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Are Consumer Hard Drives Headed Into History?
Lucas123 writes "With NAND flash fabricators ramping up production, per GB prices of solid state drives are expected to drop by more than half by this time next year to about 50 cents. Even so, consumers still look at three things when purchasing a computer: CPU power, memory size, and drive capacity, giving spinning disk the edge. SSD manufacturers like Samsung and SanDisk have tried but failed to change consumer attitudes toward choosing SSDs for their performance, durability and lower power use. But, with the release of the new MacBook Air (sans hard disk drive), Steve Jobs has joined the marketing push and may have the clout to shift the market away from hard drives, even if they're still an order of magnitude cheaper."
He has enough clout to push about 8% of consumers to buy overpriced hardware.
Even if the Per GB price dropped by 80 or 90% SSD's would still be more expensive and have a lot shorter life expectancy than current HDD's, we are many many years before the possibility of SSD's fully replacing HDD's becomes even conceivable
I tend to hold on to my tech for years. With the finite number of read/writes to flash memory, I don't want to be forced to part with a computer because it uses a proprietary flash storage system or be forced to purchase a proprietary replacement storage module.
Things like iPods, smart phones, and PDAs are cheaper and easily replaced in whole, but I wouldn't want to face a replacement cost for a laptop.
I would cringe to do secure erases (writing zeroes) to a flash memory drive (solid state drives or Apple's flash "drive" module in the new Airs), knowing I was prematurely killing my storage life. Platter-based disks with sudden motion sensors will still be my huckleberry for a few more years...
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Wait, I'm supposed to feel like a 14 year old girl again? Damn, I musta missed something in my childhood!
SSC
$0.50 per GB is still about five times the cost of a magnetic drive. Put another way, each user has the choice between paying $50 and $250 for the same amount of storage. Does anyone think there is a real competition here?
And of course, that's by next year. How much denser/cheaper will magnetic drives be by then? Please stop with these "year of the flash drive" posts.
"if Apple are involved it must be news"
Yeah, they're headed to history, but that might take another ten years.
Certain technologies have pretty long shelf lives - Hard Drives are one of those. Tape Backups and CDs are another.
Sure SSDs are getting cheaper, but so are hard drives. Hard drives are now a nickel a GB, half the price of just a year ago. The best SSD prices still look like they're 40x as expensive.
Sure, they'll take over the small drive / low power / slim profile market, especially for expensive hardware (SteveJobsthankyouverymuch). But as we do more with large audio/video/photo files, out appetite for storage is still a 5-10 years away for cost effective SSDs at TODAY's rate of use.
Just look at the usenet. DivX was king, with only hard core nuts going with full DVD rips. Then HD was here and everything was recompressed to 720p x264. Now it's mostly 1080p x264 recodes and straight 26GB AVC rips. Our use is definitely not slowing down, and spinning platters is the only thing that can give us that kind capacity for the foreseeable future.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Why would I switch to SSD? I've had 1 drive go bad in my lifetime. They've lasted in some cases 20+ years. Plus they are cheaper. Why would I bother buying SSD's when they have a known failure point at after given number of writes?
This is very much like the blue-ray issue. It's not surprising folks aren't interested in jumping on board because, frankly, there is no real reason to run out and BUY it.
CD's and DVD's had huge adoption because you saw a large improvement on your existing hardware. Bluerays required a new TV to see that improvement - and it was a very expensive TV at the time.
Once people have purchased new TV's (it will probably take another 5-10 years for the older TV's to all fail so that the mom and pops of the world HAVE to go buy a new one) blue-rays will have come way down in price and they'll finally replace the DVD.
Likewise the SSD. I'm sure many other folks are as tired as I am regarding these silly... strike that... STUPID press releases trying to push their sale.
They will be bought when there is a need. There is none at this point, except in very specific applications, like the high-vibration atmosphere at manufacturing plants.
