I agree with 6dust fully, and would like to put forth another criticism of your article.

You say Seagate "chose a 20 per cent price hike despite his company’s factories not being affected by the flood waters". while it is true the factorys were fortunate in sitting on higher ground and avoiding flood damage, what you fail to mention and what has been repeatedly mentioned in numerous sources is the supply chain was severely impacted by the flood. Seagate did not unfairly raise their prices; it was a direct result of having to establish new suppliers on the spur of the moment. This action and the costs it incurred is what drove the prices up.

These greedy Disk manufacturers need to get real; I will delay buying new drives as long as possible now and shop even harder for lower prices and actual lifespan.

I used to buy several drives each time I built a new PC. Now I will only buy 2 modest fast drives for a OS RAID 1 drive, with most of the storage in a RAIDZ2 (ZFS) array in a FreeNAS box, with numerous Datasets & scheduled snapshots. I am no longer restricted by stupid limitations like drive size or fixed partition sizes, I only care about the total drives cost for total RAID capacity.

"the question is, do you really want to store 3TB of data on a hard drive that the manufacturer is only guaranteeing for just one year?"Yes, but only in a RAIDZ2 NAS array; I recently replaced a failed 2TB drive with no concern for data loss, while the replacement was on order, because of the extra redundancy in a RAIDZ2 array.

Frankly, anyone who relies on single Flash or Magnetic drives, or the insane RAID 0, rather than redundant RAID is skint or a moron, and will discover that it only takes the shock of one sudden complete drive failure to get this; single drives can fail at very inconvenient times and any warranty is often worth far less than the data loss for this situation, backups are not real-time, thus incomplete, and cloud backups will be orders of magnitude slower to restore and may become inaccessible!

I’d rather trust my data with hard drive then an SSD in the long term. Heck i still have a 4gb hardrive from the 90′s running just to see when it’ll fail.

I have now 12 hardrives, of varying ages, the oldest about 8 years old.

All have a good SMART.

I seriously doubt any SDD will last half that time

"Even after more than 8 years writing about flash SSD endurance this subject remains 1 of the top 3 SSD topics still searched for by our readers. That’s because just when the controllers get better, the new flash chips get worse again – and the faster that SSDs get the quicker they will use up those 9 lives (or 3,000, or 10,000 etc)."

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

While it is true that hard drives are not going anywhere in the near future, the consumer market has experienced a clear shift in that SSD’s have a much higher profile now and with prices now below $1/GB and falling fast they are becoming more of a viable option. I work with small to medium sized companies and ssd’s are gaining presence in these environments where massive storage for workstations just isn’t needed. while large storage dependent concerns such as Dropbox for instance need the large capacities of traditional hard drives, the vast majority of business I deal with do not have large storage needs for their various workstations and as such I believe that the traditional hard drive market will shrink in pure numbers of drives shipped over the next few years. Traditional hard drive manufacturers do not have the same commanding presence in the ssd market despite having these products available. Intel and others, at least in my area of the world, has a much higher placement rate of their ssd’s in the enterprise. Intel, a company that doesn’t produce traditional hard drives at all and backs their ssd’s with a 5 year warranty. With consumers names like OCZ, Mushkin, Intel and Crucial are the ssd’s that people are asking for, not Seagate or Western Digital.

Low margins eh, I hope it’s understood that that’s the asian business model and works well for them.and seeing HD manufacturers can buy other companies it works for them too, and after all just selling to google alone is enough to make a tidy profit even at low margins, and there’s all the others like facebook and the NSA and UK spyservices and MS etcetera etcetera

"With the number of solid state disk (SSD) in the low teens…"

Just because there are over a dozen *brands* does not mean there are that many manufacturers in this space.

Looks to me like the same landscape with a lot more brand-engineering.

" "A number of consumer storage vendors … have done a roaring trade in network attached storage boxes…" True, but what do you think is inside those boxes? Yup, that roaring trade has led to more hard drive sales." "but after an year from 10 devices at home – only one (NAS) will have HDD. good luck to HDD manufacturers. HDD space at vendors/servers is consolidated and spread accros many user’s, which otherwise will buy HDDs

I’m on-board with SSD. I’ve got it in my home PC and I love it. having said that, traditional hard drives aren’t going away ANY time soon.

"A number of consumer storage vendors … have done a roaring trade in network attached storage boxes…" True, but what do you think is inside those boxes? Yup, that roaring trade has led to more hard drive sales.

"Let’s not forget that Google, Microsoft, Canonical, Dropbox and many other outfits offer cloud storage for free, and despite legitimate privacy concerns provide another convienant storage alternative." Again, true, but what do you think those clouds are made up of? That’s right, hard drives, and this time it’s enterprise class, which is a much higher profit margin.

Your line "…instead of recognising this threat…" is just plain dumb. WD and Seagate both offer enterprise class SSD drives, and Seagate offers a hybrid drive as well.

The TRADITIONAL role of hard drives may be changing, but they’re not going away. Increased cloud usage and advances in newer media formats (3d, 4k, 8k…) that take up more space will only increase the need for huge capacities that SSD just can’t meet.

Seagate and Western Digital wait for the click of death