Getting Rid of the Disks

Kneht writes "Dan's Data has an interesting article on what it would cost to get rid of your HDDs and replace them with SSDs because hard drives suck. Several aspects are examined, such as required UPS, compact flash, etc. Read the article and you may get a new appreciation for your lowly 7200rpm drive." Funny, I was just thinking that I should start using 120GB disks as my removable media.

Comments

$$$ Money!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now, hard drives are the right cost/benefit compromise. Could they be better? Yes. Would it cost a lot more? Yes. When the second changes, let me know.

Why bash hard drives?

[evilviper]

I don't understand the hard drive bashing. Sure, it isn't as fast as DDR, but it's faster than any other storage media... It's not only faster, but cheaper as well.

In addition, I've had many power supplies and entire motherboards die in the same period as my hard drives have been operating. The best part of all is that they have very obvious signs when they are beginning to die, as well.

Hard drives are not the fastest or most reliable piece in you computers, but they are definately not the worst or slowest. Who here can find ECC DDR RAM for anywhere near $1/GB?

Re:RAM swapfile

[vidnet]

Yes, it would indeed defeat the purpose.

But quoth the article, "If your operating system's virtual memory management isn't all that it might be (...)".

So if your OS sucks (I'd insert an example, but it's too obvious), then RAM based swap files could speed things up. If you OS does not suck, then it would be utterly stupid.

And speaking of OS that don't suck, I upgraded to 512mb ram half a year ago, and Linux hasn't done a disk write since. Love that cache.

Take me to his dealer

[Quietti]

modern drives are pretty reliable, and highly compatible with each other

I wanna have some of what he's smoking, quick!

Seriously, I have IDE and SCSI drives that are about 10 years old (capacity is obviously small - in the 200 - 500mb range) and have almost no bad sectors; they still do a reliable job in routers and other boxes that don't require a lot of storage. Meanwhile, newer drives of 2Gb or larger regularly require replacements. Then, there's the problem of recent drive capacities being too large for the BIOSes of my "deprecated" computers, not to mention SCSI connector standards that change more often than the MTV Top 10.

The real problem, for an end-user, though, is the excessively generous storage capacities; as Cringely once pointed out, unless you are a graphic artist, your personal data probably fits well within 500Mb of storage. Why the hell is it that the smallest drives I can purchase nowadays are around 30Gb (120Gb for SCSI), at a time when my data storage needs still have not exceeded that 500Mb per user quota? And, no, my workstations do not suddenly have a use for larger drives either.

One cannot help but notice how manufacturer warranties reflect the lower quality, as well. Where we used to have 5 year warranties (which, in practice, meant that the drive actually performs well for about 10 years), current offerings are guaranteed for 1 year and last exactly that. There's been several recent cases e.g. with IBM's glass drives, where a replacement is required within 6 months from purchase.

I don't know about you, but I have better things to do than constantly wasting money on purchasing replacement drives and time on reinstalling everything on the new drive, only to find out that the BIOS cannot use such large drives, and cursing that I had to purchase a drive whose capacity is exactly 100 times what I can use.

Message to drive manufacturers: Gimme reliable and quiet 2 - 4Gb drives, using the good old 50-pin connectors in both IDE and SCSI flavours, but providing all the modern refinements of Ultra DMA100, etc. and guaranteed for 5 years or more. Make them affordable too. We don't want any more stinky throw-away media storage, thanks you.

LVM

[Jennifer E. Elaan]

From what I have read, linux's Logical Volume Management (LVM) system gives you the advantage of RAID while still letting you expand your storage. If I were going with the multiple HDD method, I would be using it.

That said, I'm looking at a DVD-R drive. While the rewritable DVD's don't work everywhere, the non-rewritables work almost anywhere, and DVD-R discs can be as cheap as $0.70 each (DVD+R's are several times more expensive). This falls well below the $1/Gig for HDD storage, and they are very conveniently removable.

Quit teasing.

[Glonoinha]

Ouch - come on man quit teasing us. This is EXACTLY what we want, although I would suggest supporting ATA-133 on down. The reason people want to add a SSD is to make an existing computer a LOT faster ... if they have to buy a new computer (that has SATA) simply to use your SSD then the price isn't just the price of your hardware, it is the price of your hardware PLUS the price of a new computer. A hundred million PCs are getting sold this year without SATA support and that means there are a hundred million computers (customers) out there you are insuring you can't sell to if you only support SATA.

Secondly, rather than planning your first release to be the superduper box in 18 months, how about a 'pretty good' box that supports regular IDE (ATA-100 on down) in 6 months, sell some to generate some cash flow, learn from the feedback of your early adopters, adapt the engineering changes into your superduper box v2 that is still getting released in 18 months.

Maybe the first generation skips SATA, no battery backup, uses PC100 SDRAM, make it full height (two 5.25" bays) instead of half height if you need the room, perhaps see if a SCSI interface might get you out the door sooner (much less intelligence on the drive in a SCSI implementation) ...

Lets face it, the first generation of anything usually has pain - so plan on your uber release being v2 in 18 months and release (sell) your first generation in 6 months.