I would say that the vast majority of the consumer hard drive market is in the bracket where size matters much more than performance.
I have no idea what fraction of the server market.
But there's also an important thing to note about product families. You talk about using density improvements to make drives smaller, and then install more of them to keep performance up. I think that's reasonable, but I also think that one of the best ways to do that is to reduce the platter count and drive height. In that world, where the main product is thin drives, it takes only a small amount of engineering effort to keep making an XL model that has lower performance but is significantly cheaper per TB.
I said I'm not an expert on the HDD market, but I have seen some stuff so here's a bit of perspective. The hyperscalers are more than 50% of the market. They're each big enough that price distortion from their own buys is a real concern that they plan for. (Note BTW that these are often left out of analysts' charts, because leaving them in makes it harder to see patterns among the rest.) More than half of what's left is sold to businesses, with most of that going to companies big enough to build and run their own data centers (including supercomputer facilities). And then, finally, all consumer drive sales account for something less than 20% of the total.
Yes, size does matter a lot for those markets. If you want performance use flash. However, again, size per drive is a red herring. What matters is the capacity you can fit into a system, whether it's a laptop or a server. Having that much capacity present as a single volume through a single interface is simply not ideal either for performance (which might not be the same goal but still has a lower limit) or for reliability. That's all I've been saying. You're better off combining multiple lower-capacity drives, even if you can get by (at least for a while) with a single larger drive. Serious video folks and even gamers have known the advantages of dual drive RAID-0 or RAID-1 for years.
> where the main product is thin drives, it takes only a small amount of engineering effort
What you're now suggesting is no more than what I suggested nearly a day and several posts ago (look for "drive manufacturers could help"), which you and "others" took issue with. Yes, drive manufacturers can and should make those thin drives, and then sell multiples packed into a single enclosure like we already have today. The fact that it's multiple physical drives could be more or less transparent. The transparent version would be cheaper and offer the system designer more flexibility. The non-transparent version, akin to existing HW RAID or even multiple platters today, would be a bit easier to conceptualize for people not used to thinking of enclosures and spindles and platters and heads as separate things, but it would be a bit more expensive (controller plus memory as part of the package) and not necessarily better.
In short, using "drive" to mean both the package with connectors on the side and the piece(s) of oxide-coated metal inside it is sloppy, and leads to wrong conclusions. Once you realize that higher density creates more options than "every limit the same except for higher capacity" then it quickly becomes clear that 120TB on a single spindle isn't the best use of that technology.
> However, again, size per drive is a red herring. What matters is the capacity you can fit into a system, whether it's a laptop or a server.
I agree, but the argument I'm making is about cost per terabyte. I'm not inappropriately clinging to terabytes per drive.
> What you're now suggesting is no more than what I suggested nearly a day and several posts ago (look for "drive manufacturers could help"), which you and "others" took issue with.
I didn't take issue with smaller or multi-component drives existing, I just don't think they are necessary for all use cases. I was referring to what you said before on purpose, but disagreeing with the conclusion that "mostly we'd all better get used to higher drive counts". I got the impression you were treating it as a temporary transition measure.
I have no idea what fraction of the server market.
But there's also an important thing to note about product families. You talk about using density improvements to make drives smaller, and then install more of them to keep performance up. I think that's reasonable, but I also think that one of the best ways to do that is to reduce the platter count and drive height. In that world, where the main product is thin drives, it takes only a small amount of engineering effort to keep making an XL model that has lower performance but is significantly cheaper per TB.