PC hard drive shipments could fall by 50% this year...

[Ty Harper]

Looks like the consumer shift to streaming is having a major impact on the hard drive market (one major component supplier is already positioning itself away from the market) which will very likely in turn impact the price of hard drives in a negative way.

Personally, there's no way I'm putting my trust in a cloud service, so I guess I'll just have to be more thoughtful about my storage strategies and take whatever price increases might be coming down the pipe.

https://www.techspot.com/amp/news/79938-pc-hard-drive-shipments-could-fall-50-percent.html

[thephoenix]

cloud services are safe. the problem is bandwith to upload gigs and gigs of footages. oh, and maybe the price as well ?

[Video Hummus]

1 hour ago, thephoenix said:

cloud services are safe. the problem is bandwith to upload gigs and gigs of footages. oh, and maybe the price as well ?

Cloud services are convenient at first but quickly become expensive and hard to move away from once you have a lot of data in them.

Bottom line is video data is incredibly burdensome no matter how you want to store it.

[Ty Harper]

3 hours ago, thephoenix said:

cloud services are safe. the problem is bandwith to upload gigs and gigs of footages. oh, and maybe the price as well ?

I think cloud services are as fickle as any service tied to market supply/demand. If the company starts losing $$ or the cloud storage market shifts, things could get sh*tty really quickly. I think Apple's phasing out of iTunes is a cautionary example of the kind of disruptiveness that can occur when we put all our chips on any paid service and they decide to go in a new direction. It's also another sign that the era of consumers caring about actually owning media is dwindling --- to the point that a company like Apple that was anti-subscription/streaming is now all about that life. So I can see a future where the cloud service market also shrinks and the prices get even steeper.

[webrunner5]

Well with 8K coming, and 6K likely to be a consumer standard soon that will be an even bigger burden on Cloud Services. I don't trust squat away from my own self unless I have it backed up. And if I do that why bother even with the cloud. Sure the Cloud can save you from having 2 backups at different locations, but for what you pay it almost to me for big projects not worth it.

There is just way too much hacking going on as of late to trust any one with all your data, that in the long run is nothing short of suicide.

[newfoundmass]

Storage and back up is increasingly becoming a bigger problem for me. I want to have a local copy, but also having cloud backups are kind of necessary at this point. 

Amazon Web Services Glacier storage is the most cost effective to store but slow, and costly, to retrieve. 

When you've got dozens of TB of data though your options dwindle, and the costs quickly get into enterprise plan territory which can costs thousands and thousands of dollars a year. 

Once Amazon cut the unlimited storage for Prime users it became clear to me that this was only going to become a bigger issue / problem. 

[thebrothersthre3]

hard drives are so cheap now I have no issue buying a lot of them

[thephoenix]

38 minutes ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

hard drives are so cheap now I have no issue buying a lot of them

to me the problem is not buying hdd but storing them.

if you want to do things the right way you need a backup hdd and a backup of the backup in an other place in case of fire or flooding or anything else. and then it goes expensive

[thebrothersthre3]

11 minutes ago, thephoenix said:

to me the problem is not buying hdd but storing them.

if you want to do things the right way you need a backup hdd and a backup of the backup in an other place in case of fire or flooding or anything else. and then it goes expensive

I don't do the double back up part though its probably a good idea. 

[hijodeibn]

26 minutes ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

I don't do the double back up part though its probably a good idea. 

I have to do that also, I think I am going put everything of my Drobo in several hard drives and leave them at my parent house.....

[thephoenix]

4 minutes ago, hijodeibn said:

I have to do that also, I think I am going put everything of my Drobo in several hard drives and leave them at my parent house.....

that's what i do. and then it gets a pain to update the backup of the backup ?

[Robert Collins]

33 minutes ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

I don't do the double back up part though its probably a good idea. 

I think a sensible approach is to have one local backup and one cloud backup. The cloud gives you automatic offsite and allows you to go 'back in time' in case you accidentally delete stuff and it is copied to your local backup (like I did a while ago.)

Cloud doesnt need to be expensive. I use Crashplan for small businesses which is US$10 per month. Unlimited storage including connected external drives like my NAS (or a drobo). And restoring is free.

[IronFilm]

3 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

Storage and back up is increasingly becoming a bigger problem for me. I want to have a local copy, but also having cloud backups are kind of necessary at this point. 

