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No Cheap Replacement For Hard Disks Before 2020
siddesu writes with disappointing news to anyone who'd like to see solid-state storage dominate in the near-term future. "A new study of storage technology by the former CTO of Seagate predicts that hard disks will remain the cheapest storage technology in the next decade and probably beyond."
...10 TB drives will be $10? More likely, 100TB drives will be $100 but you won't be able to get anything smaller. And they'll still crap out after a couple of years.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I would wager that because the memory used in solid state drives is old enough that a breakthrough at this point is more unlikely to happen, merely because it should have already.
If you mean 'lowest cost per GB' then you're probably right. If you mean 'lowest cost per IOPS' then you're already wrong. And if we're talking 'lowest cost for something of adequate capacity and a low power consumption for a laptop' then you're also probably wrong too. When flash drives drop below about $1/GB (and it's already close) there will be little advantage in mechanical disks for most users. It doesn't matter if the disk is bigger if you're only using 10% of the capacity, and it's slower than the alternative and uses more power.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The fact a major, respected, industry leader has predicted an upstart new technology will not surpass the incumbent technology is an indication it is almost certainly false.
..don't panic
Probably because manufacturing techniques often take at least 10 years to become mainstream. Even if someone invents something faster, smaller and more reliable than magnetic storage... you still have to conceive of a way to produce it in mass quantities to drive the price below that of established spinning disks.
today, a typical 500 GB hard drive costs about $100
This article must be several years old. In present day, a 1TB hard drive costs about $80.
October 23rd, 2009 By Lisa Zyga
Doh!
Nope! Roast beef costs more than bologna, yet people chose to buy it every day. SSD drives don't need to be cheaper because they are better - silent, far less prone to shock damage, and ohhh so much faster. Morever, HDD's, though cheaper per megabyte for huge-sized drives, will be more expensive for the smaller sizes people actually need. You can get a memory stick for, what, $10? HDD's never touch that because of their complexity. Well before 2020 a 250 GB SSD will be $20, and will have ample capacity for most users, and will be cheaper than any HDD. Granted, a 50 TB HDD will still be cheaper than a 50 TB SDD, but most people won't care. About that time, HDDs will become specialty products, further crippling any remaining cost advantage.
Well before 2020 a 250 GB SSD will be $20, and will have ample capacity for most users, and will be cheaper than any HDD.
Rather like the average user will ever need more than 640k of RAM.
By 2020, 250GB will be as much of a joke for the average user as a 250MB drive would be today; 250GB will probably be just about big enough to hold one super-extra-high-definition video file.
250GB will be as much of a joke for the average user as a 250MB drive would be today
Nintendo DSi has the equivalent of a 256 MB microSD soldered onto the motherboard. It's enough to hold a few apps from the DSi Shop. If it were a joke, why would Nintendo have used it?
250GB will probably be just about big enough to hold one super-extra-high-definition video file.
For one thing, the eye has a resolution limit, so why would people need more than, say, 2560x1440 (quad 720p) in home electronics? For another, are you talking about the consumer's use (which would be streaming rather than storage if the movie industry has its way) or the movie producer's use?
You severely underestimate future requirements for porn storage.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
The hard drive has been a limiting factor in all kinds of things. Why were you taught to "always save your work"? Cause hard drives are slow and it was infeasable to have the application save data in real-time. With an SSD, most applications can probably save your work in real-time. Why does it take so long to boot? Cause the hard drive is slow. With an SSD you can probably afford to quickly dump all of your memory out to "disk" and shut the compute down in hibernate mode--none of this partial-sleep junk.
Why does it take so long to load a program? Slow disk. Why does my computer lag sometimes? Probably slow disk moving around heads on a spinning platter.
Why does it take so long to install things? Partially cause the OS has to set up a shadow copy so you can roll back. Why does my OS not have a shadow copy feature yet? Probably cause the designers thought it would be to slow to implement because of your slow-ass disk. Why does it take so long to search my filesystem or index it? Slow-ass disk.
You think that extra speedup won't be cared about? Seriously? The fact we've delt with such a slow means of long-term storage has held us back for a long time. Remove the silly constraints forced by stupid mechanical devices and suddenly we can do a lot of creative, useful things that were not possible before. Surely even you can see that, right?
Or am I forgetting this is slashdot home of the tech-Luddite and dog gon'nit a command-line and a green screen is good enough for me and should be good enough for anybody!
Only if you install the Federation Font Pack and the holographic tridi layout engine. And that's supposing the SETI program makes an immediate break-through, like tomorrow, and Perl 7 ships on time.
We've already passed the visual resolution where porn becomes gynaecology. Even lust has resolution limits.