Shame on Slashdot's editors for continuing to run this hokey marketing BS, and shame on the people who continue to send articles like this. It's quite silly, frankly.
Even with the best wear leveling techniques SSDs will not be able to provide the sort of write cycles that a magnetic drive can withstand. This may not be an issue in most consumer use, but the possibility is there that somebody will hear of a friend of a friend's uncle who had his entire life's work (read: porn collection) wiped out. Something doesn't actually have to be a risk for someone to freak out about it and avoid the technology.
On the other end of the spectrum of usage scenarios: If the disk is not accessed and rewritten occasionally the issue of disappearing data comes up. In a NAND cell the data may be stored by as few as 100 electrons which are trapped in the floating gate of the transistor. Over the years imperfections in the insulation layers or quantum tunneling through the insulation layers (some of which are merely a few atoms thick) results in the electrons escaping and the cell eventually becoming unreadable. The target minimum data retention time for NAND flash is 10 years, but just due to the absurd number of individual transistors in a SSD some data will be lost before that time period. Suboptimal storage temperatures combined with smaller cell sizes and multi-level-cell NAND flash designs tend to make this effect worse.
SSDs may find a home in specialized situations where the pros outweigh the cons, like laptops, but I doubt they will ever displace magnetic hard drives in most applications.
The ssd is already a good value for the function of the boot drive - the place where you host the OS, applications and games. There is no need to approach terabyte territory to hold all this stuff. And my collection of ripped DVDs, etc., wouldn't benefit from being on an ssd. These two technologies make sense in parallel and will continue to do so for so long as the per-terabyte prices keep falling at the present rate.
In the MacBook Air, the SSD chips are soldered to the logic board. It is not like there is a choice on what kind of drive can be installed. When 64GB isn't enough, there is no way to upgrade. When the SSD gets a fault, there is no drive to swap out - it would be time for a new logic board. With NAND Flash having a finite lifetime, soldering the SSDs to the logic board is a prime example of planned obsolescence. When the SSD dies (when, not if), there is only Apple to turn to, so Apple effectively has vendor lock-in as well, but we have come to expect that from Apple.
No, the SSD's are on a removable board. See http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A1370-Teardown/3745/1 (It's the thing that comes off from above the RAM)
So from a sample size of 1, you can conclusively prove that SSDs are less reliable than hard drives?
He described his personal experience ("I have had the opposite experience"). He made no claim that it was a representative sample. He did not claim to have proven anything.
... sheesh. Trigger-happy much?
I know that some people make claims they have no ability to back up and pretend they are universal truths. But the GP didn't do that. So
Occasionally manufacturers do make defective products. It's just not possible to have quality control that is 100% perfect on all counts. Assuming his personal experience was not a quality-control issue, it's not possible to ensure that no damage occurred during shipping after the drive left the factory. In other words, shit happens and what he's saying is not some terribly unbelievable story. I would hope that such a product which fails after only 2 months would be covered by warranty. That's the only relevant information the GP did not share with us.
If the manufacturer of his failing SSD offers no reasonable warranty because they are unwilling to stand behind the quality of its products, I'd like to know what company it is so I can avoid buying from them.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The RAM is soldered in
Let me just repeat that, in case it hasn't quite sunk in yet.
The RAM is soldered in/ If you buy it with 2GB, you can't upgrade it. If you buy it with 4 GB, you can't upgrade it.
However, you can upgrade the SSD.
source
Of course, it comes with a paltry 1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo (soldered in, naturally) or a 1.6 GHz C2D.
Oh, I see that my new talking points have come in from Apple.
You don't need a faster processor because it's still faster than an Atom.
You don't need to upgrade the RAM, because virtual memory on an SSD is so much faster.
Thanks, Apple! My Fanboy subscription still pays dividends!
In the long term? Yes I'm sure flash, or some other solid state, based storage will replace magnetic disks. It is just plain faster, not to mention other benefits. Our storage subsystem is by far the slowest thing we've got, improvements would be welcome.
