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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."
I think HDD will continue to stay enough ahead of SSD in raw capacity that it will stay relevant for a long time. When SSD is affordable at 200 GB then HDD will already be affordable at 2 TB, etc.
Better known as 318230.
In 5 years, people will still be maintaining COBOL systems.
Price is only the first hurdle for SSDs. There's also the issue of reliability, and reports from the field suggest that SSD reliability is highly variable, and in no case as good over the long term as hard drives. That will probably change in time, but they're not there yet.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
SSD Price Drops Signaling End of Spinning Media?
Blu Ray and CDs are still "spinning media" aren't they? I think I've seen many holographic storage disc products (touted to be THE FUTURE) that were spinning as well. I agree that our mechanical media may be just atop the apex or turning point but our non-mechanical disc based media is most likely set to be a some form of spinning disc for at least a few years longer. If the article thinks that movies and albums will switch to SSD based distribution, I just don't see it happening real soon or even now.
My work here is dung.
There are only two advantages SSD has over spinning media at this time: Access speed and Durability. Storage space is still not up to par, and cost is definitely a weak point. However, technology progresses and we're hitting the limits of the current hard disk technology. SSD technology is definitely the future of most personal storage.
But it won't replace it in all areas. There are still "obsolete" technologies in widespread use due to technical superiority over perceived convenience. No one is going to say digital cameras are lousy, but compared to film, they are simply outmatched. Where is Velvia for digital? Where is Kodachrome? These films have no equal in the digital world except as poorly implemented filters in Photoshop.
Spinning media is going to be with us for a while, and I expect, like film, that eventually prices will go back up and this technology will be a specialty market targeted at high-end users and professionals.
The clock is certainly ticking, but it's got a long time to wind down. The largest barrier to the death of mechanical storage is the looming halt in NAND geometry shrinks, as processes get so small that it goes from being merely crap to wholly unreliable.
Seeing as how we've got 2TB in single disks now, and that capacity will likely continue to rise, I suspect we'll see capacity increases for SSDs slow for a while as new NVM tech comes online. Instead, prices will simply fall and you'll (hopefully) see some more consumer-oriented hybrid solutions where frequently accessed bits are stored in NAND and large, infrequently files will be out on your (hopefully RAID-6 protected) mechanical storage.
Helicopters signal the end of automobiles, just as soon as their poor $$/mile traveled ratio reaches parity, but you can buy helicopters from Air Hog right now!
Solar panels signal the end of nuclear power AND the oil industry, just as soon as their poor $$/watt ratio reaches parity! But you can get a solar powered calculator RIGHT NOW!
Can I be a tech pundit yet?
SSDs offer speed. Spinning Disk HDDs offer cheap space. Hybrid disks offer a nice compromise until SSDs overtake spinning disks in storage/price.
I mean really, who needs an expensive big SSD for your porn collection? Unless you have 12 monitors running porn simulcasting...SSD speeds are really only needed for heavily accessed files. HDDs offer cheap storage for those not-so-often used files. The solution is relatively inexpensive, and here today
The article seems to assume that a typcial laptop user needs a 120Gig harddisk. I don't think that's true. I can most certainly live with a 20Gig to 40Gig harddisk in a laptop. As a matter of fact, my current laptop (3 year old AMD Turion with "120Gig" HD) has two parts: about 16Gig fro WinXP MCE and the remaining 100Gig for Ubuntu. The 16Gig has all the productivity apps I need + 1 game (Portal), which still leaves me 2Gig free for data. If I didn't have the game, I'd have ~8Gig free for data. For typcial data like word processing documents and the like that is more than enough. It is perfectly usable for day to day tasks. (The Ubuntu part is my playground, but it could live just as wel on a 16Gig partition)
If you enter digital pictures into the landscape, it does change a bit. Still, that's still a lot of pictures. Besides, you don't want all your pictures on the move. They're much safer at home on server and/or NAS.
Music you say? We're talking about "needing"... You don't "need" music on your laptop, unless that's your profession, but that doesn't make you a typcial user.
While I don't think I'm going to shell out 100€ for a 32Gig SDD, because I'm a cheap bastard and what I have works, I could most certainly live with a 32Gig disk in my laptop.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Depends on the purpose, really. As the basis for your OS, the number of writes might be an issue, but for general user data it's less so. I can see a trend developing in smaller hard drives to carry the heavy loads while data which doesn't require constant access is pushed onto increasingly larger SSD, and of course the move away from desktops to laptops and notebooks will drive this forward too.
