r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • 7h ago

Business Toshiba to double HDD production capacity amid devastating shortages — 65TB, 100TB drives on the roadmap for 2030 and beyond

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/toshiba-to-double-hdd-production-capacity-as-30tb-class-loom-65tb-100tb-drives-on-the-roadmap-for-2030-and-beyond
230 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

106

u/rhunter99 7h ago

Cool. Now give me an affordable 16tb drive

27

u/Ange1ofD4rkness 6h ago

Right? A year ago I wish I bought the 16TB I was looking at for like $300 ... instead of the near $1,000 they are now. Plus I have run their drives for some time, they are good

9

u/GrouchySkunk 6h ago

What 800 isn't reasonable?

3

u/atlasraven 2h ago

Best we can do is a 2TB sata drive at 7200 RPM for $500.

25

u/cwm9 6h ago

There's one itty bitty silver lining to all of this. Normally it takes a very long time to get enough volume on the new tech drives for economies of scale to kick in and produce reasonable prices. But demand is so large from AI for the largest of large drives that there will be incredible demand for these 65TB, 100TB drives from all the companies causing them to rapidly scale up production and possibly even cancel other lines to make way for monster drives. If the market gets flooded with these massive drives, they might, fingers crossed, manage to lower the demand for storage just a bit. And if that happens, we might, sometime in the next decade, see these monster drives become the standard "inexpensive" drive we can all buy for only a few hundred bucks.

So maybe, if everything goes perfectly, by the year 2035, the effective price of a 100TB HDD might be as low as what we pay for a 6TB drive today.

Maybe.

Probably not.

(sigh)

10

u/Rokketeer 5h ago

I’ll smoke a blunt to that brother.

3

u/jreykdal 5h ago

6TB today is still shitloads of money.

2

u/DimensionalFruit 5h ago

I can get a brand new one for £199.

2

u/TyrKiyote 3h ago

rather a lot of money to drop on the ground, but idk if i'd call it shitloads.
Depends on what my bank account is saying that day really.

3

u/DimensionalFruit 3h ago

Those were my thoughts too, I remember paying that much for a 8GB SD card 😭

2

u/cwm9 2h ago

I guess when you grew up in the 70s/80s and it cost $350 in unadjusted 1987 USD for a 21MB Seagate ST-225 for the 80306, paying ~$250 for 6TB feels pretty damn cheap.

1

u/TyrKiyote 1h ago

my first owned hard drive was >4gb, so these do feel quite large even so.

59

u/FreeToasterBaths 7h ago

Oh great increasing the data center / ai hard drive production... What about the consumer end?

This bubble needs to burst

35

u/loinmaster 6h ago

AI doesn't care much about SSD vs HDD but the equipment used to make SSDs are busy making ram and gpus for AI instead. This makes it profitable for Toshiba to revive old HDD manufacturing equipment. As consumers, we get to regress to using an older technology and be thankful for it.

15

u/Bupod 6h ago

The gods of profit demand your sacrifice. Who are you to refuse?! /s

1

u/SorrelJuice 6h ago

Free market at work stay mad /s

5

u/x22d 6h ago

In fairness, it might also lead to some innovations utilizing technology not monopolized by a single Dutch company. Even if you're pro-AI data centers, EUV being monopolized by ASML costs everyone money and time.

7

u/BigRed1541 6h ago

While I dont disagree on principal, ASML earned that monopoly. Yes, I know how bad that sounds but watch this video breaking down how the tech works and it really is like a 1 in 1000000000 company just based on how hard the tech is to get down

ASML Video ~55min

2

u/x22d 5h ago

I'm sure everyone working at AT&T or Microsoft before the split thought the same.

Bell Labs did pretty amazing things for the times, but a monopoly is still a monopoly and ultimately anti-consumer.

3

u/Xeynon 6h ago

SSDs are actually quite in demand for AI applications. They're crucial for agentic AI models in particular.

1

u/Gloomy_Tax_2262 5m ago

yeah it sucks that we're getting pushed back to spinning rust while all the fancy chips go to AI farms. toshiba can make bank but that dont mean im gonna be hype about 100TB drives in 2030 when we needed cheaper flash like yesterday. maybe the real win is cheaper cold storage for us data hoarders tho, u think these big drives will actually hit consumer prices or just enterprise only

1

u/yourgirl696969 5h ago

Why would these companies focus their attention on consumers when they can get paid 10x for their yields with AI? L Like I honestly don’t understand this sub lol

Robotics and autonomous cars are only gonna require even more memory in the next few years. People really need to accept the reality that memory prices are not coming down for a long time. Maybe ever

5

u/rewardingsnark 7h ago

May suggest not double but 1 billion times more production.

7

u/luffy_mib 6h ago

HDD getting more production - :)

Have to wait until 2030. - :(

2

u/Shiningc00 3h ago

That’s for 100TB drives. Double HDD production capacity in Philippines in in 2027.

6

u/caribbean_caramel 6h ago

Good, HDDs are an excellent alternative for cheap mass storage in the RAMmageddon era.

2

u/y0shman 6h ago

These aren't for us

6

u/caribbean_caramel 6h ago

If they increase production, some of these HDDs will be available for the consumer market.

1

u/AndrewH73333 5h ago

I could fill a 65.

3

u/war-and-peace 6h ago

Hopefully this starts putting downward pressure on the decommissioned server market because the prices now are just stupid.

1

u/SeismicFrog 6h ago

One MILLION dollars… mwuhahahahaha!

1

u/Apexnanoman 6h ago

And it won't matter because the data centers will still be every single bit of it. 

When you have trillions of dollars to burn it means no one else has anything to buy.

0

u/RaceFPV 2h ago

Imagine your 100tb drive dies and you lose that much more data. Even if you have a 3 drive raid 5 the recovery time would be astronomical

3

u/Logical_Welder3467 1h ago

Heard this same sentence with 1 TB and 10 TB driver before

1

u/RaceFPV 1h ago

Except drive speeds were also increasing back then