeah, but they're all basically selling the same drives. With the exception of Intel and Samsung who are rolling their own controllers, there's only the Indilinx, and SandForce based drives regardless of whose name is on the drives right?

I would think that can't last very long due to competitive pressures. The market will probably thin out to only a few players who can survive. Of course I could be wrong since the RAM market never collapsed to only a few players.
 

MaxBurn

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My take on it is about any electronics house can put together SSD's on a similar assembly line to about any other electronic stuff. But making mechanical disks is a really impressive process with precision machining and clean environments etc. Sort of like a modern day mechanical watch maker.
 

MaxBurn

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It's the only type of watch I own but I know it's against the trend. For a while I thought a watchmaker would be a neat retirement job to slip into but these guys have years of training.
 

LunarMist

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There are tons of watches with mechancial hand movements around nowadays, although the timing is electronic. Some vehicles have stupid analog clocks too.
 

BingBangBop

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Me, I have a dual analog/digital quartz movement watch. I actually have a whole bunch of watches, but that one is my favorite. you can tell it is my favorite from the fact that the plating is wearing off giving it a two-tone color.

However, the buttons on it are all clogged up and no longer work preventing me from setting anything. The watch isn't valuable enough to justify the cost of fixing it. I think those buttons that digital watches use are their biggest flaw! So I just use the analog portion because it uses the standard stem system and that still works.

P.S. Mechanical watchmaking is a dying art. Long term, It is a bad field to get into because electronic movements are so much cheaper. Getting into a field like that, as a retirement job, would be like buying into a slide-rule company...
 

MaxBurn

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I recognize this is the wrong forum for this but mechanical watches are never going away. Just try to look at it as a form of art and a mechanical achievement.

Anyway because of these things we are never going to see a new mechanical hard drive maker, they will join and get smaller in volume but I think they will generally die out as we figure out the cost/size issue of SSD.
 

Stereodude

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Yeah, but no one looks at their spinning HD as an elegant art form or a mechanical achievement.

Personally, I think spinning disk storage will be with us for quite a while longer, since I don't see flash technology getting cheaper than spinning disks any time soon. A key reason is that flash process technology is already to about the smallest lithography that can be made with visible light and is about to hit the brick wall. Achieving higher densities will require some significant advances. That or they'll move from MLC to QLC or even less reliable flash.
 

MaxBurn

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Right so when the mechanical drives die out they are going gone, that's where that similarity breaks down.
 

jtr1962

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The biggest difference between mechanical hard disks and mechanical watches is the fact that watches are fairly low-tech. One person and the right tools can grind gears, make springs, pretty much do the whole operation. The raw materials for this have many other uses, and will always be readily available. Any person investing time and a few thousand dollars in tools can make mechanical watches just for the sheer love of it. Incidentally, with clocks being in every electronic gadget these days, watches in general are dying out. I never wear one any more, and I don't even carry a cell phone. It's easy enough to find a clock somewhere, assuming I don't have my GPS on me which I usually do. Truth is the rare times I go out for fun, I couldn't care less about the time anyway.

Mechanical hard disks on the other hand require expensive, sophisticated machinery to make. They also require a clean room. Once they are no longer economically viable ( presumably because SSD hit the same cost per GB ), there will be no incentive for a profit-driven company to make them. And there will be no way an individual who is in love with the technology to make them either ( unless that person is a multimillionaire ). So yes, once they're gone, they're gone. I can even see small runs of incandescent lamps being made for die-hards who refuse to use LED eventually more than I can see hard disks being made. Most people only care that their data is reliably and cost-effectively stored. The technology used is irrelevant.
 

CougTek

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...( presumably because SSD hit the same cost per GB )...
I don't see that happening any time soon. And when it'll happen, it will be because mecanical hard drives' cost will increase. We're at 32nm process and the biggest drives are only 256GB. And if you think about it, it takes much more space to create a byte with ROM cells than to create one on a traditional platter. With similar level of technology, mecanical hard drives will always have a space advantage (at least in the foreseable future).
 
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LunarMist

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Manufacturers can stack many chips in a small space if that is warranted. Cost is the issue.
 

sechs

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Agreed.

Spinning disks will stick around as long as they are sufficiently cheap enough. Even if they can't pack the bits much closer together, making flash will continue to get cheaper.

On the other hand, it really is getting harder to pack the bits closer together for spinning disks, and it doesn't get that much cheaper to produce them. It seems to me that we're approaching a plateau in platter density; the nearly annual doubling is gone.
 

jtr1962

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Spinning disks will stick around as long as they are sufficiently cheap enough. Even if they can't pack the bits much closer together, making flash will continue to get cheaper.

On the other hand, it really is getting harder to pack the bits closer together for spinning disks, and it doesn't get that much cheaper to produce them. It seems to me that we're approaching a plateau in platter density; the nearly annual doubling is gone.
That's exactly the problem. None of the technology roadmaps I've seen can get us much past 10 TB drives. And nearly all of them will increase the cost per drive, even though cost per GB will still drop due to increased areal density. Also, we're already experiencing reliability problems from ever increasing platter density. That may well be the limiting factor. Getting something to work in the lab, or even in production, is one thing. Getting it to last for 3 to 5 years in the real world is quite another.

Flash memory on the other hand is becoming less expensive due to economies of scale. Even now, if cost were no object, you could pack enough flash chips into a drive to get well past 10 TB. Nothing is stopping us from putting ten or more stacked flash chips in a single IC package except cost and/or demand. When the flash chips cost ten cents each instead of a dollar, there will be incentive to do so. Undoubtedly we'll reach ever smaller feature sizes because this is needed for other electronic devices, not just flash RAM. Not sure what the inherent limit is here, but it's way smaller than magnetic bits on a spinning disk. Whatever the limits of flash ( or whatever technology may replace it ), the limits on spinning disks are even more daunting. I would be surprised if spinning disks existed much past 2020, with 2015 being a more likely time where they will be phased out. Remember how people talked about CRTs remaining with us for much longer? Even 5 years ago there were people saying CRTs would be with us for a while. And now they're completely gone, indeed have been gone long before the predictions said they would be. I think it's going to be the same for magnetic hard disks.
 

LunarMist

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I'm not so sure it will be as soon as many think. Not that much SSD capacity/price progress has been made in the past year. 10 years ago many were proclaiming that tape would be a dead storage medium and it is still progressing.
 

sechs

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I dunno. I can buy a 60GB SSD today for about what I paid for a 30GB one a year ago.

I think that what you're really saying is that spinning disks will be relegated to niches. I don't disagree.
 

LunarMist

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It is still more than half and meanwhile HDs are cheaper too. At that rate I will be old dead before capacities and price of SSDs and HDs are in parity.
 

LunarMist

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It is interesting that Hitachi ignored the advancing format this time around.
 

LunarMist

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600GB platters at 7200 RPM are still not bad. Do Hitachi drives work in RIAD?
 

BingBangBop

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That is a price that fits the "too good to be true category". Note they are out of stock which I suspect will never be in stock at least at that price.
 
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