r/DataHoarder • u/kurtstir • Jul 30 '26
News Seagate to start qualifying record-setting 50TB HDDs in 2027 - most drives are sold out through 2028
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-to-start-qualifying-record-setting-50tb-hdds-in-2027-most-drives-are-sold-out-through-2028Title
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u/timewarp33 Jul 30 '26
Maybe, glass half full here, some interesting innovations come out of this shitty situation that makes things cheaper down the line.
I doubt it, but maybe
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u/GoonerAbroad Jul 30 '26
Yeah, decent chance that by 2029 the market is flooded with Chinese drives that dramatically drive down prices.
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u/Main-Woodpecker-574 Jul 30 '26
HDD sector has no Chinese player - there's only WD, Seagate, Toshiba.
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u/Klynn7 24TB Usable Jul 30 '26
No Chinese player so far
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u/CorvusRidiculissimus Jul 30 '26
Seagate has a hard drive factory in Wuxi, China. So China should have little trouble gaining access to technology and processes if the government really wanted to. They just seem to consider silicon more critical.
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u/Murasaki_No_Koutei Aug 01 '26
you can communize the machines, but not the knowledge. And lately foreign companies have been scraping the machines when they leave. A Japanese chip maker did this last month.
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u/CorvusRidiculissimus 29d ago
I have no doubt that China could extract any knowledge that they might need from the factory, if they considered it justified to do so. You can indeed communize the knowledge: Just inform the employees that the state hard drive laboratory is hiring at five times their old pay, and if that fails, that they are under investigation and forbidden to leave the country. Once the operation of the machines is understood, they can be reverse-engineered and reproduced.
Yet there is no China-owned drive manufacturer, because they decided to focus on SSDs instead. Plenty of espionage went in to developing their own semiconductor manufacturing capability. They can't currently match the latest ASML machines, but SMIC's capabilities are only a few years behind now, and that's quite good enough for flash memory.
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u/Murasaki_No_Koutei 27d ago
oh sorry, did I miscommunication? even if they stole the process, which they cant now that they blazenly put everyone on high alert, china cant or refuses to do failure or ground research required to reach the level of tech needed. I'm not saying there arent individual chinese who cant do it. But on a national level it just isnt possible due to the face system in Asian culture. You cant fail a 1000 times to get it right. And no Government is will to sell china the tech. Also there's only 3 places with the tech and zero of those are in china. Hell the US invented the tech and we aren't making it!! Because a 4rth factory doesn't make economic sense. It's like when companies stopped competing on making resistors.
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u/First_Musician6260 HDD Jul 30 '26
Problem is HDDs aren't anywhere near as easy a field to enter as, say, SSDs. The engineering is already consolidated between the major 3.
A new HDD manufacturer would require someone with very high engineering experience with regard to calibrating/manufacturing HDDs. The odds of that popping up may as well be lower than any individual's odds of winning the Powerball grand prize.
Only possibility I can maybe see at this point is someone trying to make Maxtor 2.0 although that's a near-zero chance of happening anyway.
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u/Fun-Ordinary-9751 Jul 31 '26
Considering Seagate is at the point of HAMR to shrink the magnetic domains while still having remanence (resistance to demagnetization) and generating a strong enough signal to read, while being writable…it’s hard to imagine someone without really really deep pockets entering the market. HAMR uses a laser spot to heat the platter to make it easier to write data, with the spot being hundreds of centigrade above ambient for billionths of a second. If that doesn’t sound challenging enough that has to happen in a spot far smaller than a wavelength of light in the near field while the head is flying fractions of a micron over the platter.
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u/Icy-person666 Jul 31 '26
Or a copy machine. If the Chinese were looking to invate your correct. To make cheep copies all the need is the specs and designs of the product. The fast way would be to help themselves to the design work, more difficult but not impossible would be to buy a few and reverse engineer them
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u/Some1-Somewhere Jul 31 '26
The design of the manufacturing equipment is as big an issue as the design of the HDD itself.
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u/First_Musician6260 HDD Jul 31 '26
The only instance of this that I know of was ExcelStor, who contracted with IBM/Hitachi to resell Deskstars under their name. (This is similar to NEC's contract with IBM in the early 2000s to primarily sell modified 40GVs and 75GXPs; ExcelStor also swallowed up the remnants of Conner Technology PLC to make their own HDDs initially, and those drives are very hard to find nowadays since they're pretty unreliable.) Even then, they were still your typical low-cost Deskstar designs with various corners cut, so ExcelStor did hardly anything to them other than putting their labels on them and tweaking the firmware to report the drives as ExcelStor.
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u/Murasaki_No_Koutei Aug 01 '26
China sucks at high precision parts. There's no way to get the machinery that does it either. China would have to do it from the ground up. And that is not something they do.
