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Seagate Announces First SSD, 2TB HDD
Lucas123 writes "Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said today that the company plans to put out its first solid state disk drive next year as well as a 2TB version of its Barracuda hard disk drive. Watkins also alluded to Seagate's inevitable move from spinning disk to solid state drives, but emphasized it will be years away, saying the storage market is driven by cost-per-gigabyte and though SSDs provide benefits such as power savings, they won't be in laptops in the next few years. A 128GB SSD costs $460, or $3.58 per gigabyte, compared to $60 for a 160GB hard drive, according to Krishna Chander, an analyst at iSuppli. 'It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard drives,' on price and reliability."
This
Technically speaking, if it were always about price vs performance, we'd all be running last generation AMD's, using CD-R's and the like. In reality, you don't pay proportionally more for extra performance, you pay EXPONENTIALLY more.
/. readership, a 20% boost in performance is worth a 200% increase in price, especially considering how cheap computing equipment is these days, compared to the utility it offers.
For the average consumer, SSD's aren't yet the way to go, but for what I'd bet is a good proportion of the
I've told you a million times not to exaggerate...
It's one thing to say, "the market's not ready, but we'll get into it when our customers are likely to be interested, cost-wise." It's another to try to undermine the market by saying it's just a bad idea and changing positions when you realize it's become a good enough idea that if you don't embrace it, it'll kill you.
I'm all for adjusting to your environment, but there's a difference between being a leader and innovator, and a gadfly-turned-also-ran. Not saying I wouldn't buy their products, but even when they were saying, "never never never" (wish I could cite a source), I know it was BS BS BS.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Or, it could be they lost business deals from customers like Google who are switching to faster SDD drives. It would also explain the recent grumbles they had about suing flash companies on trying to get in their enterprise business.
Christ, as if existing standard hard drives aren't unreliable enough already.
:p) modern IDE/SATA drives fail within 3 years as is, they already have a pretty high failure rate.
It's not unrealistic to see 1 out of every 10 to 20 (well, 1 in every 3 if you use Maxtors
I thought one of the major advantages of SSDs was their reliability or is that simply not the case? are they really so unreliable currently?
One of my biggest dislikes of hard drives in general is reliability, I want to be sure my hard drive wont just not work one day leaving me without my files and backing up is one of those necessary evils as is. I build RAID in to all my machines nowadays with redundancy but I still feel like I'm getting screwed having to buy multiple disks and only get a portion of the total storage.
Would it be nice to be able to save files one day on a standard consumer system and be guaranteed they'll always be there the next without ever needing to back them up and without having to buy at least twice as many drives for redundancy.
What happens when the engineers run out of bright ideas to increase the storage density on magnetic media? Magnetic domains can only get so small before they become unstable.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Agreed - waiting for the price to come down is something consumers do. Driving the price down is something competitors do. Waiting around for it to happen on the part of the mfr. is silly.
Assuming past performance is indicative of future performance is a classic FAIL of analysts of all types.
You have no idea what the future will hold. With the rising costs of metal, disk technology may one day become as expensive and obsolete as 4,000 pound solid steel cars are today.
Economics can and do change every day. Keep an open mind.
Actually there are reasons why SSDs may catch up to rotating disks:
1. Rotating disks get closer to physical limits and designers are planning for some big technology changes that will have an effect on cost. Check out Mark Kryder's video presentation on future disk technologies at CMU (I don't have the URL handy.)
2. SSD technology can go up with Moore's law for the foreseeable future.
3. We're getting to the point where SSDs reach practical sizes. I don't need 1TB in my laptop - I could live with 64GB quite well (I only have 120GB right now.) So, in a year or two I can probably get an SSD for my typical usage pattern at a decent price. At that point the volume for SSDs will grow dramatically and rotating disks will be used mostly for very large capacity and/or very low $/GB. Less profitable => fewer engineering dollars => slower density growth. Just what happened to tape a decade ago.
