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Costly SSDs Worth It, Users Say
Lucas123 writes "When you're paying $30,000 for a PCIe flash card, it had better demonstrate an ROI. While users are still struggling with why solid state storage cost so much, when they target the technology at the right applications, the results can be staggering. For example, when Dan Marbes, a systems engineer at Associated Bank, deployed just three SSDs for his B.I. applications, the flash storage outperformed 60 15,000rpm Fibre Channel disk drives in small-block reads. But when Marbes used the SSDs for large-block random reads and any writes, 'the 60 15K spindles crushed the SSDs,' he said,"
Small (and cheap) 32GB SSD for my desktop...
Big powerful 12TB file server using traditional disks for the bulk of my data.
Performance for the stuff where the SSD makes a difference (program files), cheap storage for the stuff where it doesn't (just about everything else).
And if that 32GB drive dies (unproven technology.. MTBF is still a guess) .. I'll buy another cheap (probably cheaper at that point) one and restore from my daily backup.
SSD's outperform disc in applications where they perform better. Story at 11.
So you're saying copypasta can be copied even faster thanks to SSDs?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
So sometimes it's faster, and sometimes it's slower, and always it's more expensive per GB. That makes this a pretty useless article.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
except it's already on the market. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/internal-storage/momentus-xt-kit/
For example, when Dan Marbes, a systems engineer at Associated Bank, deployed just three SSDs for his B.I. applications, the flash storage outperformed 60 15,000rpm Fibre Channel disk drives in small-block reads. But when Marbes used the SSDs for large-block random reads and any writes, 'the 60 15K spindles crushed the SSDs,' he said,"
So when you need lots of small, random reads, 3x SSDs beat 60x HDDs. Most of the time is spent seeking the file on the HDDs, your ~4.6 ms random seek time is an order of magnitude or more slower than the flash-based drives. No surprise here.
When you are just transferring large files, most of the time is spent actually transferring data. A modern SSD might manage 300-400 MB/s read, but 20x as many HDDs are still going to beat the crap out of them.
The only mildly surprising part is that part about the HDDs winning for all writes, but I guess that really depends on how the test is set up - unless you are actually writing to random parts of the HDD, it is basically a straight-up write operation, so only throughput matters - and again, 60x HDDs are going to beat 3x SSDs (though it is important to note that SSDs are significantly slower at writing than reading in general, although still much faster than an HDD on an individual basis).
Am I supposed to just run out and buy SSDs for the whole load?
No. I think that in the open source world you're expected to write the update yourself.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Hybridization generally takes the form of servers with it used in a tiered form. Actual hybridized devices (like the OCZ or Seagate devices) are of limited value in enterprise.
This is currently a fairly hot area of research, though most of it is occurring behind closed doors at the moment.
While this summary should never have been posted here (please taco, give us good stuf, not 'I know how to move the mouse pointer so I am a l33t hax0r-stuf) but the full article is interesting. It gives a couple of hands-on experiences from users that are quite interesting. It seems the SSD can gain you speed in more situations than previously thought/marketed. Although for my uses I'm not going to spend more than 2 dollar/euro per GB.
I can't see a whole lot of development going into hybrid drives when it's entirely possible that the price point of SSDs will drop enough in a few years to justify mainstream use.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Are you sure that's not just a 500GB disk with a 4GB cache?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
...and a beautiful thing it is for fast booting (after the first time) and if you mostly run the same few programs. Not so pleasant where files are rapidly changing but just the ticket for a laptop.
500 gb hdd, with intelligent caching using solid state memory...ie a hybrid of an SSD and an hdd.
Not quite. Seagate's tech is a simple block cache, where the most frequently accessed blocks get thrown on the SSD portion. It is no doubt quite effective, but we should be able to do better if we move the logic into the OS.
The OS has intimate knowledge of the filesystem, and can easily profile its use. Files that are small or randomly accessed should get put on the SSD, while large sequentially accessed files should get put on the HDD.
i've had a bad experience with SSD drives having returned 2 due to deal breaking problems for me .... on caused BSODs the other could handle suspend mode without locking up.