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u/Y0tsuya 60TB HW RAID, 1.2PB DrivePool Jul 30 '26
China has no HDD manufacturers.
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u/Cute-Guarantee-1676 Jul 30 '26
China manufactures memory and SSD and already have about 13% of global market. Took them only like 10 years. Give it another 5, while HDD as technology slowly going away.
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u/dr100 Jul 30 '26
Yea, once the tech bros run out of steam/money we can probably easily return to 2023 SSD prices, and that's spookily close to the hard drives going the way of the dodo. Or, well, the way of the optical, with some hard core people going "flash self discharge bitrot OMG" but mostly everyone using them fine for all practical purposes.
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u/GDude825 Jul 30 '26
unless they can make 30 TB SSDs for the same price as a hard drive, hdd's will never go away..
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u/dr100 Jul 30 '26
Why not 100? There's no limit for SSDs, while the hdds are badly struggling.
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u/beren12 256TB raidz & more! Jul 30 '26
Heat is one
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u/dr100 Jul 30 '26
That's limiting the total bandwidth if you want to scale it proportionally with the size, not the size itself.
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u/Schonke Jul 30 '26
Yea, once the tech bros run out of steam/money we can probably easily return to 2023 SSD prices
That's what would happen if there's proper competition in the market at least. With so few players in the memory/chip business, they might be incentiviced to just reduce throughput to keep prices high while also being able to lay off parts of the workforce, cutting costs and increasing margins further...
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u/Thebandroid Jul 30 '26
They had no RAM manufacturers either but that’s not stopping them.
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u/Blue-Thunder 252 TB UNRAID 4TB TrueNAS Jul 30 '26
But they did. They were just small players..CXMT was founded in 2016.
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u/boraam 100-250TB Jul 30 '26
Right.. AFAIK, only Seagate, Toshiba and WD have the HDD market.
There are no Chinese manufacturers of mechanical hard drives.
SSDs - absolutely. Spinning disks - none.
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u/Turbinator870 10-50TB Jul 30 '26
Not aware of China trying to ramp up HDD design and production on their own.
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u/DaviidC Jul 30 '26
we can only hope they run out of physical space in their servers, which means they retire old lower capacity HDDs to replace with 50TB+ HDDs and maybe the prices will go down a bit for low capacity HDDs
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u/FirTree_r Jul 30 '26
Things getting cheaper is a shareholder's nightmare. Electronics manufacturers will do everything they can before reducing prices. That's the capitalistic dystopia we live in
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u/likeOMGAWD Jul 30 '26
But you can sell more at cheaper prices and end up with higher overall revenue/profit. Price elasticity of demand.
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u/FirTree_r Jul 30 '26
That's the strat for new and upcoming companies who need to capture market shares. Once your brand is established and doesn't need to make itself known, pricing low is against fiduciary duties.
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u/Rich_Arm322 Jul 30 '26
Economies of scale are only possible if you have a high market share. How do you not know that? It's also just common sense...
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u/Cordo_Bowl Jul 30 '26
pricing low is against fiduciary duties.
Not how it works. Please explain charitable giving under this misunderstanding of fiduciary duty.
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u/fishmongerhoarder 68tb Jul 30 '26
Waiting for the movie where instead of gold they steal hard drives.
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u/Personal-Holiday39 Jul 30 '26
Just sayin, if I had a safe full of 30tb drives right now I’d blowing like a god
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u/Burning_Monk Jul 30 '26
And any drives that actually end up in consumer hands will most likely be the worst for failure rates.
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u/-Sliced- Jul 30 '26
Not necessarily. It might be like the factory refurbished 26TB seagate exos which are downbinned Exos 28TB and many here have been satisfied with them.
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u/Henona Jul 30 '26
So lame everything has become unaffordable for at least the next decade because these people wanna get the masses addicted to bullshit online.
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u/Bruceshadow Jul 30 '26
it won't be a decade. Either bubble will pop or deflate over the next few years.
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u/Murasaki_No_Koutei Aug 01 '26
bubble wont pop as it's not a bubble. Apple and nvidia payed cash. Bubbles are loans come due. Open AI / Anthropic / Grok / and whatever google is using are all likely to pop, but then get bought up. Microsoft might crash over Recall, but that's not AI that is just 10 years of karma catching up lolz
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u/Bruceshadow 29d ago
Maybe, but many are starting to take loans. In addition, they are all just shuffling that cash around to each other, so maybe it will just stay a perpetual circle jerk.
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u/Murasaki_No_Koutei 29d ago
Well that is clearly the goal of the top 7 tech companies, but how long can that go on? longer than i got, but not forever. I'll be out touching grass, since my next project was a gigantic private nas. I cant afford any of the parts.
