That drive certainly is a bit strange. For one, I would imagine lot of the potential performance is wasted by a SAS connector.
That said, it might be of interest to enterprises from a few different angles (largest drive available for that form factor, easier to manage, great performance, etc). Anything that widens adoption will serve to drive prices even lower. SSDs don't necessarily beat HDDs on price per GB, they just have to get close enough that enough people don't care anymore. And as the original poster pointed out, for many that's already the case.
> And as the original poster pointed out, for many that's already the case.
Because we're seeing, at the same time, a drive away from owning media and instead streaming them, and/or storing data increasingly in The Cloud® and only having a small working set locally.
All those off-loaded will have to be stored somewhere by someone, and that someone will most likely keep using spinning rust for its better price.
And if you do want to keep all your data locally (e.g. because you're living in Nowhere Innawoods and ISPs struggle to get you 6 MBit/s), HDDs can't keep getting bigger and cheaper fast enough.
That's an interesting point, though I suspect it's slightly overstated. I'm sure there's several scenarios that demand huge amounts of storage - e.g. storing HD series, etc - but I'd argue that it isn't mainstream in the greater scheme of things. Heck, I have a 2mbit ADSL line (since I'm living in the arse end of nowhere), and my primary PC has 3x250GB spinnies and a 100GB SSD, no cloud storage. I have a 2TB external for long-term backups. I haven't bothered to replace the HDDs, because honestly I don't really need to. And I'm sure I'm not a special case.
> I'm sure there's several scenarios that demand huge amounts of storage - e.g. storing HD series, etc - but I'd argue that it isn't mainstream in the greater scheme of things.
That was my point; almost nobody is storing HD series anymore because people want to (and in many cases legally are only able to) stream them instead.
> But if the Cloud is made up of hard drives, then hard drive manufacturers still win.
If drives in the Cloud are, on average, utilized more efficiently (both in terms of less unused drive capacity being purchased, and existing drives being used for more of their design life and not being tossed because the device they are in is end-of-life even if the drive isn't) than traditional locally-deployed (both client and server) drives, then increasing cloud use could mean the manufacturer's still lose (in terms of year-over-year sales) even with total storage increasing, if the increase in average efficiency outpaces the increase in storage, so that annual drive sales drop.
Many technologies have this type of price tiering -- high end costs a fortune and exists for super-niche customers and to build out the manufacturing process. (Recall $25,000 plasma TVs 15 years ago).
If you're making large purchases right now, 3+TB SSDs are pricing out fast spinning disk tiers. You probably will see no 10k/15k drives in 2-3 years.