I have now 2x samsung F3s in raid 0 (plus back up on NAS)
personally i have no desire to have to do the sort of file management small sized SSDs currently demand and since reading the reviews they all pretty much suck.... however SRT is a compelling option... all the convenience of big mechanical drives plus a speed boost of SSD ... unless the price per GB of SSD can be brought down alot then i think SRT may well be the way to go.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
You can cache your data using SSDs but still have a RAID. Adaptec, LSI, Intel, they all have cards that do it.
In addition to the Momentus XT that several others mentioned, there is also SSD caching on Intel's Z68 motherboards allowing you to designate a 20GB+ drive as an automated cache of whatever data is traveling to and from your hard drives. The effects are quite noticeable and it seems like the system is pretty smart. Plus, it is done in software that is easily updated should a more efficient algorithm be found.
To me the cost per GB of an SSD really makes it tough to justify in a lot of cases especially if you want to store large programs like games where you'll need at least a 100GB SSD. However one area place I have started to use low capacity (8 or 16GB) SSDs are in low noise and/or low power environments. If you team them with an ITX Atom board and the right power supply you can build a small computer with no moving parts whatsoever. And the computer will have a very low power usage for applications like HTPCs or network appliances (like firewalls) where the machine might always be powered on.
...and would require integration with multiple OS's, require drivers (the quality of which we don't know), etc. Making it transparent to the OS means you don't have any of those problems. It's a trade off, and for a first gen drive, probably the better way to go.
TFA mentions this, in fact the solution the company in the article uses is really a 3 level hybridization, they have RAM cache(which blows even SSD out of the water, but costs at least 5x per byte as SSD and of course is volatile), the SSD, and the hard disk array for seldom-used files.
Monstar L
Momentus XT is not an enterprise drive. I have a 500GB Momentus XT in my MBPro. It gives me a (relatively) inexpensive speed bump with the best of both worlds. I have the capacity I need with the platters and the speed from the solid state. The built-in logic seems to know what I use the most and keeps things fast. All for a fair price.
-J
Commercial SANs have had such tiered capability for years. Multiple levels of performance from bulk, long term storage on spinning disks to short term storage on SLC flash and finally a big memory cache. ZFS for Solaris and FreeBSD offers something similar with the L2ARC, allowing a cheaper but slower way to provide a large, high speed memory cache.
Im running this drive on my gaming comp. Its a 4GB flash 'mirror' of all the files you use most frequently. All the logic and mirroring is handled by the drive controller so its OS-agnostic. It runs great, especially for the price and considering i built my gaming rig before z68 was available. The drive HDD tachs at 90MB/sec, besting my old Raptor 10k 74 GB.
Good-bye
...no one said it was. I was just replying to the parent who suggested the idea of a hybrid drive, without knowing that they do in fact exist to some degree. I assume they will become even more popular as other brands release them, perhaps in a 3.5" performance version.
Of course. OS awareness of hardware capabilities lets you avoid workarounds like TRIM. Instead we have TRIM because the nature of the hardware (NAND flash) is hidden behind an interface designed for rotating media that behaves differently.
Well, if you integrate it into the block layer, then it can be utilized by the filesystem with one layer of abstraction. Abstract it completely and you have to hope that the drive logic is capable of making good decisions, otherwise you'll end up with your swap occupying the SSD and not get any sort of speed increase.
from all reports the seagate drives do a fair job at selecting what to cache. For these drives I think your concerns are mostly moot. Perhaps there are better methods of doing what they do, but the drives perform admirably in terms of caching and I'm sure a better generation of drives is less than a year away.
No, you are supposed to start a flame-war on lkml about how SSD cache is a stupid idea that will never amount to anything. Next hundreds of kernel developers will start develop the code to prove you wrong.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
If you think about it, the outcome of this test is 100% in favor of the SSD.
Think about it:
The tester was willing to test only 3 SSD's versus *60* 15K drives. So the tester thought that 20 times fewer drives was a fair test for the comparison. What is the tester actually saying here? I think I have a feeling I know. :-)
Anyway, 15K drives are not long for the market. Soon, all that will be left are economy class, 10K, and SSD's.