In the short term? Hell no. SSDs are useful in special cases, but not for general use and not showing any signs of reaching a crossover soon.
I mean if I wanted to meet my storage needs with SSDs only, I'd have to spend on the order of $10,000. Granted, my needs for storage exceed most users, but still. It costs me all of about $500 to get them met with HDDs. Even if I left backups to magnetic media and just went with SSDs for primary storage I'd still be out about $4000. I could replace every component in my system, including my professional NEC monitor, for less than that.
Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to have SSDs, but they have to come down in price a shitload before they are realistic for the regular desktop. Right now, SSDs have 3 uses:
1) Systems that don't need a lot of storage and space/power are a premium. The Air is a good example. If you can live with 64GB of storage, then flash is ok price wise. Still expensive per GB, but since you have few GBs it isn't bad. If all you are doing is running basic apps then that works fine. You can't hold much media or large games or whatnot, but not all systems need that.
2) Systems where performance beyond what reasonable HDD solutions can offer is needed. Audio production sees this. New virtual instruments are getting extremely complex. Tons and tons of samples played back in heavy layers. You can't load them all in RAM (without amazing amounts of RAM) and they just overload disks when you try to stream it all. SSDs can be useful here. While a $10,000-20,000 fiber channel array would probably do the trick, a $4000 SSD will also do the trick and not only cost less but be easier to deal with.
3) Ultra high end storage solutions that need performance beyond anything HDDs can offer. With databases, you can run in to this. Heck they had SSDs back before they were popular. Expensive, expensive devils, but tons of performance. You need this to reach certain performance levels, no amount of disks can handle the IOPs you need. This is where cost just isn't an issue, performance is.
That's pretty much it. For cheap systems, HDDs reign supreme. They cost less than flash and that is that. For higher end systems, you end up needing more storage than flash can provide at a reasonable cost.
Before we see flash replace HDDs we will probably see augmentation. Intel, Adaptec, LSI, all are supporting SSDs as a cache for HDDs on various RAID controllers. If this comes down to consumer price levels, could be useful. 1TB of storage for $100 and then $100 more for some flash cache would be doable for many people.
It'll be a long time before SSDs are the way most people go, however. It is too bad, I want solid state storage now, but there is a big, BIG price gap that has to be covered.
Back when CD-Rs were new, we were hearing how they'd last for well over 50 years. Now we're finding that CD-Rs last only 3 to 5 years, and that's when they're stored in conditions that are near-perfect.
It's pointless to take media lifespans measured in decades as anything other than marketing bullshit, especially given that the computer industry itself has only been around for about 65 years.
AND saved $$$$.
Just for fun, I just priced a 17" mac laptop (I like my full-sized keyboards). With a 512gig SSD, it's $3,628.00
For the same price, you can buy, not one, not two, not 4, but 6 17" laptops. plus a second 640gig hd for each of them.
So, for the price of ONE 17" mac with half a terabyte of SSD, you get:
On top of that, if one breaks, you would have 5 spares. Plus lots of place to store backups
Think about being able to carry a lan party in one of those large recyclable shopping bags.
And you won't have to just imagine having your own Beowulf cluster.
feeling like a 14 year old girl is not a good thing at all.
Not once I'm through with them.
What ever happened to the hybrid drives that were supposed to be the practical solution...
Seagate Momentus XT drives are available at your favorite computer part reseller in 250GB, 320GB and 500GB flavors.
See also: Wikipedia - Hybrid drive and Seagate's Momentus XT landing page.
Um... Small random reads are the primary pattern in desktop usage. Are you a complete idiot? That's the SUBJECT under discussion, not dumb shit like sequential transfer speed. That's only important for marketing people who like big numbers with MB on the end.
No, small random reads are NOT the primary pattern in desktop usage. Almost NO file on your file system is under 4k in size, which is the "chunk" size for most 8mb to 64mb hd caches.