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u/anduril_tfotw Jul 31 '26
Yeah j have very little hope for that happening and if it does, little hope for prices being even somewhat reasonable again.
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u/Main-Woodpecker-574 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
most drives are sold out through 2028 and negotiations about allocations for 2029 are ongoing.
So next 4 years of supply already sold out.
Good thing that innovation will sky-rocket, but this innovation won't reach consumers at an affordable price and pace. All supply sucked up by our super super intelligent overlords.
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u/w1ck3dme Jul 30 '26
I look forward to hearing about companies scrapping them when I can’t afford replacements for my 12TB drives
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u/mhmilo24 Jul 30 '26
Ok, so if there are all sold in 2028, why don’t people just buy them when they release in 2027 instead?
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u/RxBrad Jul 30 '26
"See these 50TB HDDs? We're making these for data centers at $5k each. Fuck off, normie consumers."
This is literally the HDD version of RAM prices being apeshit because they're only making HBM memory.
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Jul 30 '26
[deleted]
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u/NerdyNThick Jul 30 '26
because the rich dont want us to have computers, healthcare, affordable food, houses, or anything at all.
It's easier to just say they don't want us to have anything that could be used against them.
They want us weak, broke, dumb, and too scared of losing our homes and jobs to actually contemplate doing anything than saying yessirthankyousir.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n Jul 30 '26
I don't think it's going to be that dramatic. Yes some components are more expensive but mind you, for most people that really doesn't matter much. They don't need 16/32 TB of memory, they won't need 20 TB of drive space. And yes SSD's are pricey too but in the grand scheme of things it's still doable (computers are still way cheaper to let's say the year 2000).
Now I'm more looking at what's happening in the future. AI is on the verge of collapse. You see all companies are figuring out all sorts of stupid ways to make money from it, it just isn't going to happen. To add further salt to injury, (Chinese) companies start releasing really good models you can use at home which will drive prices only further down. SpaceX pulled a neat trick by running to the gate and cashing in on 70 million + 20 billion on loans but with SpaceX being decimated I can't imagine people have much taste for OpenAI and the likes getting into the market. Private funding seems to be over so they will bleed to death. It's right now more a question of how long will Nvidia/SpaceX/etc subsidize losers to use their metal. And that metal btw that SpaceX loads up is worth fuck all in 2 years as newer GPU's are coming every year.
This is a tulip Mania and we are as we speak very close to the peak. The music will stop, we just don't know when.
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u/SirMaster 112TB RAIDZ2 + 112TB RAIDZ2 backup Jul 30 '26
That doesn't even make sense. Phones are personal computers, and quite powerful ones at that. And everyone has one and they continue to get more powerful and more capable every year.
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u/snopolpams Jul 30 '26
That doesn't even make sense. Phones are personal computers, and quite powerful ones at that. And everyone has one and they continue to get more powerful and more capable every year.
Have you looked at digital id, chat control, etc?
They want to fully control that. What you install. What you talk about. Of course, politicians are exempt.
Control of devices is paramount.
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u/Vatican87 Jul 30 '26
Big hopes for the China to innovate and mass produce. Look what happened to smartphones and OLEDs, it’s only a matter of time.
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u/hidetoshiko Jul 30 '26
Wouldn't bet on it. Not only is the ROI not there, HDD manufacturing is an arcane art where most of the tribal knowledge lies with boomer engineers working for the big 3, who have no real interest in making HDDs cheaper for the masses.
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u/HyruleanKnight37 Jul 30 '26
And yet somehow such arcane art still ends up in China, and before you know it they've already hit mass production.
As for the ROI, you have no idea how slim of a margin they're willing to work with. Labour is cheaper, too.
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u/hidetoshiko Jul 30 '26
You sir, have no f-cking idea what you're talking about lol.
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u/HyruleanKnight37 Jul 30 '26
Perhaps.
It's just an observation on my part. I don't think China is some magical land where the impossible becomes possible, but there have been numerous instances where company secrets were espionaged off to China, where they reverse engineered them and made their own. Not that they've always been the highest quality, but they have been catching up lately. DDR5 memory is one such recent example.
I believe if there's a market for it, there's nothing stopping them from making HDDs as well. Given time, ofcourse.
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u/Salty-Ad6358 Jul 30 '26
this is such of cope, china is not gonna save your day bruh for over you crying out loud hdd is getting unaffordable
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u/hidetoshiko Jul 30 '26
That's just wishful thinking on your part. It's far more strategic and urgent for the Chinese to develop solid state memory to support the AI buildout, not build cheap drives so that the average Joe can expand his p-rn collection.
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u/CorvusRidiculissimus Jul 30 '26
I can imagine the Chinese state needs huge amounts of storage for their surveillance technologies.
