I was scrolling around the prices of SSDs and HDDs to see if they have dropped and that SSDs are more even with Hard Drives in $/GB, after all, for internal storage, going to SSDs would be a great choice.
The problem is that it seems like the price of Hard Drives per GB (or TB I should say) has gone down considerably, got a 4 TB External HDD for $120, a 2 TB HDD costed me $90 in late 2014. Whereas the price of SSDs have gone UP. Not sure if this has anything to do with Flash Memory shortage I heard about, but it looks like SSDs are gonna have to wait even longer than I thought to replace HDDs as a whole.
The worldwide NAND shortage has everything to do with that. Supply and demand, basically.
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What I would find more interesting, is the future prices of Toshiba drives.
They are having a crises and are considering selling their memory chip making business.
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Also don't compare external HDD prices to anything. They're deflated prices due to them not meeting the internal drive quality control measures and are slapped inside a cheap enclosure with a crappy warranty. That's why they're so cheap.
That said, allegedly next year we should see a sharp decline in prices. Here's hoping. I'm moving all of my physical domain controllers to SSDs this year.
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Are the Toshiba drives good quality?
My gut tells me that's a dumb question.
I'm not sure I'd say SSD prices have gone up a whole lot, from my memory they are more or less the same they've been for a year or two now.
HDD prices have gone down* though, Newegg had some 2 TB Toshiba drives for like $55 a couple weeks ago.
*At least down since the prices during the Malaysian(?) flooding a few years ago.
Why would external drives not go through the same quality controls in production?
Source?
It's assumptions. I've taken apart many a-failed external drives and they're usually the same-ish HDDs as what you can buy for internal drive purposes and they all typically only have 1 year warranties. This lead me to the assumption they don't meet the more stringent QC for it to be sold solo with a 3-5 year warranty.
I don't buy them anymore. I just buy a caddy and an internal rated HDD.
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I mean...
HDDs that are meant to be moved regularly are more likely to die than HDDs that aren't moved regularly. I never put HDDs in laptops for that reason. It's just making them die faster.
I presume the same is true for External HDDs.
Toshiba owns the former Hitachi 3.5" stuff. At the very least I don't think they are any worse than WD or Seagate. Although I guess HGST is still the most reliable brand at the moment.
This sounds like a heavily weighted bias because of your sample base... If all you do is take apart broken externs you're going to think that....
Anywho, the lesser warranty is most likely because being OUTSIDE of the protective metal box exposes to all sorts of dangers thus increasing the risk of failure. Thus why the company isn't as willing to cover it.
You're probably right, but I've had two fail myself that were static backup devices. I've never had any of my HGST drives fail that were in an enclosure. Sure you can argue the same thing again, but then again anyone can argue failure rates etc in hard drives since it's such a failure prone medium.
Huh... my passport ultras have been incredibly reliable...
Western Digital owns Hitachi's HDD business, not Toshiba. HGST is that division that they purchased. (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies)
Interesting angle that I've never been privy to before. What's even more interesting is the ruling that Western Digital was allowed the HGST branding for their own 3.5" drives everywhere from the consumer to the enterprise markets, and Toshiba got the facilities while selling their own damaged facilities.
So realistically Western Digital DOES still own HGST but relinquished the manufacturing facilities when taking the name. That doesn't really mean that Toshiba is selling Hitachi's drives, as intellectual properties (designs, patents, etc) would still be owned by Western Digital after acquisition.
Edit:
Read the legalise a little further and it looks like Toshiba is licensing WD's assets for drive production. So now it's all just the same drives sold under different names. It's like ARM but for hard drives...
I have a USB "toaster" dock and this iStarUSA hot-swap bay.
I also have a 3TB drive in my system dedicated to daily scheduled backups. That is mainly my "Ooops, I messed up. Let me find yesterdays file" backup. The real backups that are in my safe are my semi-retired bare drives that got too small (Did they shrink? No, I got fatter). On those drives I do drag and drop backups and have multiple backups of backups. Since they aren't used often, I figure reliability shouldn't be an issue. Knock wood.
Both kinds of drives are still hella cheap though. My first HDD cost $700 - 20MB SCSI for AMIGA.
For some reason I can't find the articles I was reading the first time, but the way I understood it was
- WD bought HGST essentially as a whole
- Due to FTC in multiple countries WD had to sell the entire desktop 3.5" segment of HGST to Toshiba
2b. Equipment and IP included
- Toshiba then sold their Thai facilities to WD (which includes the factories that were hit by the flooding)
Toshiba actually has a press release that goes into more detail about the specific transfer of stuff
https://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2012_02/pr2901.htm
It was really weird deal.
In addition, the settlement order requires Western Digital to provide Toshiba with access to its employees involved in research and development and the production of desktop hard disk drives, and also requires Western Digital to license all intellectual property needed to make and supply desktop hard disk drives to Toshiba.
That's what I saw in the FTC filing that paints a very clear picture. It was almost more of a trade of assets then it was a proper sale. WD tooled up Toshiba for production and has to license (for free I would assume) all the intellectual properties that they acquired from HGST. Of course the FTC filing states the following:
The settlement order also requires Western Digital to be available to supply Toshiba with certain components Toshiba will need to run the desktop hard disk drive business it acquires, and to contract manufacture hard disk drives for Toshiba until Toshiba is able to manufacture them on its own.
Which means that Toshiba was initially just selling WD's drives with their sticker attached to gain market share. It could be that isn't the case anymore, but it is the case that HGST as a brand name is entirely owned by WD by this point.