Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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)
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
If you get rid of the fans, there won't be any funny/troll posts about Microsoft, Apple and Linux.
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
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!
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.
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
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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
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.
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.