Even DOS didn't have average file sizes that small. And many of today's hard drives also have implemented the elevator algorithm in hardware, so head seek times, especially for small random files, are much less of an issue than they once were.
4 drives with 32mb hardware caches will outperform your sdd in every scenario, including small random writes - especially since, for the same capacity, they can be grossly under-stroked - limited to the outermost few tracks. Understroke a 1TB drive to 32 gigs and its' seek times drop to almost zero. Throw 4 of them into a 4-drive setup as /, /home, /var, and /srv, and you'll beat the 128-gig SDD in small file r/w, and massively beat it in large file r/w.
Why the hell do you want a half a terabyte of SSD? Because it's the most expensive offering?
RAID 0 and RAID 1 are nowhere near SSD in terms of power consumption, throughput and IOPS.
In today's computing environment, RAM is plentiful, CPU cycles are cheap, storage is abundant yet IOPS will bring even a high end machine to it's knees.
I was migrating some data from an old laptop (2 year old MacBook Pro) to a new one (MacBook Pro with a small SSD). I don't know what it's like on Windows or lInux, but on OS X once you're hitting 500-800 IOPS on a 7.2k hard drive everything slows to a crawl. You CPU utilisation can be idle, your RAM usage can be well within the amount of physical RAM installed yet too many IOPS and you soon can't do much with the machine.
On this new machine, I was copying a mail spool to it (mbox folders) installing software and Spotlight (full text indexing) was running in the background. This machine (a laptop mind you, not a workstation) was pulling in 7500 IOPS and not breaking a sweat - it was quick, responsive and completely usable for interactive tasks.
In order to get 7k IOPS from spinning media, you're talking about Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage arrays costing tens of thousands of dollars.
I, for one, am more than happy to put up with a small boot drive (40-60GB) if it's an SSD and move my bulk storage to spinning media. After that experience I now carry a laptop with a 64GB SSD and a 500GB FireWire external drive for bulk data and I couldn't be happier with that setup. I've even made the boot drive (and apps drive) in my workstation a small SSD, with bulk data on spinning media. I can boot this machine in mere seconds and launch half a dozen apps at login and it just doesn't slow down.
If you haven't used a machine with an SSD in real life, don't knock it until you've tried it.
It used to be that adding more RAM to a machine was the cheapest way to speed it up as just about all machines used to be (more or less) RAM bound. Now it's IOPS and adding an SSD is the cheapest way to have a more responsive machine. Older machines will potentially benefit even more than a newer machine as the relative speedup can be even greater...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Why do you lie about HDD vs SSD random read/writes:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2968/intel-s-x25-v-kingston-s-30gb-ssdnow-v-series-battle-of-the-125-ssds/6
Even the 10K high-end pricey WD Velociraptor has a pathetic 0.8MB/throughput for random writes. Meanwhile a value level Intel SSD gets 35MB/sec throughput for random writes? How do you think putting 4 of those high end HDD together will make then faster than an SSD? The fact is they won't.
Plus if you think an SSD is a waste, why would you even entertain the suggestion of capping a 1TB HDD to 32GB? Do you have an benchmarks proving this is faster and really drops seeks to near zero?
"US consumer retail market" means people walking into a store and buying a piece of hardware, and it's expressed in terms of money, not units, and people spend a lot more for their Macs than for their PCs. It probably also includes iPhone, iPad, and iPod, and accessories sales, since it refers to Apple share, not Mac share. In terms of units, their share is still around 4-5% at most.
I guess you aren't a developer, if you can get by with only one box.
Compatibility testing, running my own svn/ftp/http/ssh servers (separate from the ones I run on my main machine), keeping personal stuff (email, etc) isolated on one machine, business email on another, these are all valid reasons to have a second computer
Tom, I'd like to introduce you to something that could radically change the way you work:
Virtualization: VMware, VirtualBox...