Slashdot Mirror
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."
Every news source has merged those two statements together, and every time, my brain gets stuck on it.
Seagate is announcing two seperate products. One is a SSD and the OTHER is a 2TB hdd.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
I can't help it. I remember buying my first two gig drive for $780, back when the dollar was worth squat. Now of course, the value of the dollar is rapidly approaching diddly-squat.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The SSD from Seagate is a total "Me Too!" product. Seagate thinks they are in the "Mass storage" market, but they are not. They never have been. Their market is the one that includes "rotating magnetic platters". 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.
It's so nice to see a company that fought this at every step pretend to embrace it.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
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'd buy a $460 128 gigabyte SSD in a laptop. Not to long ago these options were about $1000. If you do this right (and often it's been done wrong) you get better performance, much longer battery life, and enhanced reliability. With the right software monitoring of repeated writes, you could also know about hard drive failures coming in advance. That's fantastic, in my book. $460 is still a tad high, but I'd bite.
Spinning hard disks will go the way of tubes in ten years, more likely faster than that. Scaling the manufacturing up will drive SSD drive costs down. There are long-life reasons why:
- SSDs aren't as vibration sensitive (both will not take a bullet, but only SSD can likely survive a normal drop of 2M on to concrete)
- SSDs don't have the temperature/altitude constraints
- SSDs don't have latency and no rise/shutdown time for green needs, in fact, they use hardly any power at all
- SSDs are generally faster, although there are algorithms needed in flash to prevent bucket overuse because reads are almost infinite, but writes are not
- SSDs take less in terms of precious metals and present fewer QA problems
- No electromechanicals to wear out.
The price point? Going down. It's an obvious solution to a long time problem. Magnetic versus flash storage will tend to favor flash, as magnetism decays sooner than flash will-- when flash is written to correctly.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
For two reasons. First and foremost, low power consumption. Secondly, we have already passed the sweet spot in the storage capacity needed for the applications most people run, particularly on laptops. Add to that the fact that current HD form factors are an extremely good fit for SSD units, and the writing is on the wall.
So what will happen is pretty obvious. Laptops are going to push SSD storage into the mainstream, giving it the critical mass needed to start the research bandwagon rolling, and 5-10 years after that happens hard drives will become the 'new' tape storage and most production systems will be using SSDs.
Even more pointedly, with power costs being the premium concern for data centers these days, and the hard drive being the only thing left in the computer that can't be engineered down to near 0 power consumption when idle (short of spinning it down, which has its own problems), my expectation is that large commercial concerns will see a huge cost benefit to using SSD storage despite the higher front-end cost of purchasing it.
-Matt
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.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
is very dependent on the application. In particular it depends on the mix of linear vs random operations and the mix of reads and writes.
For 100% read applications SSDs tend to be similar in performance to hard disks when reading linearly, and a lot faster than hard disks when reading randomly. This shows up in linear read speeds of 100 MB/sec for a typical Flash SSD which is "close" to a hard disk. For random 4K reads, Flash SSDs can stomp any hard disk. Most disks are in the 10,000 4K read IOPS range where 15K SAS drives are in the 250 range or 40x slower. So for applications that are 100% read SSDs can be as much as 40x faster, although the average is usually in the range of 15x to 20x.
When you start writing to Flash things get interesting. Flash is really designed for large, linear, aligned, writes. With most drives, you can get maximum write throughput only if you write exactly aligned with the drives internal erase blocks. Thus you can write exactly 2 megabytes on exact 2 megabyte drive boundaries and get 100% of the theoretical write throughput of the drive. Unfortunately, no application acts like this, so you are at the mercy of the file system and Flash controller to turn your smaller, probably random, and probably mis-aligned writes into what the drive can handle. The net impact of this is that good Flash SSDs have 4K random write IOPS in the 120s which is 1/2 the speed of a 15K SAS drive. I have measured Flash SSD with 4K write IOPS with values like 135, 120, 64, 43, 24, 13, 4.0, and 3.3.
This is why Flash SSD performance is so hard to judge. The random write performance can suck up the available "drive time" and dig a system deep into dirty buffer flushing. We talked with one Dell laptop user that described their system becoming "unusable" while an Outlook indexing operations was randomly updating a big file. Unusable in this case was 2+ minutes for to bring up task manager.
These random writes also have a real impact on the wear of the drive. Every time you seek a write, you basically chew up a write/erase cycle, even if the write is only 4K long. If you look at a drive that claims 50 GB/day for 10 years, this is 50 GB of linear writes on exact erase block boundaries. If you write 4K randomly, the 50 GB really means 25,000 4K writes or 100 Megabytes of random writes.
The solution to this is to not write randomly to the drive. There are file systems designed for Flash that address these issues. These are typically called "Log File Systems". Unfortunately, there is no generally available file system really designed for performance. In Linux the LogFS options are really tuned for small memory small storage systems and for hardware where the flash chips are directly accessible. They do help drive wear a lot, but they are just not tuned for Gigabytes of space or database crunching performance.
Another solution is my companies product called MFT (Managed Flash Technology) which is a software block mapping layer that runs on the host. It gives you the random write performance benefits and wear benefits of a LogFS while allowing you to use whatever file system you wish. MFT was developed on 2.6 Linux and has been ported to Windows. With MFT, the same drives that do 25 4K random write IOPS usually measure over 10,000. The linear speed of the drive is still equal to a hard disk, but the random speed is now closer to symmetric with reads and writes. Thus jobs like updating databases can literally run 20x faster than the fastest hard disks.
In the end, Flash SSDs will find specific markets initially. I can say with certainty that they won't get used for off-line backups or storing/edit large quantities of HD video. But give them databases or file systems with lots of small files, and they can really smoke a hard drive.