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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Self-contradiction:<p><i>"[the factory's] closure will significantly reduce the company’s HDD output"</i><p>...but a few sentences later:<p><i>"the plant no longer makes products"</i><p>How can a plant that no longer makes products would reduce the company's output if closed?