Having said that, for home media servers it's not unusual to have several TB of linked hard drives, until SSD can even come close on both size and price, the humble hard drive should be safe for a while longer.
What makes you think that spinning drives don't have a limit on total number of writes?
While most computers come with bigger disks (because the cost of making spinning disks makes the marginal cost bigger, and bigger numbers are always easier to sell), I've had 30-40 GB Linux setups on dual-boot machines where the primary was Windows, and never really had space problems. And lots of the things that eat up space on consumer machines (like video) are stuff that is better on a hard disk anyway. So I could easily see computers that aren't heavily used for video or similar applicaitons going to SSDs if 32-40 GB SSD are affordable, and computers with a 32-40 GB primary SSD as well as an HDD, where the HDD is mainly used for things where sequential transfer speed rather than random access time is key. The trick for the latter is getting a good configuration/UI setup that makes it "just work" for the most common applications without the user manually choosing locations (mapping locations appropriately, and maybe implementing MIME-type-based defaults for download locations), while giving power users precise control.
We know how to remove the fans. We have 18W 2GHz CPUs. As you roll these back in clock rate, power consumption drops. It takes n^2 power to run a CPU at a clockrate of 2 if it runs on n^1 power at a clockrate of 1; whereas if you have 2 cores, it takes 2n. When we drop power consumption by replacing spinning disks with 12V SSDs (not 3.3V fed, 12V at a third the amperage, less heat) and get low-power CPUs in there, the total dissipation will go away.
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If you get rid of the fans, there won't be any funny/troll posts about Microsoft, Apple and Linux.
And not to mention that 40GB is barely enough to have Vista or 7 breathing, once Office installed. Don't ever think about installing Windows 7 SP1 on such a tight space.
Oh, and don't you have those MP3s, Videos, Documents et al of yours?
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.
Why shoot the programmers? Why not shoot the managers too ignorant to modernize their code base?
To get back on topic, I see spinning drives as the new backup or large file storage medium. You boot off your SSD and keep most of your files there, but anything you want a backup copy of or anything large enough to not need fast access, like movies, pictures, and music get stored on the HDD.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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
Excuse my ignorance, but what is the security status of these things? Like running an erase HD command where you rewrite three or seven times for supposedly no data recovery. Are these similar, better, worse?
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!
If by "cheap" you mean the craptastic OCZ Core series, and the other SSDs of the same gen that used the god-awful JMicron controller, the "cheap" end of the SSD market is full of high-performance drives that don't choke on random I/O. As soon as Intel and Indilinx came out with controllers that were worth the sand they were printed on everyone started doing it, and we've now got a market where the performance delta between "cheap" and "prosumer" SSDs is much, much smaller.
The vast bulk of the cost of the SSD is the flash, which is why if you can find someone still selling Core series SSDs they're only marginally cheaper than an SSD that's actually usable.
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Interesting. Hard drives replace tape backup. SSDs replace hard drives.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I've never seen a consumer hard drive last even 3 years
Maybe you're doing something wrong in that case, because all but one of the five consumer drives in my Windows PC are over three years old and it's still working about as well as a Windows PC ever does.
And personally I've never bought a drive which failed in less than three years (for that matter I've only ever bought one drive which failed before I swapped it out because it had become too small).
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).
I received a 128 Gb Kingston SSDnow as a gift from a friend, to put in my laptop. The laptop had a 320 Gb hard drive, so I've had to not lug 2 years of photos around, but it's well worth it because this this is damned fast. Things that had 10 second times now are sub-second. The thing boots Windows 7 in less than 10 seconds.
Capacity is nice, but once you get past 40Gb or so, you only need it to store images and things in bulk. It's like having the speed of a SAN in a laptop. SSD is an order of magnitude faster as far as the user experience goes, and if you can get one for less than $200, it's well worth doing, IMHO.
Once the end users see this in action, the price/Gb won't matter to them, because responsiveness is the name of the game.
(not 3.3V fed, 12V at a third the amperage, less heat)
P=IV
So I'm having a hard time reconciling how raising the voltage by 3x (roughly), and using a third less current changes power consumption at all. I'm pretty sure transmission distances and losses are pretty low inside a computer case.
