HDD is back: The return of the hard drive

OWC sees disk drives returning to favor as NAND price rises and delivery shortages reduce SSD sales.

Other World Computing (OWC) has a rather amazing history, having been started up by CEO Larry O’Connor in Woodstock, Illinois, in 1988, when he was 14 years old. Over the next 37 years he has grown the company into a business that specializes in computer hardware upgrades and accessories, particularly for Apple Mac and iPhone products, but also Windows PCs. OWC sells things like SSDs, RAM, external drives, Thunderbolt docks, enclosures, and so forth. With its Apple focus, its customers include creative professionals, such as photographers, video editors, and musicians, looking for fast-access storage and system expansion offerings to make their work easier.

We understand its name refers to the early PC days when Apple products were the “other” world alongside mainstream Windows boxes.

The company has offices in Texas and Nevada as well as Woodstock, and two online stores;  owc.com and macsales.com. It’s a long-running, independent, creative professional-focussed, private business that's exposed to the supply chain issues affecting DRAM, NAND and hard disk drives (HDD). We asked its CEO and founder Larry O’Connor about OWC and how it views these issues.

Blocks & Files: Tell me a little bit about OWC please.

Larry O’Connor: I started OWC because of my own technology needs and desire to derive more capability from existing, available tech - make it go further and farther. OWC’s infancy was re-inking printer ribbons in 1988, then we engaged in selling and supporting customer Apple memory upgrades in 1989, then into external storage by 1990, processor upgrades by 1994, and continued to engage with the needs of customers that came to us. 

At the end of the day, where there were clear gaps in the products we could offer as a reseller, OWC pivoted to engineer better solutions - both hardware and software inclusive - to have the solution the customer needed. 

Blocks & Files: What effect is the sky-high pricing and extended delivery times of SSDs having on on-premises storage strategies regarding SSD replacement, substitution and/or tiering?

Larry O’Connor: Thus far, the impact has been relatively muted, but absolutely, I have seen a real shift in balance towards spinning HDD over SSD. SSD, more now in areas of necessity and high benefit, where more than capable HDD arrays are being employed for general and mid-level data performance requirements. There are many applications where an SSD is a nice-to-have, but a HDD-based solution fulfills the need. 

Blocks & Files: Is any SSD-replacement activity going to be a tactical or strategic response?

Larry O’Connor: A bit of both. When everything is cheap, there is more of the "easy button" and what’s nice to have. In the wake of the current market changes far greater attention is being paid to actual trade offs/benefits and the actual work flow areas that an SSD is the right solution, and otherwise, where an HDD based solution is more than adequate and well serves the needs even if has some other tradeoffs - which don’t negate from the efficiency of the work being accomplished. 

Blocks & Files: How do you view the effect of WD's high-bandwidth drive and dual-pivot disk drive technologies affecting the relationship between SSDs in terms of latency, capacity and I/O bandwidth?

Larry O’Connor: HDDs have been improving significantly in all aspects over the "SSD era." Compared to even just 15 years ago, HDD options today are as much as 7X faster and getting faster with each new generation as head count and platter data density increase. WD’s latest milestone shows that hard drives — once declared obsolete in an all-SSD future — remain indispensable for storing and managing the exploding volumes of data organizations generate today.

Even an on-prem simple HDD is exponentially faster than any cloud-based storage today You would need sustained 2.5Gb/s Internet upload bandwidth to match just a single drive’s capability. And it’s a relatively small portion of the world, USA, that even has 1Gb/s download speeds, and, typically, on the upload side, short of a dedicated circuit, your’e lucky to get 40-100 Mb/s of uplink vs. the more typical 8-20 Mb/s. 

Blocks & Files: How do you think Seagate and Toshiba will respond to WD's announcements, including its power-optimized drives and simpler API interface for JBODs?

Larry O’Connor: I believe all the manufacturers have been heading in these performance directions, while WD is the first to announce a leap like this…. And I look forward to them delivering, I won’t be surprised to see both Seagate and Toshiba with similar performing solutions within a similar time frame. 

Comment

We’re looking at a renaissance of HDD storage, which will likely accelerate when high-bandwidth drives hit the add-on market exemplified by OWC. It may even be possible that PCs begin to return to have HDDs as their bulk data storage device, with hot data cached on an SSD.