 

The low low budget approach to the cloud is instead find a friendly soul (could be your grandmother, or your childhood friend, whoever!), put a small fireproof safe somewhere in their house, then once a month ship them a harddrive. (preferably they live in a different city to you, or at least live on the opposite side of town to yourself. Just in case a natural disaster strikes like an earthquake / wild fire / tornado / etc)

[webrunner5]

Yeah I can buy 10 cheap used servers and come up with a slick website, and pretend I have this safe as hell site with 200 years of IT experience. No way I am trusting that stuff form hacks, lost data, and oh sorry, we are going out of business, FBI seized all our shit. ?

[Ty Harper]

I think the thing everyone is missing is that, just like hard drives - cloud companies in and of themselves have a limited shelf life (as a reliable and cost effective service) before they become a very costly problem.

[newfoundmass]

12 hours ago, Robert Collins said:

I think a sensible approach is to have one local backup and one cloud backup. The cloud gives you automatic offsite and allows you to go 'back in time' in case you accidentally delete stuff and it is copied to your local backup (like I did a while ago.)

Cloud doesnt need to be expensive. I use Crashplan for small businesses which is US$10 per month. Unlimited storage including connected external drives like my NAS (or a drobo). And restoring is free.

Don't they have a file size limit? 

4 hours ago, Ty Harper said:

I think the thing everyone is missing is that, just like hard drives - cloud companies in and of themselves have a limited shelf life (as a reliable and cost effective service) before they become a very costly problem.

Correct. If you're only storing a couple hundred gigs, or even a TB or so, it's not too big of a worry. It's when you start getting in the 10's of TBs or more that it becomes an issue where you're kinda held hostage. It's not as simple to switch Cloud services when you're dealing with such a massive amount of data. 

[Mokara]

On 6/5/2019 at 5:50 AM, Ty Harper said:

Looks like the consumer shift to streaming is having a major impact on the hard drive market (one major component supplier is already positioning itself away from the market) which will very likely in turn impact the price of hard drives in a negative way.

Personally, there's no way I'm putting my trust in a cloud service, so I guess I'll just have to be more thoughtful about my storage strategies and take whatever price increases might be coming down the pipe.

https://www.techspot.com/amp/news/79938-pc-hard-drive-shipments-could-fall-50-percent.html

Why would streaming have an impact? The data still has to be stored somewhere.

The company making the prediction sells the spindles found in most hard drives. If they are selling fewer it means that there are less low capacity drives being made and more high capacity drives. The same amount of stuff is being stored. The drop in low capacity drives (used primarily in consumer products) is probably being driven by the transition over to SSD based media now that they much more price competitive in those low capacity applications. Obviously the decline in low capacity market is going to have the biggest impact on the spindle manufacturers because you need fewer of them to do the same thing now. That doesn't mean that hard drive use is changing, just that a lot of what used to be hard drives are now SSDs.

In other words the only thing that is changing is the data storage media. Tough luck for the spindle manufacturers.

[JurijTurnsek]

I am guessing video professionals are well connected, since many hire each other for help on bigger jobs. Now consider purchasing an identical NAS at your place and at the place of your colleague's and split the space on both. You probably both have optical connections and could schedule mirroring via internet to be done each night. Keep credential secret from each other and encrypt your partitions if the trust level is low. 

The only downside being that a natural disaster can doom you both if you live in close proximity.

Anyone ever considered tape drives? Also, what is the oldest footage you absolutely had to dig up for any reason (reviving family moments is fun, but client footage from years ago sounds like a dull affair)?

[Ty Harper]

3 hours ago, Mokara said:

Why would streaming have an impact? The data still has to be stored somewhere.

The company making the prediction sells the spindles found in most hard drives. If they are selling fewer it means that there are less low capacity drives being made and more high capacity drives. The same amount of stuff is being stored. The drop in low capacity drives (used primarily in consumer products) is probably being driven by the transition over to SSD based media now that they much more price competitive in those low capacity applications. Obviously the decline in low capacity market is going to have the biggest impact on the spindle manufacturers because you need fewer of them to do the same thing now. That doesn't mean that hard drive use is changing, just that a lot of what used to be hard drives are now SSDs.

In other words the only thing that is changing is the data storage media. Tough luck for the spindle manufacturers.

The shift to streaming is due in large part to a shift in how consumers are thinking about ownership. They no longer care as much about owning the thing (which is what was driving the hard drive market) --- they're cool with someone else having ownership (and worrying about storing the thing) while they pay a streaming subscription fee to listen, watch the thing. 

[Robert Collins]

4 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

Don't they have a file size limit? 

Correct. If you're only storing a couple hundred gigs, or even a TB or so, it's not too big of a worry. It's when you start getting in the 10's of TBs or more that it becomes an issue where you're kinda held hostage. It's not as simple to switch Cloud services when you're dealing with such a massive amount of data. 

Nope. There is not file size limit.