I'd prefer that software solution to a hardware solution since the OS knows so much more about which files it would make sense to cache and which aren't worth it. Also, you could overrule the prediction algorithms easily to cache the music you want to listen to or the database you are working on. I actually use /dev/shm (a Linux tmpfs in RAM) often to store quickly changing files.
:)
* I know iron oxides aren't used anymore, but I still like the mental image
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
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P=I^2 R
So, for the same resistance, the heat is proportional to the square of the current.
Um, no.
RAM disks -- being RAM -- aren't permanent storage, and were never held up as a replacement for any kind of permanent storage. They were always a work around for permanent storage being too slow for applications that had a demand for responsiveness and could accept the risk of data loss to acheive it, and even then were largely useful for applications that had been designed for older (relatively) constrained RAM situations, and therefore did stuff "on disk" not because it needed stored at that point, but to avoid keeping too much in RAM at once.
On the other hand, you only need to install Windows ME, and you promptly get a fanless system.
Ezekiel 23:20
Here, too.
My basic "swap cycle" for hard drives was
1) Buy them
2) Use as data storage 2-3 Years
3) Use as OS drive 2-3 Years
4) Use for swap space 2-3 Years
5) Throw them out
I have gone through maybe 25-30 drives for various boxes at home so far, and exactly ONE has failed me so far, while it was already on "swap space" duty. Usually the ones I throw out are about 8-10 years old, just because they are now even to small to be useful as swap space.
Seriously. Google is (believed to be) the largest single user of consumer hard drives. When they start replacing hard drives with SSDs, I will consider HDDs to be done. I wonder what price differential the power savings (don't forget the power for cooling) will cover?
linquendum tondere
Back in middle school me and my buddy wanted to try out linux but didn't want to wait to format* the drive so we stuck the magnet out of the base of a magnet-mount shop lamp (10 lb "capacity", about 5" in diameter). To our surprise, not only did we corrupt the drive data, but the computer wouldn't recognize the drive, either.
*I am aware now that there's more involved to formatting a drive
moox. for a new generation.
If you get rid of the fans, there won't be any funny/troll posts about Microsoft, Apple and Linux.
There were never really any fans:
They're all perpetual motion sterling engines running off the temperature differential of their own hot air and the chilling glares of everyone who thinks they're idiots.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Pundits have been tolling the death knell of rotating storage for ... decades?
But somehow, the rotating storage business manages to innovate its way back to relevance -- Winchester technology, thin film heads, headerless architectures, increased spindle speeds, bigger caches, perpendicular recording, 4k sectors, continuing advances in encoding and ECC, continuing advances in media -- the advances keep coming.
And whatever happened to bubble memory, anyway? Wasn't that supposed to save the day and obsolete rotating storage once and for all? Isn't that what Intel promised us?
The price per GB is one concern, reliability and data transfer rate are two others. There are more - thermal considerations/power consumption, portability, media life (bit rot).
Most people have storage tiers - you can have fast/slow JBODs ready and waiting to accept and retrieve data, incorporating slower, offline tape which is SAN-connected, and managed by a robot, which can be transported via station wagon for great justice.
Price-wise, LTO-4 cartridges hold 800GB at a cost of around US$35, which also requires a minimum of one US$300 device to read/write the tape, and likely a dedicated connection on a dedicated interface (some flavor of SCSI), which may tack on another $100-$400.
I can go to Foo-Mart and buy 1TB of SATA for $100 or less - perhaps with it's own (slow by comparison) interface, enclosure and power supply.
Are they interchangeable as a solution? Nope.
It was probably a rhetorical question, but I'll answer anyway: lots. Lots and lots and lots.
We've in the middle of replacing 48U's worth of short-stroked fibre channel discs with 4U's worth of solid state drives. Capacity was never much of an issue with these databases (they only total about 800GB) but to get the performance with an IBM pSeries box cost stupid money - I don't know the exact figure but it was somewhere in the region of 50k a year just for maintenance.
Even if you're not using hardware like a pSeries, a SAN or disc array capable of sustaining >20,000 IOPS is still going to cost you silly money, take up alot more space and eat at least five times more power.