Or maybe Google decides it saves bandwidth to send out the entire public Internet encoded as a single quantum particle, but for some reason people don't disable their Mozilla page cache.
Extrapolation is a valid exercise, but works better accompanied by graphs and data points rather than historical fat jokes. The last time Windows hung over its pants like a muffin top, I had a 6GB hard drive. Seagate hasn't sold anything smaller than a military surplus tent awning for years now. Hard to believe, times change.
You missed one very important point. Anyone so closely connected to Seagate as a former CTO of Seagate, is very likely to still have connections with that company and that part of the industry. Seagate and other hard drive companies don't want solid state to dominate, as their business is in conventional hard drives. Now we have solid state drives that means the chip manufacturers are now direct competitors with hard drive companies, which means a lot more competitors for hard drive companies.
So any press release has to be considered very suspect at best. Seagate and other hard drive companies would totally loose out if solid state dominates the market so they are never going to admit they are in trouble or that they are in danger of becoming obsolite. No company would admit that.
Or for some reason have a defective firmware, like I have on my Intel G2 SSD. Of course, that was maybe to be expected for any early adopter. Be aware though that this is a rather new technology. Some things are still developing like TRIM support and fast(er) writes.
Really? I've got 5 of them sitting on my desk right now, and they're all full... and I don't even pirate games/movies/etc... the interesting thing is, a good portion of my friends and workmates all have similar amounts of storage space -in use-. Sure we're all game developers and a good portion of us are artists as well, but it's not as rare as you might think. Especially when you re-include the pirates. :\
If you want to see what's going to happen in regard to mechanical vs solid state hard disks, you don't need a crystal ball. Just look at the transition from CRT to LCD displays. It wasn't so long ago (seems like only a few years) that LCD monitors were horribly expensive and that fact (combined with their other drawbacks) made them an unattractive option for most people. I can recall many, many people right here on Slashdot saying that they would never give up their enormous, power-hungry, failure-prone CRT displays. Now, you can't even buy a CRT computer monitor because LCD quality caught up and surpassed CRTs for most purposes while price plummeted. The same will happen with mechanical disks and SSDs. Maybe it'll happen faster, maybe slower, but it will happen.
Keep in mind also which company this "prediction" is coming from: Seagate lived a long and prosperous career engineering and manufacturing mechanical hard disks. They are a huge company whose entire operation is based around the concept of shipping hunks of metal with rotating platters inside. Since an SSD is just a bunch of memory chips duct-taped together, the memory companies (Transcend, Crucial, Corsair, Samsung, etc) were the first ones with SSDs on the market. The SSD thing likely hit Seagate by surprise and they can see that their run won't last long. It's not too late for them to start transitioning to manufacturing memory chips, but doing so would be brutal for many reasons. To start with, their decades of mechanical drive development experience, manufacturing facilities, engineers, trade secrets, R&D, etc are mostly about to be worthless. If they start selling this stuff off now while it's still fairly valuable, shareholders are going to do a huge "WTF?" and walk off. Second, the memory companies have a few years head start. Even if Seagate could enter the market and compete with them, the company would be leaving their position as a market leader to be a market newcomer, taking cues from everyone else. (Cue the sound of their last few shareholders stomping out.)
Basically, unless Seagate can buy up a few of the leading memory companies making SSDs right now, they're screwed. Until (or unless) that happens, all they can do right now is appease their shareholders and put their executives up on stage to have them parrot the lie that their business is going to be viable for a good long time yet. Oh, and frivolously sue all the SSD manufacturers on broad patent infringement grounds.
This is more a matter of dialectical usage. In North America it is typical to refer to companies in the singular whereas the plural interpretation is more typical for British English and those regions it has influence over. It is interesting to note that the term "company" is itself a plural word but "corporation" refers to a plurality of parts (share holders in this case) forming a single body. Then throw in that, in the US at least, companies are legally regarded as individuals and you have a recipe for confusion regarding proper pluralization for corporate entities.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Now this is a situation which is best left to hard drives. Blu-Ray discs have only a small multiple of space than DVDs. They're currently much more expensive than DVDs, and both a far behind the 5 cents/GB you get for hard drives these days.
Then you have the added inconvenience of fiddling around with 40 discs vs. one single TB hard drive. If you want to be careful, you should also regularly check your backups for integrity, which is much easier for a single SATA hard drive.
That's how you measure the world of computing? By what's on the shelves at the local GameShop?
It's like measuring the state of the health care industry by what's in your medicine cabinet.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say that PCs are 9/10 of the computer industry, just that the term "just a fraction" doesn't mean what you think it does.
You are welcome on my lawn.