Chinese semiconductor thread II

[PopularScience]

A historic moment for domestic storage! Sugon secures the top spot on two major rankings.

At the ISC 2026 conference, Sugon’s ParaStor F9000 all-flash storage system topped the rankings in both the "Production" (Full-Node) and "10-Node" categories of the IO500 list, making Sugon the first Chinese vendor to achieve this dual championship.

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[spaceship9876]

I wonder whether chinese company will make mechanical harddrives in the future. They are still much cheaper than flash to storage large quantities of data e.g 24TB.

 

[PopularScience]

I wonder whether chinese company will make mechanical harddrives in the future. They are still much cheaper than flash to storage large quantities of data e.g 24TB.

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[huemens]

I wonder whether chinese company will make mechanical harddrives in the future. They are still much cheaper than flash to storage large quantities of data e.g 24TB.

No point in making new investments in that now. NAND was on track to overtake mechanical drives in price within a few years before the current AI related demand spike happened. Current high prices of NAND are due to supply shortage, not cost of production. Eventually NAND supply will scale up to meet the demand.

 

[henrik]

I wonder whether chinese company will make mechanical harddrives in the future. They are still much cheaper than flash to storage large quantities of data e.g 24TB.

They should have done that long ago for national security and technical reasons. Flash storage depends on electric charge which degrades over time if unplugged, while mechanical drives depend on magnetism.

 

[bsdnf]

I wonder whether chinese company will make mechanical harddrives in the future. They are still much cheaper than flash to storage large quantities of data e.g 24TB.

The HDD market has actually been declining year by year for a long time, and the storage shortage brought about by the artificial intelligence boom is just a temporary resurgence.

HDD technology does not follow Moore's Law, and its iteration speed is much slower than that of SSDs. Not to mention that a bunch of patents are still in the hands of the three giants. Instead of going backwards, they should focus on the future of semiconductor storage technology.

In terms of security, enterprise-grade nitrogen and helium disks are unrecoverable once their airtightness is compromised, and air-filled disks offer no predictable stability for their heads. If enterprises need distributed backups for their HDDs to mitigate risk, why not instead just use a bunch of QLCs? It saves space and is just as cheap.

 

[huemens]

Flash storage depends on electric charge which degrades over time if unplugged, while mechanical drives depend on magnetism.

That doesn't matter for live systems.
For long-term offline archival storage, tapes are a much better medium than HDDs. Big enterprises already use tapes for archival storage. Tapes have higher linear read/write speeds than HDDs and lasts longer. HDDs are already gone from consumer space and what's left in the enterprise space will eventually be replaced by SSDs.