You probably already know that seagate is selling 30 and 32 tb drives to enterprise customers, the mozaic 3+. Assuming they started selling them last quarter (Some news says they started last year) how long does it typically take for this new tech to reach the consumer market? Are we talking 1+ years or maybe just months?
Affordability is the main issue here. Enterprise drives are 
while consumers usually don’t have that level of budget available. So it comes down to when the manufacturers have recouped sufficiently from their investment to allow for lower grade drives to be sold in the consumer market.
Your guess is as good as mine 
To make matters worse I don’t believe the other manufacturers have deployed equivalently sized drives yet. With no competition yet, I imagine seagate will deploy slowly to maximize their return.
Hmm always the question of buying today or waiting for the next innovation.
To be honest I expect 30TB SSD drives to come at or near price parity to 30TB HDD drives in consumer land if it takes 18-24 months for Seagate.
It all depends on how fast Samsung can release their 256 TB e1.L drives, and how expensive the HAMR tech makes traditional HDDs, but there is real risk for HAMR never really taking off, if you look at the storage market at large.
If HDD costs about the same per TB as SSD, why would anyone with a sane mind go HDD over SSD? Except for a few niche cases of course where the technical characteristics of HDDs make sense.
SSD’s have rapidly come down from 100 times, to 10 times, towards 4 times the price of HDD’s
And SSD pricing is attractively going in a good direction.
New large SSD’s are back up more than 4 times as expensive as HDD’s, and in non-SATA format, offer more than 4 times the performance.
But when talking large sums, 4x cost, does add up.
Eventually SSD’s will make sense.
Also, the growing power consumption of denser SSD’s is often overlooked, as they used to run cooler and used to be better for power, but that’s diminishing as they get faster
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As long as consumer SSD’s are limited to SATA speeds, they won’t need to get faster, just denser. In fact, Linus demonstrated a 100TB SSD (yes, that’s 100,000 GB!) in a 3.5" enclosure from a niche vendor several years ago. True, it had a price to match (40k USD) but it showed dense SSD solutions can be made with existing tech. Meanwhile NVMe/PCIe has made an impact in the consumer storage space so M.2 and U.2 drives will dominate in the near future, U.3 is also making waves for itself but not so much for consumers.
Again, the consumer market will be serviced once the enterprise side has recouped the R&D costs. And make no mistake: SSD’s will never be cheaper then HDD’s as long as HDD’s are (somewhat) in demand, simply 'cause SSD’s are made by the same manufacturers that make HDD’s 
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Yes, true. But we are slowly moving past that stage now in consumer land.
Now that most motherboards come with at least two, often 3-4 and sometimes even 5 m.2 slots, SATA is being phased out, and quickly. Definitely by the end of the decade, SATA will have disappeared from most desktop cards.
Add to that SSD only consumer devices coming out like your love-hate the Asustor Flashstor and hot-swap E1.S devices like the QNAP TBS-h574TX, and we are starting to see a trend.
No one is saying SATA will simply cease to exist, but the number of new products with SATA on them will slow down to a trickle and then completely disappear. Just like it is now pretty hard to find a phone with a 3.5" jack, or a new CRT screen / TV, so too will it be pretty hard to find SATA devices. They will still exist of course, but the norm will shift to m.2 and E.1S / E.1L in consumer space.
Agreed, 100%.
Samsung makes HDDs? News to me.
If there is some serious money to make by creating an SSD only manufacturing site, you can bet top dollars someone will invest in that. After all, if it gets cheaper to produce SSDs than HDDs, why wouldn’t someone else want a piece of that pie?
They do and plenty examples to be found on sites like Aliexpress and ebay. But they keep their prices as high as they can, taking note of those who have dual SSD/HDD interests. Why sell a drive for 20 bucks when the established competition, with their HDD interests, sells the same drive, or at least very similar, for 45 bucks as not to cut into their HDD division (price 35 bucks for the spinning platter of the same capacity). So the SSD-only company prices their SSD at 42 bucks to undercut the competitor(s).
But you already understand that 
The HDD makers brought SSD companies, because they know SSD’s will be the future
So samsung’s memory division (NAND & DRAM) was eating a big loss last year (when SSD prices dipped), how do you explain that? Samsung is making a loss but all other manufacturers are printing money just to keep HDDs price competitive?
They used to, but got bought up in 2011 by Seagate.
It sounds like this guy thinks the new drives will be available soon.
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yeah
Anand tech team also looked at their financial report, where production was due to start early this year…
maybe christmas-ish release?
Well, that’s not rocket science. Some years ago, some idiot released a virus that basically shut down social cohesion all over the world. It was promptly followed by an enormous spike in demand for building materials (home improvement stuff) and electronics parts (automotive, PC building, etc). When that kind-of normalized another idiot started a war, which caused food prices to spiral even further out of control. This meant consumers had massive price hikes to cope with, something they really couldn’t handle. So demands came to raise wages and in most developed countries, like Europe and I assume some Asian countries as well, companies had to meet those demands to keep their staff (there’s a shortage of staff in many industries and poaching staff from competitors is rife). So for manufacturers, costs rose even further. Samsung probably renewed contracts during the pandemic and/or shortly after for basic materials to their production facilities at higher then normal prices. As you said, consumer prices fell, so their profit margins went negative. Basic economics, really.
Above you said that SSDs price is fixed to be more expensive than HDDs because of a deliberate choice of the manufacturers. Implying that they make huge profits with SSDs while protecting the competitiveness of HDDs. That is apparently not true, if they made a huge loss when prices dipped, no?
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He said as long as they “are (somewhat) in demand”. The last bastion of HDD’s merit is the price/byte, and so obviously once that is gone, there is going to be no more demand for them. A HDD that is more expensive per bit than an SSD would go extinct, like floppies did.
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The Only reasons are price, and reliability; they fail, but in a more… Manageable way…
But it is only a matter if time…
I personally still see use cases for HDD’s, but like Wertigon says, the price for consumer size drives, and the vastly superior performance of NVMe, means SSD’s are already more applicable in laptops, and desktop computers.
Well, except tape is still used now, despite it being obsolete.
Cold storage still works in HDD’s flavour, as the magnetic storage decays slower than the trapped charge, so HDD’s will dramatically shrink in usage…
I don’t know that much about tape, but won’t tape squeeze out hard drive from that role ( I’m somewhat blindly assuming tape is able to maintain it’s price advantage, again I don’t know much about tape) the slightly better non sequential performance over tapes, I don’t think will matter.
So do I, the backstory to my username is my recent acquisition of ~235 SAS drives, most of which are HDDs.
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Once SSD/HDD price parity Is achieved in retail markets, then it needs to end up matching enterprise markets where HDDs are much cheaper than whatever you get as refurbs on diskprices.com .
And then, there’s used market price parity - lots of folks are still buying old used 8TB SATA drives for their bulk bytes, completely disregarding space and power density.
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