Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

[shiftpgdn]

My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don't think mechanical disks are long for this world.

For our next storage expansion it's ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash/SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don't have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.

[Taek]

You can buy HDDs for $20 / TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.

[phire]

All the high end and mid-range laptops have already dropped the spinning drive (unless they have a secondary drive for bulk storage), the user experience is just so much better. It's only the low-end laptops that still use spinning drives, because even a 1tb is technically cheaper than a reasonably sized SSD.

I took a look and the NAND chip trend lines, and I predict that by mid 2018, 256gb of NAND (which is enough space for an average consumer) will cost less than a 1tb drive. At that point, all the cheap laptops will drop spinning drives too.

[tscs37]

I think until SSDs can hit the price point of a HDD at same capacity they will probably stay around atleast in consumer space.

A 2TB harddrive is just way to cheap compared to a 2TB SSD, even if they fail and need more power, atleast for archiving or large storage in consumer terms.

Primary storage may switch to SSD though.

[ams6110]

Recently had a small cluster (12 nodes) where close to half the SSDs used for the root filesystems failed in a span of a few months.

Turned out to be a defective batch from manufacturer. SSDs are normally reliable but in my experience are not immune to problems.

[qyv]

Perhaps this is old information, but do SSD's from the same batch/model not tend to fail all within the same timeframe? A steady stream of failures is probably preferable to a single mass failure.

[fapjacks]

Couldn't shake that Maxtor curse. Good riddance, I say. I'm involved in the Seagate class action over bad drives, but like many other class actions I've been involved in, I seriously doubt I'll see much of the thousands of dollars I've sunk into drives Seagate sold me knowing they had atrocious failure rates. Perhaps a five or ten dollar consolation check like usual.

[quasse]

I'm glad you mentioned that case, I just filled out the documentation. Luckily I kept receipts, correspondence with Seagate, and still have one of the failed drives.

Considering I was a college student at the time, it cost me a lot of money to replace my failed Seagate drives (after RMAing them and having failed replacements). I've never bought another Seagate product and never will, regardless of claims that they've improved.

[lightedman]

Drop out of the class-action, file your own suit, and demand whole remedy.

[Keyframe]

Maxtor! Now, those were bad drives. I just went on to see the state of the industry. Didn't realise Maxtor bought Quantum (Fireballs were big back then) and then Seagate bought them. It's basically consolidated to Seagate vs WD vs small fishes (Hitachi, who else?). SSDs bring in IC vendors into the game.

[rincebrain]

Seagate's Linux FW updater still has the string "MaxtorRulesSeagateDrools" baked into it, which rather says a lot about where that particular tool came from.

So not everything that came out of Maxtor is terrible, if it means they let you flash HDD FW under Linux now.

[buzzybee]

Still using a HDD here. Would like to transition, but holding out for better price/capacity ratios. It's really clear that it's the bottleneck for everyday use at this point; I recently went to 16GB RAM which stopped a lot of Windows swapping behavior, and now the major pain points are bootup, storage-intensive tasks, and bloated web sites.

[aphextron]

You should really get at least a 128gb drive for your OS and frequent applications. They're like $30 on Amazon nowadays. The speed difference is phenomenal - it's the single best upgrade you can make to a desktop PC right now.

[simooooo]

Use a ram disk for your browser cache

[adamconroy]

Not a surprise to me, their HDDs are junk. I've had two burn out in work machines and one personal external burn out. I never buy their gear anymore

[tracker1]

I had 10 out of 12 go bad on my freenas box a few years ago, will NEVER buy seagate drives again.

[mynewtb]

I've been using seagate drives exclusively for the past 8 years with no unusual failures. I will always buy seagate. </anotherpointlessanecdote>

[DanBC]

All drives fail, catastrophically, at the worst time. More important than "will it fail or not?" (because they all fail) is "how good are the warranties?", "how good is the customer service?", and "have we tested our backups?"

[happycube]

This plant should've been closed down when they bought Maxtor - it was a huge part of Seagate's quality drop in the late 0's.

[bogomipz]

I liked the exploded diagram, I wouldn't have guessed a single HDD was the product of 6 different countries.

[chx]

While slightly costly, you can buy a 4TB 2.5" SSD in a normal thickness drive. You can not do that with a HDD, the only 4TB 2.5" HDD I am aware of is a 15mm thick one which does not fit in, well, pretty much anything, not laptops, not most bays, nothing, they are only usable as an external drive (but it's useful that way, I have one). I believe this is the first time the capacity crown goes to an SSD at any given time (at least in the consumer space -- in the server space the 16TB 2.5" Samsung SSD and the 60TB 3.5" Seagate are both out of this world but so are their prices too).

[tw04]

I take it you don't deal with enterprise storage then. 15mm is the size of basically every enterprise 2.5" drive sled. That's the form factor of all 10k RPM 2.5" drives. The only thing the drive you described DOESN'T work with are laptops. Pretty much anything else it's a perfect fit.

The laptop drive thickness is the abnormality for the rest of the storage world.

[mrb]

Self-contradiction:

"[the factory's] closure will significantly reduce the company’s HDD output"

...but a few sentences later:

"the plant no longer makes products"

How can a plant that no longer makes products would reduce the company's output if closed?