Only a little more maturity, and the enterprise flood gates will open. When that happens, the hapless victim will be the short stroked IOPS environment, where total IOPS was always the requirement, and that requirement was for more IOPS than capacity. I.e., if a 15K drive offers 400 IOPS, and you need 400,000 sustained, but don't have to store very much at all, your only current choices are buying a lot of 15K drives. Or a bazillion less SSD's.
The switchover point is only a heartbeat away.
Bye 15K drive. I'll miss you.
C//
Get one. It's worth it.
Just as an info dump for anyone who's not familiar with why SSDs perform so much better: SSDs have far better seek performance.
A normal HDD takes about 10ms to seek (3ms at the very high end, 15ms at the low end- 10ms is a good rule of thumb), which means you've got a princely 100 seeks per second per spindle (i.e. HDD). SSDs don't have seek limitations. Looking up a contiguous block of data vs not looking up a contiguous block of data makes no difference to an SSD.
It turns out that 100 seeks isn't a lot in serving infrastructure or, in some cases, on a desktop. When you go to read a file off disk multiple seeks are involved- you need to look up the inode (or equivalent), find the file and a large file will probably be in many different chunks require separate seeks to access them.
Even on a desktop you'll frequently be seek bound not throughput limited. Lets say you are starting up a largish java application (Eclipse might be a good example). It references a huge number of library (.jar) files which are certainly large enough to require many seeks to access. And those libraries are often linked in to system libraries which also have their own dependencies and may have additional dependencies all of which require further seeks. Plus with Eclipse it will look up the time stamps on files in the project... and so on.
During boot of a system is another time when HDD are usually seek bound- lots of different applications/services/daemons are starting at the same time, loading lots of libraries causing lots and lots of seeks.
On server infrastructure a highly utilized database will probably be seek bound not throughput limited.
The article is kind of stating the blindly obvious- if you are seek bound SSDs are better. And 60 drives gives ~6000 seeks. A typical modernish desktop HDD can get in the order of 100MB/s data transfer (average sustained), more expensive HDD can get quite a lot more. If we take 3.0Gb/s as a ceiling (i.e. the SATA 3.0 max transfer rate) then at 6000 seeks/second you are getting 3000MB/6000seeks=0.5MB per seek. So the result makes perfect sense if you looking up data that is either entirely non-contigous or smaller than 500kB- an SSD will beat you every time on seeks (since it has no seek time).
The limitations on SSDs are: they have throughput limitations, just like HDD and more importantly their write performance is usually significantly worse than a HDD (writing on an SSD often involves reading and re-writing large chunks of data, even for very small writes). You can easily construct tests where HDD perform better than SSDs (particularly something like a 60 spindle array of HDD where an awful lot of writes can be cached in the on disk's ram buffer, which is common on hire performance drives- often battery backed so they can "guarantee" the write has been committed without having to wait for a write to the magnetic media).
Of course SSDs other obvious application are where you want robustness and silence, i.e. laptops. Oddly enough their power performance isn't that much better than a normal HDD (although that might have changed since I last read about it).
Say the cost is worth the wait, whats your point mr non article?
Yes, it has been done. Even in software, one of the best known is probably ZFS with L2ARC on Solaris and other systems, look it up.
Have a nice day.
New things are always on the horizon
ZFS with L2ARC seems to do fine with that, haven't looked closely how it does it though. But I hear it does have some optimizations.
New things are always on the horizon
. . . a Storage Review experiment from over a year ago:
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_velociraptors_raid_ssd_alternative
They put WD Raptors in RAID 0 to form a high performance (yet still affordable) platter drive setup, and then faced them off against Western Digital's new (at the time, first) SSD. Makes sense, right? Except that WD's first SSD was a complete joke, an underperforming, laughably expensive POS that I forgot about a couple days after Anand's review. When I first read about it I couldn't help but think that WD was deliberately setting it up to fail. It was at the bottom of every benchmark yet priced higher than any other (MLC) SSD. They even put a jmicron controller in it for fuck's sake (not the infamous original one, but still . . .)! Storage Review's calling it a "mid-range" SSD is very generous at best.
