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."

Comments

Huh?

[chuckymonkey]

So these people can predict the future now?! Really, you never know what is going to happen for sure. Look at current HDD tech, IBM made the GMR breakthrough and BAM! Huge storage capacity in drives. What makes people think that there cannot be another such discovery with solid state or some other yet unknown tech?

Re:Huh?

[0123456]

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?

And that has any relevance to the general computer market because?

At the rate we're going, by 2020 Windows will probably need 500GB for a base install and the average PC game will be 1TB.

For one thing, the eye has a resolution limit, so why would people need more than, say, 2560x1440 (quad 720p) in home electronics?

In the near future you'll be able to buy a $3000 camcorder that can shoot more than 2560x1440 and burn through a gigabyte every 30 seconds or so; by 2020 you'll probably be able to shoot IMAX resolution on a $3k camcorder.

Honestly, every time I've seen someone say 'the average user will never need more than this', they've looked incredibly foolish only a few years later.

Re:Huh?

[Forge]

There is another factor.

Flash is faster and more energy efficient than spinning disks. This creates a demand for flash which reduces the incentive of manufacturers to drop the price per GB.

Also try to understand the gap we are dealing with.
Flash is around $1.87 per GB while Hard drives are closer to 7c per GB.

That's 26 times the price. Sure SSDs are getting cheaper every day but so are hard drives. I am sure they will get so close that the price gap becomes less important than all the other features which separate them. Some time after that, SSDs may even become cheaper, or both SSDs and hard drives will be supplanted by some other technology. It just won't happen right away.

Is one more decade too pessimistic an estimate? Only time will tell. What I do know is that where SSD's advantages are more important the change has already started. You can buy a portable computer with only SSD storage today.

Re:Huh?

[onefriedrice]

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.

Actually, I don't think this is true. We are at the point of diminishing returns in so many areas. For example, we used to be okay with black and white. Then 4-bit color. Then 8-bit color. Now we're at 24 or 32-bit color, and anything more than that would pretty much be wasted because our eyes can't see any more colors. The same thing is happening with audio and video. There comes a point when adding more data won't make a difference. So while you're correct in saying that people use more disk storage space than they did ten years ago or even one year ago, you can't really extrapolate and say for sure that we're going to be using more and more at the same rate of increase we've seen in the past.

Another thing to consider is this growing fad of putting everything on the "cloud." Maybe it is just that, a fad, but perhaps one day people will store all their photos, music, videos, documents, or anything that would take a lot of disk space today entirely on this cloud thing and not keep copies of anything on their disks. I hope not, but you never know.

Re:Huh?

[commodore64_love]

No. There is English. And then in 1066 the damn French invaded the island and polluted the language with their messed-up words. True English died with Beowulf.

What exists today in both Britannia and America is a mongrel mess of Germanic and Latinate words. No wonder the spelling and rules make no sense. Damn French.

(I'm chust joking. Put down the guillotine Mr. Frenchman.)

I'm not about to trust this one...

[Suiggy]

I mean, both Intel and OCZ have said that once they get to tri and quad-state MLC flash technology, prices should drop considerably by 2012. I think Seagate just doesn't want to be relegated as a dying tech company.

Hybrid I/O well before before 2020

[Saeger]

Nobody with a clue has been arguing that SSD's would be cheaper per gigabyte than ye olde spinning-platter HDDs any time soon.

What we're seeing now, and will see much more of, is the hybrid approach of combining a small-ish (80GB) SSD for the most-accessed OS & Apps, with a monsterously huge and relatively slow (array of) HDDs for bulk data archival and backup.

With HDD I/O still the single biggest bottleneck today, it makes sense to start transitioning to SSDs, but it doesn't have to be all at once. The premium for SSDs -- ~$2.50/GB SSD vs ~$0.10/GB HDD -- isn't that much, but it will probably pay for most to wait another year not just for prices to fall more, but for all SSDs to finally support TRIM, and have efficient firmware that competes with indilinx and intel's. SATA3 will also be welcome as current SSDs have already hit the SATA2 xfer limit.

(Oh, and please don't eat the "ZOMG SSDs have limited write-cycles!" FUD. In the vast majority of normal usage patterns, you'll never ever get close to hitting it, and even you did, the failure mode still allows you to READ your data off if you had no backup, as opposed to a HDD crash.)

Re:Fragmentation

[BikeHelmet]

You're correct, but I have two nitpicks.

First, don't confuse NAND used in SD cards and stuff with the same NAND used in SSDs. They're quite different qualities.

I've had SD cards drop 1/8th their capacity after days of heavy use. SSDs, however, have higher quality NAND and wear-levelling controllers. For Linux, they have better filesystems, too.

Second, up until the newest generation, most SSDs were susceptible to debilitating speed loss after some usage. To be safe, you had to half the benchmarked results. With TRIM and smarter controllers, this is mostly solved, but very heavy usage for extended periods will still result in speed loss. Remember, on an HDD deleting is basically a free operation, but on an SSD it has to physically erase. This would be most noticeable for say... a security camera box recording a dozen or more streams 24/7.

Re:To each his own.

[petermgreen]

However, SSDs are already replacing HDDs on netbooks
Funny i've noticed things the other way round, all the early netbooks were SSD based but now lots of them have moved to a slightly larger form factor accomodating a hard drive.

Re:Get both

[Just Some Guy]

FAIL. You should not swap, period.

Oh, they're so cute when they're young and idealistic! Back in reality, I have a database server with 8 cores, 16GB of RAM, and 500+GB of RAID-10 storage. For all but an hour a month, that's abundantly sufficient for everything we ask of it. For that one hour, though, a bit of that RAID turns into swap while we run some gigantic monthly financial queries.

Your ideal solution would be to spend a few thousand dollars in programmer time to make those queries run faster, or drop at least a thousand on a set of 4GB ECC DIMMs. My practical solution involves allocating 16GB out of 500 to swap for the one hour out of 720 that our normal resources aren't sufficient. Frankly, I like my idea better, and I know that my boss does too.