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The false dichotomy is that it's an either/or thing.
There will be SSD components with high speed and low power and their price/GB will decrease very quickly. Largest capacities will always be expensive. For a long time they will cost more than magnetic media, but it probably won't always be so. Their speed and reliability will improve as vendors build out the drive intelligence that abstracts the physical media from the logical media and parallelize atomic access with internal RAID to compensate for the slowness of individual cells. These products will sell to users who are interested in their benefits and the manufacturers will make lots of money. Ultimately the speed of random reads and writes of SSD media will be limited only by the interface as solid state components are "always on" and each block of data is as accessible as any other.
Magnetic media will continue to drop in price as well. As storage increases today's hard drives will find their way to the recycling center in record time. The optimal price/performance will continue to improve as will maximum capacity. Speed will not increase as much, particularly with random reads and writes, because the data is still stored on a rotating physical object and a physical read/write head must move to the correct track and wait for the data block to fly under the head before data can be read or written. These products will continue to sell well for a long time to users interested in their benefits and the manufacturers will continue to make lots of money.
Both will be popular for a long time. There are other technologies in the works also.
Ultimately at 60MB/s it takes 1,000,000 seconds (11.5 days) to write 60tB to a (currently theoretical) rotating platter drive. At 6tB/second (interface TBA) it takes 10 seconds to write the same data to a solid state device. The ultimate winner in this one is clear, but it will be a long time.
Let me be the first to say: "that's a lot of porn."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
For the majority of people 4TB, 8TB and 16TB are no more useful than 128GB. So, cost/capacity improvements in spinning discs will be relevant to a smaller and smaller number of people.
The only reason they are trying to break into this market (that they continuously decry as useless, futile, and too expensive) is because they are afraid of what "might" happen ten years down the road.
I'd say they're being smart. Right now Seagate DOES have market recognition for storage. A proper, forward thinking CEO(I know, rare), should always be thinking on how to adapt to evolving markets.
Much like how, when IBM started, they were a tabulating machine company. If they had tried to stay that, they wouldn't be around today.
Much like how, if you start digging into them, you'll find many oil companies are busily attempting to become 'energy' companies, diversifying into solar, wind, biological fuel production, etc...
Sure, right now SSD doesn't make financial sense in most applications. But it's out there, it's selling. It doesn't take much work to look at a graph comparing SSD vs HD cost per gig for various form factor hard drives. It doesn't take much to look at computer usage and realize that the majority of laptop users aren't filling up their existing hard drives. It doesn't take much to look at the dropping cost of a usefully large SSD vs the more or less constant 'minimum cost' low capacity HD. Just looking at these factors a competent CEO will realize that Seagate could be relegated to special purpose needs, and maybe even bankrupt from the loss of the mass market.
I don't read AC A human right
Of course the benefits* are way higher than the downsides - I don't make coffee anymore after starting a complex task. Especially disk space and read/write times have improved significantly. But I'm still waiting way to much time for trivial tasks and compared to hardware achievements most new software performs pretty bad.
*If it wasn't for the fact that MS changes the doc format every product cycle I'd stick to Office 97 - I don't see any innovation in newer versions - they just cause more trouble.
I don't read replies by ACs.
For many applications, what matters is price per IO operations per second. Sometimes price per IO operations per second per U of rack space or per watt is what matters.
Flash will beat hard drives there much sooner than it will beat hard drives in simple $/GB.
Flash has fast reads and slow writes. Sun is promising flash drives with 25% of the space reserved for bad block remapping, and a huge amount of supercapacitor-backed write cache. They are promising to release this in SFF HD form factor with a SAS interface, and SO-DIMM form factor with a presumably proprietary interface.
Even if Sun breaks its promise, as is typical for them, someone else will come out with the product.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The next step is to stop treating them as "disks". We tolerate the library and OS overhead of getting to a block on a disk drive because access times on disks are so long. But solid state memory devices can be accessed in microseconds. We need a different model for these devices.