Comments by "Siana Gearz" (@SianaGearz) on "Thailand’s Hard Drive Industry Problem" video.

  1. Strong disagreement on all points. German engineering businesses have their hands in a LOT of pies, thousands of them. It has semiconductor business and others. Infineon is one of the larger semiconductor companies and is German. Germany also has one of world leadership positions in chemistry (BASF etc), medical technology, robotics and factory and engineering equipment, and companies like Bosch are involved in more engineering and manufacturing ventures than you can count, always behind the scenes, critical supplier. SSDs will almost fully supplant HDDs when the price is right for almost all uses, and the price of SSDs has basically no lower bound in sight. HDD capacity per square inch has been barely growing in the last 10 years, and it is an extremely complex assembly which can no longer be reduced in cost. SSDs are suitable for an approximately 5-7-year online storage use, just like HDDs. So when the device is normally connected to power, it will retain the data, and can survive power removal for a moderate length of time. What SSDs are not suitable for is offline storage. So if you disconnect an SSD from power, after a year or two of being unpowered, it will rapidly start losing data, while an HDD loses data when online, but remains perfectly stable offline. An SSD while connected to power periodically "refreshes" so reads and rewrites data stored on it, to nudge the gate voltages into alignment again and reduce data loss, while when it's not powered, the drift occurs uncontrolled. The refresh itself consumes a small percentage of SSD's overall limited write endurance. In this context, "online" means whether the device is powered and running and the data is accessible within fractions of a second after being requested. Currently, the vast overwhelming majority of data storage is HDD-based, online, redundant. To the extent that SSDs exhibit a data loss even online, it's only a matter of redundancy and cost. So when SSDs reach half the price/GB of HDDs, you can simply use twice as many SSDs to store data more redundantly and you will also use less power than with HDDs, and the break even point will come much earlier than that. Considering SSD power efficiency and power cost, it's likely when price/GB reaches near parity, HDDs are dead for all uses except offline backup. In offline storage, HDD will face more competition from tape storage. Currently, HDD only wins in offline storage because low price of HDD is facilitated by the large mass market that needs HDDs and uses them for online storage and general use, which will break away. When HDD price rises, there will be a re-evaluation that favours tape again. There is magnetic tape (LTO) and potentially optical laser tape. I think Seagate is gearing up for LTO expansion. The economic cross over point and thus extremely drastic demand decline of HDD will occur within 5 years.
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  2. But the video hasn't "aired" yet, thus i had no opportunity to enjoy it.
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  3.  @johndoh5182  50TB? Probably on 12 platters. Not cost efficient. Dying industry's last spasms. I deem it inevitable that price/gb will reach parity in about 5 years between SSD and HDD. And then SSDs will win based on power efficiency. The prices of HDDs stay constant or increase; while capacity per platter went from 1tb in 2011 to just north of 2tb in 2021, this is GLACIAL compared to prior and predicted SSD progress. None of the major industries actually care that much for HDD in principle, they only win on cost per gb for now. For now. They'll jump ship when the price is right. And once they jump ship, HDD prices go up, as economies of scale collapse, and i predict LTO tape comeback.
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  4. Wow you have been at it for long. My first HDD was 500MB. But my computer before that used primarily 5.25" floppies, and before that audio cassette tape :D
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  5. High expectations? How much vertical domestic high tech do you expect of a city state of 5 million? I think you're doing OK.
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  6.  @autohmae  It will change once price/GB of SSD reaches parity. Thing is HDD capacity per square inch of platter space has been barely growing recently, not much investment in the tech. The price can no longer be reduced either. SSD price/GB will continue free falling for the foreseeable future. The parity point is likely within 5 years. One thing SSD really dislike is being disconnected from power for weeks/years on end. But most storage is daily used devices, NAS, servers, they are all fundamentally suitable for SSDs, just waiting for prices to nudge their way down. Server use is also sensitive to power consumption, and an SSD is so much more power efficient. A disk in a server runs for typically about 5-7 years before replacement and this timespan is easily covered by SSD just like HDD.
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  7.  @autohmae  When powered, SSD have excellent long term endurance, not really substantially better or worse than HDD, but they do need to be able to auto-refresh the data once in a while, which consumes just a little percentage of their RW cycles, thus they need to stay powered on regularly. The reason HDD are used for cold storage is because they survive that nicely and are cheap. And they are cheap because there's a huge mass market that needs them for their sheer capacity per $ as online, powered up storage. Once that market collapses due to price parity, HDD should go up in price because economy of scale collapses; probably will cause tape to become more prevalent for cold storage. LTO or maybe laser optical. Seagate is one of the forces behind LTO, WD and Toshiba are major SSD/Flash players. In 10 years, capacity per platter went from exactly 1GB to 2.2GB with heat or microwave assist. How much in the next 5-10 years? Maybe 3GB? Maybe 4GB? At increasing expense in hardware, and no way to keep pace with SSD tech that is in engineering stages and where expense is trending down with no roadblock in sight.
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  8.  @autohmae  I might be mistaken, but Japan beat the odds and did almost the impossible spinning up its semicon industry from basically zero somewhat late in the game. Korea, Taiwan and now China have been able to buy into Japanese and other foreign export systems available and grow from there. Ultimately you need a massive heroic level commitment from the government with a lot of money on the table to get things moving. I think English proficiency in general population is neither here nor there, the relatively few key professionals needed to spin up such an industry can acquire technical, non-conversational language with a modicum of effort in comparison with the technical and scientific knowledge that they need to build up alongside it, and it might need more than one language as things stand.
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  9. This is not true.
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  10. I already appreciate that the audio has improved recently. Up until not too long ago, there was an upper interference band and it was quite grating, but i endured through that. Now sure it's not perfect, but i'm no longer suffering.
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  11. Curiously, most BIOSes will happily boot a 4KB-sector HDD up to 8TB in size in MBR mode; but Windows might break on anything that isn't 512b-sectored due to bootloader issues, thus mandating the use of GPT. Linux and BSD had to handle large disks long, long before GPT was invented, thus more flexible support. Not sure what kind of incentive since MBR boot has been kinda dead for a decade?
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