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SSD Price Drops Signaling End of Spinning Media?
gjt writes "When Intel and OCZ recently announced new 'affordable' Solid State Disk drives — offering a meager 32-40GB — we initially yawned. But, then we took a closer look at the press releases and the in-progress research and development in SSD technology and opened our eyes. While the new drives aren't affordable on a cost per gigabyte basis for everyone, it does set a precedent — and most importantly a barometer price of $100. And it really does start the death clock for hard drive technology."
That is a really persistent myth (that magnets will erase/corrupt data on a modern hard disk drive).
.40 or .45-caliber round through a platter, you can be certain the data is unrecoverable. Last time I checked, HDD platters are made out of some sort of silicon composite, so a bullet should shatter the entire plater (or at least half of it) into tiny fragments.
Inside of all harddrives for the last 10 or so years are multiple, very powerful neodymium iron boron magnets that move the actuator arm over the surface of the discs. If magnets outside of your drive would erase data, then surely these intensely powerful magnets inside would do the same, no?
The most conclusive testing I've seen done on this was several years ago. A guy had stacks of dead hard drives, and he decided to harvest the magnets from them. He had a stack of 50+ very powerful NIB magnets. He then took a working HDD, full to capacity, and covered the entire hard drive in them- front and back, with layer upon layer of magnets. Then he set the drive in a desk drawer for a few weeks, after which he plugged the drive up, and all of his data was still completely intact. Not 1 file was corrupted in any way.
Now, if you put a
Yeah, if you really want to compare apples to apples, measure MTBF.
Oh, and let's not forget the SSD's far superior ability to decay gracefully.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Typical users keep music on their computer.
How much for a hard drive that's as fast as that $125 SSD?
The 1TB Seagate hard drive that I recently tested gets random 4k read rates in the ~1MB/second range. My 80GB Intel X25-M gets ~38MB/second.
That's about 40 times more performance for THE SAME PRICE!
Storage capacity is irrelevant in many situations.
A 40GB SSD is more than sufficient for your average manager/executive. They'd almost certainly prefer opening Outlook and Power Point in a tenth of the time it used to take to having an extra thousand gigabytes of unused space on their laptop.
The 80 GB drive I have in my system was the best upgrade I ever bought. Kernel compiles are crazy fast, and all of the media I need can be streamed off the network (sharing a single one of those 1.5TB drives with a dozen or so other people).
Don't be fooled, people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages
Wrong.
A full Win 7 Ultimate install with Office 2010 + Visual Studio 2010 + Project & Visio 2010 sits at around 25GB.
you still have 15GB left. Take off VS2010 and you are sitting around 20-25GB free.
Mod parent down for being simply wrong. Power consumption is directly proportional to clock frequency, not the square of the clock frequency.
An input to a CMOS gate can be approximated as a capacitor, so each time the capacitor is discharged, an energy is consumed equal to the energy stored in the capacitor. The energy in the capacitor is 1/2*C*V^2 where C is the effective capacitance, and V is the supply voltage. The total power consumption is n*k*f*C*V^2 where f is the clock frequency, n is the number of gates and k is the activity level which describes the number of times per clock cycle each gate will change at its input (on average). The 1/2 gets absorbed into the k.
If you double n (two cores), but halve f, the power consumption doesn't change.
The point of the shift to 4k sectors (e.g. the WD "Advanced Format" drives) is that the amount of space needed for error correction at ever increasing densities was entering into the bounds of diminishing returns. Larger blocks mean less error correction is needed and thus more storage space for a given platter density. Anand has a pretty good writeup on it here: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3691
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
(most SSD are 2.5", not 3.5")
PCIe "hard drives" already exist.
Here's a 1TB model: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227500
There are others in 250GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities.
I doubt that the cost goes down much though. The PCIe interface chip isn't free, and neither is the card bracket. The PC board itself is also much larger, and has to be thicker than those used on most hard drives. The cost differences are probably a wash.
- The Sigless Wonder
There is a fixed minimum cost for building a hard drive. Spindle, motor, etc. It's about $70.
Not quite. A shop near my house (Rome, Italy) has 320GB drives on sale at 35.4 EUR (roughly $48) including 20% sales tax - and this is just the first I bothered to check, it's a street price, it includes their own profit, and it's a 3.5" unit. When 3.5" go obsolete once and for all, the 2.5" drives will stop costing a premium and actually become cheaper, most likely.
So - while there definitely is a price level where mechanical units stop making sense, it's nowhere near $70 and probably it will keep shrinking over time.
Anyway - the entire point is moot. A sum of other factors (weight, power consumption, heat generation and tolerance, shock tolerance) will most likely push hard disks away in the lower capacity ranges.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
How about an unbiased sample? An extensive sample, even?
Google, being a very big consumer of HD's, has published such data.
3% die in the first 3 months, another 4% die by the end of the 1st year.
8% more die in year 2.
Maybe you have missed the fact that these monster capacity drives actually suck in the reliability department? yeah.. 3 out of 100 convert themselves into worthless crap within 90 days.
"His name was James Damore."
Pity the lesson of Y2K went unheeded - where every COBOL programmer was paid whatever they asked to fix their code, but after should have all been taken out to a field and shot in the head.
You don't remember the days of limited storage, do you? Those 2 extra bytes times 100000 records * 20 date fields was 1/10 of your drive back then.
Now get off my lawn!
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Oh, the ignorance of youth. Computers were over fifty years old in Y2K, and your cell phone is more powerful a computer than any built in the fifties. Hell, a Hallmark card is more powerful and sophisticated. They used two digits for years because they had to. There simply wasn't enough data storage (which oddly makes this otherwise offtopic comment on topic). You take your terrabyte disk drives and your gigabyte SSDs for granted, but early system were measured in kilobytes.
An example is the IBM 1401 that was announced by IBM on October 5, 1959 (I was seven years old at the time).
Legacy data and cheapassed managers kept the two digit dates around, and programmers and systems analysts warned management of the coming doom, but were ignored until it was almost too late.
A COBOL programmer in the 1950s would be dumbstruck by what we have today. Actually, I'm dumstruck as well; cell phones, flat screen computers, and self-opening doors in Star Trek were impossible; science fiction. You young folks can't imagine how primitive things were when I was a kid, and nobody dreamed we'd see SSDs.
Free Martian Whores!
Well, I'll question the more reliable part. Despite having owned way more harddiscs in the last decade that I've owned even tape media (tape was a backup solution only for some years), I had more unreadable tapes than unreadable hdds.
obligatory link to Google study/data.
-Turkey
Dell sells LTO-4 (800GB/1.6TB) for $50.45 with the purchase of a drive. Since the drives start at $3,249.00 You need to be using around 60 tapes before it matches the price/GB of a sub $100 1TB SATA drive.
More than two years ago the balance shifted. It is now cheaper to build massive storage servers with SATA RAID in-house and off-site and backup to both than to put a Tape Library in your office and rotate tapes off-site.
This is true even when you assume $0 for transporting tapes and free off-site storage.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
It would be possible, but horrible. For PCRAM or MRAM it makes sense, but Flash can not be written on a byte level (well, it can, but only once and then you have to erase the entire cell). You could make it read-only into the physical address space and then use another mechanism for writing, but that would be painful.
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