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The 1 Terabyte SSD Arrives
An anonymous reader writes "Over recent years Solid State Drives (SSDs) have moved from luxury to affordable additions to one's PC, but mechanical hard drives are still king when it comes to capacity. That was until the revamped Colossus LT series Solid State Drive came along this week. With up to 1TB, the drive offers offers massive storage capacities of the level normally not seen in SSDs. While 1TB of SSD space hits right at the heart of the traditional hard disk market, it comes at a high price — at around $4,000 for the 1TB model, these drives are in the realm of aspirational rather than practical."
I have a handful of friends who adopted Intel's latest G2 X25-m models at their release. With new firmware, they are all still reporting notably reduced performance over time. Everyone knows what causes it, it is entirely understandable given the storage technology in question, but that doesn't make it any less of a drag. I'll wait and see how things change before doing the switch.
So at roughly $4/GB that'd place us where, back at the late 90s? I'm not sure what part of 'catching up' people seem to think of when they're talking about SSDs replacing HDDs. Yes, they're faster in a number of applications, but HDDs are crazy cheap at $0.10/GB or better, fast enough for most purposes and have a longer life than Flash-based media. I guess I could pull out a stack of punch cards 1 km tall and claim it's got 1 TB storage capacity too, thus having 'caught up' with HDDs.
Considering Flash is reaching the point with its feature sizes (32 nm) where its data retention rate (1 year) and number of write cycles (8,000) is dropping rapidly (enterprise SSDs use 65+ nm SLC Flash instead), it's hard to see how Flash-based SSDs are winning, exactly.
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It's too bad that I won't be able to take this baby for a spin...
Hey mate, spare a sig?
This sucker's electrical. But I need a nuclear reaction to compress the data to the 1 terabyte of capacity I need.
This has been on newegg for a very long time: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227500
I've been waiting forever for its price to drop, but nothing seems to be happening. I don't think SSDs will be of any consequence to mainstream users before memristors become all the rage.
You can get 60GB for under $120? Damnit, I considered an SSD recently and 30/40GB was £100 for the cheapest ones. Didn't get it in the end because of reports of degrading performance over time. That'd be one hell of a downer if you'd bought something that large and expensive!
No, you can't.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150636%201421439415&name=60GB
The lowest price for a 60GB SSD is $140, and that's from a no-name company. If you want quality for that spec, your wallet will be taking a hit of about $200
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Maths fail in article. $4000 / $100 != 400x
You don't need a solid state drive for storing media. It's completely useless. There's only a few really good uses of these things. Mostly in places where you have a lot of reads all over the disk in a very short amount of time. Mostly for things like Databases and stuff. For personal use, it really only makes sense to store your programs and OS on it. There's no reason to store things like movies and MP3s on there. Get a second drive spinning platter drive for that.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well, a normal 15k RPM SAS drive costs about $1400 per TB ($700 for a 500gb drive) and draws around 16 watts of power (for a Seagate Cheetah at least). Let's assume these SSD's will be like the others and draw around 1 watt. So that's a difference of $2600 and 31 watts (Because you need 2 SAS drives per SSD). So every hour, each SSD will consume 31 watts less. So with a price of $0.12 / kWh, every hour the SSD will save about $0.0036. Over the course of a year, that will add up to about $31.44 in power savings. So you'd need to run the drives for around 82 years to recoup the added cost from power savings (A higher electricty cost will lower this, but even at $0.50 per kWh, you're looking at nearly 20 years). Needless to say, that's well beyond the life span of the drive. So no, a prudent company won't buy these for power savings...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
As a media producer who uses DAW and video editing apps, solid state storage is a dream for me. I'm using much smaller SSDs now and although the power savings don't mean much to me, they are certainly quieter and faster than magnetic or optical media.
My 15k rpm drives are too loud and too warm.
When a 1TB SSD hits $1000, I'm in for two.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The only real "enterprise" case for SSDs(besides just making the boss's laptop quieter and more responsive for a few hundred bucks extra) is IOPS.
As a mass storage option, SSDs are pretty pitiful. As you note, even 15k RPM SAS stuff, hardly the cheap seats, is substantially cheaper per gigabyte. If you can step down to 10K RPM, or even the nicer grade of 7200RPM SATA(SAS/SATA compatibility can be quite convenient), the difference gets even starker.
If you are talking IOPS/$, though, SSDs passed the "economically viable" point some time ago and were last seen running for a location somewhere between "not even fair" and "Good God, man, it's like curb-stomping a puppy!" in their competition with even the zippiest of mechanical drives.
When I can get a 1TB 3.5" SATA drive for £61.33 (approx $94.58), I'm not sure how something which is 42 times more expensive can be considered "affordable".
Maybe I have a different definition of the word.
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It's 4000 AUSTRALIAN dollars, not human dollars.
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Oh, I'm not saying that they don't have a good place in the market. I am saying that it would be foolish to buy them from a power consumption standpoint alone. If you need IOPS, then the added cost can definitely be worth it...
The other thing you need to look at is lifespan. A 15k drive should last a company at least 3 years (I know some companies replace them yearly, but a typical rotation is 3 to 5 years based on what I've seen). Can an SSD (that's under high I/O) last that long? Or are you going to be replacing them yearly because of wear leveling issues? Again, I'm not saying that they are not worth the money. All I am saying is that it's far from a simple math problem to determine if they are the right fit for an enterprise...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good