Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
...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.
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
Although flash memories have also become popular - with advantages such as lower power consumption, faster read access time, and better mechanical reliability than HDDs
So HDDs will still be tops in terms of capacity, but SSDs win in everything else. They're getting to the price range now that they're a viable replacement for high-end systems that don't need massive storage. I doubt I'll even have a HDD in the next system I build, SSDs provide enough capacity.
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
I for one, just like many others, prefer hard disks over solid-state because of their more predictable lifespan. Solid-state drives tend to slowly lose parts of their usable sections. Even though the good old hard disks tend to break easily, at least I can defragment them without slowly starting to damage the disk. Yep, there are 2 different kinds of solid-state drives which handle this problem differently, but I still don't think the technology is matured enough yet. Perhaps in a few years. As for the mini laptops and such, solid-state seems to be superior though. Many of the first mini laptops used solid-state, but now only very few have them. Why this direction of development?
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!
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.
Most of my non-server machines only use about 40-50gb of disk space, even though the hard drives have gradually grown from 20 to 40 to 120 to 500 to 1500GB over the last few years. Each time I build a system, I tend to throw in whatever drive costs about $100-125 when I order my parts. So based on my past usage model, I'd have no problem switching over to SSD if I can get say...128GB of storage for $100-125. On those occasions where I need a big chunk of permanent storage, I'll just get some sort of external hard disk that will undoubtedly continue to plummet in price.
"Good luck with that."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_zapper
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.)
Power to the Peaceful
Holy shit! Anonymous Coward says current generation SSD's might not be able to be used for long-term backup! Clearly this means there is absolutely no use for Solid State Disks whatsoever!
The game is over gentleman. Time to shut down production and throw in the towel.
Thanks for saving our ass. Anybody reading this should know that Anonymous Coward is a smart cookie--he was also responsible for warning about the transition from perfectly sound MFM interface to the bloated, evil IDE interface. Whatever advice he gives regarding these untested, unsound Solid State Disks should be wisely heeded.
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!
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.
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I wouldn't exactly call PCRAM a breakthrough -- people have been working on it since the 1960s. There are a host of new non-volatile memory technologies that claim to be read for prime time Real Soon Now. Just look at the list of upcoming non-volatile memory technologies in the right column at the wikipedia article. You can't go out and buy most of them yet, but any of them could be winners (besides PCRAM, MRAM is available from Everspin/freescale -- you can buy some on DigiKey if you want).
I wouldn't hold my breath for any of these to replace hard drives, they've been a long time in coming and they're still not really here yet. Hopefully by 2020.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.