Also, for some extra context:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/toshiba-be-delisted-after-74-years-faces-future-with-new-owners-2023-12-19/

Tape will be around until something better for archival purposes comes around

It lasts significantly longer sitting on the shelf than HDD or SSD by far

I doubt it’s being used for anything other than backups and archiving though

It's criminal that some computers are still sold with mechanical hard drives, but I will still be using them in NAS for years to come. The right technology for the right job.

Yes. SSDs are still excellent for small form factor and speed, but for long term reliable storage in massive volumes, old fasion hard drives are only second to tape storage.

Source: I am in charge of four 1.2PB storage clusters, each consisting of 144 10TB Toshiba drives. The systems write their output to 10TB tapes for data delivery.

Slow is relative.

Are you trying to compile 1GB worth of code or load into memory 4GB of game at startup: absolutelly, they're slow.

Are you serving a compressed 1080p video file from your NAS to your media player over 100Mb/s ethernet: they're more than fast enough. (Or to put things another way, trying to fit your home collection of media files on SSDs in yout NAS is probably not so smart as you can get almost 10x the storage for the same price and the bottleneck in that system isn't the HDD)

You're not going to put a massive production database of a performance criticial system on an HDD but storing "just in case" in one your historic of RAW images files after you've processed them is probably the smart thing to do.

Tapes themselves are cheaper but there's also the upfront cost of the tape drive (we're talking thousands).

For me, reliability is now the bottleneck.

So many HDs are crapping out after about 5 years. Not saying SSDs are better, but I haven't used any for storage. But it's starting to feel like a subscription plan as I'm rotating hard drives in my server nearly every year now since 2018.

Wendel from level 1 techs really likes the multi actuator spinning rust drives. You still wouldn't use them for a boot drive, but they're fast enough to saturate a sata connection, while still being much more dense than ssds. They can achieve 500MB/s sequential speeds, so they're plenty fast for large file access. Most consumers should be using SSD's but if you're dealing with more than a couple terabytes, the best solution isn't as straightforward.

Most super computer systems have been doing away with hhds for the speed and energy efficiency causing ssds and tape to be the two forms of storage.

Hamr drives and for data center use. Consumer ssds are made very poorly and even premium drives like a Samsung pro won't hold up in a data center environment. Hard drives on the other hand are basically only data center versions now.

No idea where this "7 times cheaper" comes

Probably from back when Toshiba was relevant

This is my thing. I have about 122TB of spinning metal (with the same as an offsite backup) with SSDs as ZIL and L2ARC. And it's awesome. HDDs I think will genuinely be important for for the foreseeable future.

Power consumption, noise, durability...

As a newb I hope one day in my journey, I can look back at this and say "I finally understand this." Til then thank you, magic man

Around AUD $4500

I work tech support for a NAS company and the ratio of HDDs to SSDs is roughly 85-15. Sometimes people use SSDs for stuff that requires low latency, but most commonly they're used as a cache for HDDs in my experience.

Work for one of the largest and we literally finished phasing out tape this year lol.

My NAS device has 80TB of usable space (6x16TB, raid5). Equivalent would've cost tens of thousands of dollars in drives alone.

Once 16TB SSDs are even available I will probably start migrating them in, but for now mechanical drives it is.

The last set of NAS drives I bought for my home server were ~$120 for 8TB, and while random access may not quite measure up, I'd put them up against your $50 Inland white-label drive for sustained R/W any day of the week, especially once the SSD's write cache is saturated. That's not even comparing like-for-like -- consumer hard drives using SMR are quite a bit cheaper than the NAS drives I bought, and enterprise-grade Flash storage costs 2-4 times as much as low-end consumer flash.

There's absolutely still a case to be made for mechanical drives in near-line storage, and that's not likely to change for quite a few years yet.

Nobody is buying $50 drives for a datacenter. What matters here is how this compares with 16TB+ sizes.