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The thing is, SSDs are expensive primarily because of economies of scale. If a lot of major manufacturers started making these drives available for $100 bucks as a feature, you'd see much wider adoption, and it would be more profitable to build additional fabrication plants that would bring the costs down immensely. Even now, 32 GB USB flash sticks cost on the order of $70. SSDs cost twice as much solely because the controllers are made in such limited quantities.
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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...
The initial assumption here is that there was a design flaw in their code. It wasn't a design flaw; the code was simply never designed to be running for this long. In some cases of very old code, it wasn't practical to use a 4 digit date when the code was written. In some cases the programmers warned well in advance that it would need to be fixed but that costs money and business don't willy nilly spend money unless they have to spend money.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Just wait till HD pr0n becomes commonplace.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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!
My wife has plenty of spinning media. She has two wheels and needs a constant supply of media to spin into yarn. With the loom and plenty of knitting projects on the go, there is never a shortage of demand.
However lower clock frequencies also require less voltage to keep a stable signal (and correspondingly, high frequencies need to be driven by a higher voltage). Taking this into account, power use does drop much more than linearly when clock frequency drops.
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.
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 ?
Q: "SSD Price Drops Signaling End of Spinning Media?" A: No
Let's face it, a hard drive to hard drive is currently the backup method of choice. Anyone who denies it can be pointed to a plethora of, "Ask Slashdot: How do I store my data?" discussions. Just like when tape drives could store more than the systems hard disk, a hard disk offers to hold more than the average SSD. Never mind the fact that when an SSD fails, it's more than likely end-game for your data. But when a HDD fails, there's any number of data recovery companies at hand to restore it.
The introduction of SSDs will add pep to the computers we use, but hard drives will continue to be the workhorse for storing the bulk of our data for a long while to come.
Oh you younglings. Back when I worked with Charles Babbage all we had was brass and steam. Now all the dorks on the block are wearing aviator goggles and leather and calling themselves punks. Disgraceful behaviour. Just disgraceful.
You can't use resistors as your model of computer components- well you can, but you get unreasonable conclusions like the one above.
Take as an example CMOS tech, theres a pretty good run down of why any type of semiconductor doesn't act at all like a resistor when it comes to power dissipation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS#Power:_switching_and_leakage
FTR- I'm not saying P=I^2 R is wrong... Its certainly correct, the challenge is coming up with 'R' when you're talking about switching semiconductors (or anything else really).
My fingers are all digital, you insensitive clod!
Great for digital calculations.
And raising one of the middle ones signals "sign-extended mode".
You can have my digits when you pry them from my cold dead hands! :-)
Actually, back in the day, all we booted from was SSD (a few kB of ROM) because spinning media (floppy's and 'hard' drives) were freakin' expensive, not to mention gigantic and slow. This made stuff like instant-boot very normal to have back in the day. In the mean time we decayed to using ever faster spinning media until the hardware couldn't go any faster (15k drives since 1997) and the capacity couldn't increase (perpendicular recording a couple of years ago) and we waited minutes for our OS'es to boot. Now we're back at SSD's which don't really scale very well for large amounts of data (smaller chips means more expensive and more potential errors) until somebody finds a better format for storing large amounts of data cheaply (probably in the realm of 3D optical storage) which will slow us down again a bit.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
More significantly, long-term storage would run you $0.10 per byte per month. Those extra two bytes times 100,000 records times 20 date fields would run the bank a half-million dollars a year in increased data archiving costs.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I'm doing this already, it works bloody well. I have my OS and Programs installed on a 120GB SSD, which sits around 50% utilisation and use NTFS junctions (aka symlinks) to map storage for stuff that doesn't need superfast seek speed (aka data) onto a group of 1.5TB drives. It takes a little management, so isn't quite ready for the average user yet - but you do effectively get something like 5TB of online disk space combined with SSD performance.
Interestingly, i've found on Windows 7 that by running OS/Programs from the SSD that the contention issues you would normally get on a spinning disk are mitigated a great deal - and there's no noticeable hit with having the entire user profile (including junk like web cache). The system is booted in 5 seconds after finishing its POST, and the desktop is snappy right from the get go.