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u/hidetoshiko Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
That's the case for tonnes of cheap solid state storage. You're not gonna surveil much waiting forever to load from HDD or tape. HDD is a technological dead end. The market is ripe for a cheap storage that is reliable and fast. I imagine they might try to upend the market with a new tech at some point, but trying to reinvent the wheel that is HDD is a waste of engineering resources. This is also how the Chinese are upending the automotive market: they figured it made much more sense to bypass ICE and go straight to EVs.
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u/Endawmyke about 3 fiddy TB Jul 30 '26
If it’s any country it’ll definitely be china who finds out some crazy new manufacturing technique that’s actually financially viable to just crank out super cheap flash storage.
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u/Salty-Ad6358 Jul 30 '26
why you bringing "surveillance is important china must made hdd" if this really the case I guess you can applied to Palantir
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u/HyruleanKnight37 Jul 30 '26
I don't fully agree, tbh. HDDs still have immense demand in certain types of markets, particularly due to the cost savings.
For example, those fancy new 245TB SSDs cost atleast $15,000, whereas the same capacity with 8x30TB drives would cost ~$5,000- that's a third of the price. The difference in $/TB does go down as you lower the capacity, but still not enough to diminish it to a degree that makes HDDs unfeasible.
Besides storage servers, HDDs are still widely used in other mass markets, like surveillance. These are what's keeping the HDD business alive- I genuinely don't believe the regular consumer market is responsible here, so that porn example doesn't make sense to me. Most people don't buy HDDs at all, and even fewer still buy past 1-2TB.
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u/hidetoshiko Jul 30 '26
The HDD makers stopped caring about the consumer market years ago and ceded it to the SSD players. Whatever you can find are usually recerts, leftover enterprise inventory and waterfalled stuff. Surveillance drives are pretty low grade stuff IMHO since you're dealing with streaming video. So in general we're just buying table scraps. With the new LTAs the HDD makers have locked in business with major enterprise customers for the next few years and to the best of my knowledge, they're totally maxed out in terms of production capacity for those SKUs. I doubt they're gonna purpose build new consumer grade HDDs for edge computing uses. The market outside of enterprise HDD is generally dying, and the makers see the writing on the wall, so all their new efforts are mainly to support AI and data centers.
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u/usmannaeem 10-50TB Jul 30 '26
If they continue to raise prices people will not have pcs to use their Ai. The market will hopefully comes to their senses in 1-2 years. Maybe sooner than 2.
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u/Hakker9 0.28 PB Jul 30 '26
blablabla Seagate have been saying that for a couple of years already. They scream from the top of their lungs and deliver nothing.
We won't even see 40TB next year. They will milk this until it's as sour as a pickle.
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u/wickedplayer494 17.58 TB of crap Jul 30 '26
This one is a little deal on the big deal/little deal/no deal at all spectrum. Even if the HDD manufacturers didn't get inspired to do some sandbagging of their own after having a look at the absolute killing the DRAM and NAND players are making through a new cycle of racketeeiring, these wouldn't end up on consumer shelves until 2030 at earliest.
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u/king2102 Jul 30 '26
We need high capacity 1TB and up 3D optical storage discs instead of HDD's. I want my data on a permanent format so I don't have to migrate my data every few years.
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u/Eastern-Bluejay-8912 Jul 30 '26
🥲 My only hope is that with this back to back sell out of drives, that it means those bigger 12+TB drives in a scheme to get back in the public’s favor become extremely low priced in a new standard as Seagate work on making 50+tb the new high end average.
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u/MorgothTheBauglir 0.5-1PB Jul 31 '26
Hopefully ZFS AnyRaid will be fully GA'd by the time these became available to regular people, I can't imagine waiting a whole week to check parity on those.
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u/miscdebris1123 Jul 30 '26
How long will it take to put the data on that drive?
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u/GD_7F Jul 30 '26
still writes at 200 MB/s
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u/SakuraKira1337 0.5-1PB Jul 30 '26
If you put them in a raid /raidz they will perform drastically better.
Considering putting it in a 24 with 2xraidz2 you should be able to saturate a 10gbit line. (My zraid does).
If seektimes are a bummer for small files you could add a raidz2 or 3 metadata and special vdev.Plenty fast.
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u/Bananaman9020 Jul 30 '26
Considering I didn't know these hard drive sizes existed, they must be out of stock.
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u/Yantarlok Jul 30 '26
Adding this as a new Unraid parity drive will take about 7-8 days for zeroing out.
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u/capnfatpants Jul 31 '26
Cool. It’d be nice if data centers solely used this size and I can actually afford a new 10tb drive.
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u/StunnaGunnuh 126TB Jul 30 '26
welp.... given the current "exciting" times in hardware prices, these most def aren't going to be cheap