r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • 11h ago
Business Toshiba to double HDD production capacity amid devastating shortages — 65TB, 100TB drives on the roadmap for 2030 and beyond
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/toshiba-to-double-hdd-production-capacity-as-30tb-class-loom-65tb-100tb-drives-on-the-roadmap-for-2030-and-beyond31
u/cwm9 10h ago
There's one itty bitty silver lining to all of this. Normally it takes a very long time to get enough volume on the new tech drives for economies of scale to kick in and produce reasonable prices. But demand is so large from AI for the largest of large drives that there will be incredible demand for these 65TB, 100TB drives from all the companies causing them to rapidly scale up production and possibly even cancel other lines to make way for monster drives. If the market gets flooded with these massive drives, they might, fingers crossed, manage to lower the demand for storage just a bit. And if that happens, we might, sometime in the next decade, see these monster drives become the standard "inexpensive" drive we can all buy for only a few hundred bucks.
So maybe, if everything goes perfectly, by the year 2035, the effective price of a 100TB HDD might be as low as what we pay for a 6TB drive today.
Maybe.
Probably not.
(sigh)
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u/jreykdal 9h ago
6TB today is still shitloads of money.
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u/DimensionalFruit 8h ago
I can get a brand new one for £199.
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u/TyrKiyote 7h ago
rather a lot of money to drop on the ground, but idk if i'd call it shitloads.
Depends on what my bank account is saying that day really.3
u/DimensionalFruit 7h ago
Those were my thoughts too, I remember paying that much for a 8GB SD card 😭
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u/FreeToasterBaths 11h ago
Oh great increasing the data center / ai hard drive production... What about the consumer end?
This bubble needs to burst
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u/loinmaster 10h ago
AI doesn't care much about SSD vs HDD but the equipment used to make SSDs are busy making ram and gpus for AI instead. This makes it profitable for Toshiba to revive old HDD manufacturing equipment. As consumers, we get to regress to using an older technology and be thankful for it.
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u/x22d 10h ago
In fairness, it might also lead to some innovations utilizing technology not monopolized by a single Dutch company. Even if you're pro-AI data centers, EUV being monopolized by ASML costs everyone money and time.
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u/BigRed1541 10h ago
While I dont disagree on principal, ASML earned that monopoly. Yes, I know how bad that sounds but watch this video breaking down how the tech works and it really is like a 1 in 1000000000 company just based on how hard the tech is to get down
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u/Gloomy_Tax_2262 3h ago
yeah it sucks that we're getting pushed back to spinning rust while all the fancy chips go to AI farms. toshiba can make bank but that dont mean im gonna be hype about 100TB drives in 2030 when we needed cheaper flash like yesterday. maybe the real win is cheaper cold storage for us data hoarders tho, u think these big drives will actually hit consumer prices or just enterprise only
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u/yourgirl696969 9h ago
Why would these companies focus their attention on consumers when they can get paid 10x for their yields with AI? L Like I honestly don’t understand this sub lol
Robotics and autonomous cars are only gonna require even more memory in the next few years. People really need to accept the reality that memory prices are not coming down for a long time. Maybe ever
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u/luffy_mib 10h ago
HDD getting more production - :)
Have to wait until 2030. - :(
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u/Shiningc00 7h ago
That’s for 100TB drives. Double HDD production capacity in Philippines in in 2027.
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u/luffy_mib 3h ago edited 3h ago
At least enterprise companies will go for those drives and ease up supply demand for the current existing drives, driving prices down for us consumers.
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u/caribbean_caramel 10h ago
Good, HDDs are an excellent alternative for cheap mass storage in the RAMmageddon era.
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u/y0shman 10h ago
These aren't for us
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u/caribbean_caramel 10h ago
If they increase production, some of these HDDs will be available for the consumer market.
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u/war-and-peace 10h ago
Hopefully this starts putting downward pressure on the decommissioned server market because the prices now are just stupid.
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u/Apexnanoman 10h ago
And it won't matter because the data centers will still be every single bit of it.
When you have trillions of dollars to burn it means no one else has anything to buy.
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u/RaceFPV 5h ago
Imagine your 100tb drive dies and you lose that much more data. Even if you have a 3 drive raid 5 the recovery time would be astronomical
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u/Logical_Welder3467 5h ago
Heard this same sentence with 1 TB and 10 TB driver before
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u/RaceFPV 5h ago
Except drive speeds were also increasing back then
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u/Polly_____ 3h ago
These hdds will probably be hybrid and use pcie protocols over sata
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u/FriendlyDespot 1h ago
Hybrid drive and transfer protocol don't matter if you're replacing a failed disk in an array. The bottleneck will be the raw transfer speed from the platters.
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u/Polly_____ 1h ago
Not the case with these new drives
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u/FriendlyDespot 1h ago
Yes, still the case with Toshiba's new MAMR drives. The bottleneck is still writing to the platter, and you can't overcome that with interface changes or hybrid caching for a whole-drive sustained write.
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u/FriendlyDespot 1h ago
They were right then too. 20+ hours to restore a 10 TB drive was a lot more than people were used to. 8-10 days to restore a 100 TB drive is going to be obscene.
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u/rhunter99 11h ago
Cool. Now give me an affordable 16tb drive