As to the hard disks as backup, it works pretty good. At work we have maybe 1.2TB in a full backup - we do a weekly full backup and incrementals onto LTO tapes, and a second weekly backup onto a consumer grade SATA 1.5TB drive in a USB cradle. The SATA drives are taken offsite in case the office burns down, £80 + carrying a few hundred grams around makes for really cheap and fast data transfer.
Depends on the purpose, really. As the basis for your OS, the number of writes might be an issue, but for general user data it's less so.
This sounds kind of backward to me. The advantage of SSD over HDD is speed (especially seek time), but only the OS really benefits from reduced seek time, and what benefits the most is the pagefile, which gets written often. Only in certain circumstances user data would benefot from reduced seek time mostly video editing etc. Movie files not intended for editing, Office documents, audio files and photos won't benefit from reduced seek time, but SSDs will be more expensive per gigabyte than HDDs for some time.
So, it's more likely for one to have a small, but very fast SSD as a system drive and one or more slow, but big hard drives for data. This is almost what I use. System drive is 36GB 15000RPM HDD and files reside on a bunch of 5400-7200RPM 40-750GB hard drives. When I want to safely store files that I don't plan to access often I write them to LTO2 tape.
Every week or so a van leaves Google crammed full of hard drives containing their current backup of the Internet.
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.
SSDs have a better MTBF, but I think you have the graceful decay backwards. Good SSDs do wear leveling and use SMART to tell you when your ten-thousandth write is approaching. But once they die, they're dead. Solid-state failures are a lot less predictable and more unforgiving than mechanical failures. (For reference, read up on the Poisson Process as it relates to solid-state failures.)
You are an idiot.
At the time most of that code was written, 32K (words) was a large computer. You SQUEEZED the bits into words tightly. TIGHTLY. People recommended tricks like XORING two pointers together to save space, at the cost of additional computation. And mainframe computer time was in the neighborhood of $700/hour. And that was before several rounds of 12% inflation. At that time a paperback book cost between $0.50 and $0.75, to help you calibrate what that meant.
Also turnaround for many programmers was once per day via courier.
At that time two digit years were the appropriate choice. Four digit years didn't become reasonable, by and large, until the 1980's or even later. (Remember when we moved from mainframes to CP/M computers, our disk storage was trimmed to around 70KB. And our RAM was limited at 64KB. It wasn't until personal computers got hard disks that this limit was lifted. (Networked hard disks came later for most people.)
So for anything written after 1990, you might well have a point, but that's not the code you're dissing. Idiot.
The other respondent who said you should have blamed the managers was more reasonable. Unfortunately current management theory claims that managers don't need to know anything about what they're managing. So the individual managers, themselves, probably aren't to blame. I'd put the blame on the general managers, who should know better than to accept that theory. (Though at their level it becomes true. But a part of their job is to know how the job requirements change as the degree of separation form the actual work increases, and they generally fall down on that. Badly.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
2TB of SSD storage is unrealistically expensive
Agreed.
if you can even find a way to get that much in one system.
You can get a 512GB 2.5 inch 9.5mm high SSD now. You can stick two of those in one 3.5 inch bay so putting four of them in should be possible in almost any case. I'm quite sure that if one of the major vendors tried they could make a 2TB 3.5 inch SSD.
Software, games, and media are ever increasing in size.
While true to some extent in my experiance most PCs sold to normal lusers are still sold with drives of 320GB-500GB and this is more than enough for most people (with the exception of those who like to keep movie collections on thier computers but afaict most people don't).
Drastically reducing the size of drives is not realistic in peoples computers.
Some SSDs that are as big as typical HDDs in consumer machines are already on the market. That leaves two things to happen, firstly SSDs of acceptable size need to come down a lot in price, secondly someone needs to convince users that SSDs are worth it.
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 was under the impression that SSD's remain readable forever even after they become unwritable.
If I'm wrong about this then I stand corrected, but if I'm right then that is a highly desirable trait when you're worried about preserving data integrity across a hardware replacement.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Which keeps longer if you stick it on the shelf and forget about it?
If you're thinking about backup, you should be concerned about long periods of time. 20 years at the bare minimum. Reports are that DVDs don't last that long. Disks freeze up and need expensive repair to recover the data. How do SSDs stack up here. (Don't judge by current capacity, we're in the very early days yet.)
P.S.: *I* don't know. If you do, I'd like to hear your answer.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
We had a manager that tried moving to using disk based backup. If you have to rotate the disks, stop now, don't even try. We lost more backplanes and disks in the first 6 months than you would believe. Either put the disks somewhere else and replicate the data to them or use tape. Hard drives are not meant to be moved around constantly.
I was under the impression that SSD's remain readable forever even after they become unwritable.
I have heard the same regarding SLC, but I'm not sure if it applies to the cheaper MLC drives discussed in TFA. Any experts care to weigh in?
I've had a few linux and bsd boxen run off of CF cards, but even the fast ones are so bloody slow compared to even a slow harddrive. I suppose the lack of a buffer might be part of the problem - or do CF cards have small buffers of SRAM?
iowait drives me crazy.
Sent from my PDP-11
From TFA:
This has always been the argument against SSDs, and it's always been wrong. Pundits are under the impression that it should be possible to get speed, capacity, and affordability all in one go. To use a car analogy, they're asking for a 12-cylinder sports car that gets 40mpg and costs under $30k.
For as long as there have been SSDs, consumers have been waiting for lower-capacity versions that were affordable. It's not that hard to do: just take your "low-end" 160GB version, leave a few chips off the PCB, and voila. The manufacturers so far have been hitting the overclocker and enthusiast crowd who will pay any amount of money for the latest and greatest and the companies are just now realizing that hey, average Joes might buy these things too if we can meet a reasonable price point.
I've personally been waiting for an affordable SSD for my laptop and desktop machines but so far the options have been:
1) A mini-PCIe thing that barely holds an OS and doesn't perform any better than a mechanical disk
2) A fast 2.5" SATA SSD with about 4x more space than I need and costs 2x more than I'm willing to pay
I'm one of those people who doesn't store a crap-ton of data on my computers. 95% of the data on my computers is OS and applications. All of my important or bulk data goes on a file server which is accessed over the network and hence does not need to be available within less than a milisecond.
The day someone sells a fast, reliable, low-capacity SSD (20GB is fine) for under $100 is the day I'll buy three.
LTO-4 are 800 GB uncompressed, 1600 GB compressed, I get a compression ratio of about 1:1.2 - 1:1.4 So I fit between 1 and 1.2 TB on each tape, some data compresses up to 1:1.8. But that's not the advantage of tapes.
Hard drives are extremely fragile and not portable. Drop, mishandle, submerge, freeze or run over a harddrive and then recover data from it. With a tape you can destroy the casing, even cut the actual tape and you can still recover from it. Maintaining a large RAID array on-site doesn't help if your building burns down and maintaining one off site is quite a bit more expensive then a 24 LTO-4 tape loader.
You fail to take into account the cost of actually buying and maintaining a redundant RAID array. An EMC SAN will cost upwards of US10K, an IBM ServerRAID 8i PCI-X card will cost about US$800, even software raid requires a box with an OS to run it with warranty and more hours spent on maintenance. Even if you're mad enough to run a critical business system on consumer hardware a decent PC will set you back A$1500 for a 6 disk system, A$2000 for a 7 disk system as most consumer boards only have 6 SATA slots. Aside from the risk of running consumer disks (3yr warranty) compared to enterprise level tapes (lifetime warranty from IBM and Tandberg) there is little difference in the set up costs and a big difference in the cost of maintenance and life expectancy.
On-line backups are difficult when your data upload rate is limited, I back up 6 TB weekly plus daily differentials which are about 1 TB per week, one set of tapes goes off-site each month. unlimited 10 Mbit Fiber costs A$1500 a month in Australia, 8 LT0-4's cost A$560 and copy the full 6 TB in under 18 hours, that 10 Mbit link would take 52 days to copy that data at it's theoretical maximum transfer rate. Yes we wont have to transfer the entire lot each week if we use a differential or incremental backup but we backup 1 TB a week just in differentials so that's still 8 days. 75 MB/min max theoretical transfer rate for 10 Mbit fibre to the 3.6 GB/min real world I get out of a LTO-4 tape. Granted I get close to the max on the 2 Mbit fiber line we have (A$400 per month).
Tape is cheap, fast, reliable and high capacity. Other backup solutions are cheaper or faster or have higher capacity or more reliable but never manage to combine all these qualities like tape. Optimality I'd like to combine differnt backup solutions so they are redundant and I don't have a single point of failure, but I'd also like a pony.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.