Even so, this supposedly screaming platter drive setup could only occasionally hang with the bottom of the barrell of SSDs, and mostly lagged behind it. And as I said, this was over a year ago. It goes without saying that they didn't worry much about heat, noise, reliability (of RAID 0), or power consumption.
Anand doesn't even list platter drives in his benchmark results anymore because they'd skew the charts so badly.
As a previous poster said, a winning strategy is to get a SSD boot drive just big enough for your OS and programs, and use platter drives for everything else. And since the SSD takes care of your performance needs, you can get the cheapest, slowest, coolest, quietest platter drives. There are some cases where both high performance and high capacity are needed at once (like video editing) but they're not the norm.
They have already dropped enough to justify enterprise use. Enterprise-grade 15K drives are expensive ($1/GB) compared to the consumer-grade stuff people are normally talking about when comparing the cost of a gigabyte of storage.
Its almost as if nearly all of slashdot has no idea that 15K drives cost so much... hybrid drives make no sense unless you give up on the RPM's
"His name was James Damore."
There is no such thing as poor performance on an SSD, unless you allocate it poorly. The fact that most companies aren't paying attention to fantastic ways to get reasonably priced SSDs into their equipment just proves that hype is awesome and smart still sucks. Luckily for me, smart is still making money (though not nearly as much as hype).
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Damn, I wish I had mod points :)
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Either write it yourself, pay someone to do it, beg nicely or shut up and just wait.
I remember reading about MS doing research in that area years before SSDs where all the craze. In fact, Vista already supported them (in 2007).
Dilbert RSS feed
Sounds kinda slow. My triple-raid0 SSD setup tachs at 400MB/s (Sony Z11). For your price, I guess it's good enough for general usage. After experiencing this, it's a hard stretch to try to go back to HDD speeds.
Actually, most newer SANs support even further tiered setup. Some will manage this automatically and others require a scan and move. Various technologies do this with varying levels of intricacy and transparency.
A few solutions looked at the heat map of access and would proactively move these to either SSD storage, traditional SAS storage or high density SATA storage. If you wanted to spring for the frontend cache systems they were sporting volatile cache based a memory backend. Though our workloads typically would just fly things right through the cache so it wouldn't provide much usefulness for the cost.
Everyone did it slightly different and there were some really newer implementations of the typical SAN environment. Our group being very geeky really liked one of the newer technologies, but everyone agreed it was a bit too new to gamble on. Sometimes vendors don't win out on just the geek points alone.
These guys are also happy to come out and talk about their technologies. I highly recommend picking at least four major vendors and talking about their technologies. It's just not going to be on the cheap side and chances are if you need that level of speed/durability it's because you can't lose data/system uptime.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
No, you are supposed to start a flame-war on lkml about how SSD cache is a stupid idea that will never amount to anything. Next hundreds of kernel developers will start develop the code to prove you wrong.
I can't believe it's impossible to view Goatse in Linux!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I moved a small 4TB database from 24x 256G 15k SAS drives to 24x 240G OCZ Vertex 3 SATA3 drives. I ran a few queries on the old and the new. same data, same parameters, same amount of data pulled. Both were hooked up via PCIe 8x slots.
the SSD crushed the SAS. Not just a mere 2x or 3x crushing. A _FIFTEEN TIMES FASTER_ crushing. This was pulling about a million rows out. 12 seconds (SSD) vs 189 seconds (spindles)
Cost difference? under $50 per drive more expensive for SSD. I think our actual rate was around $10 per drive more. However, the system as a whole (array+drives+computer) was $12k less. No contest... for our particular application, SSD hands down makes it actually work.
we'll be moving the larger database (same data, same function) to SSD as soon as we can.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
...when your selection criteria is cost-per-IOPS. For heavy, random IOs (like transactional databases) SSD presents a cheaper solution.
Anyway, that's my two-sentence rewrite of TFA.
People go to great lengths to minimize read/writes; putting their games and apps on a HDD, changing system/user folder locations to a HDD, etc. So basically is it worth it to merely load the operating system a little bit faster? Why buy an SSD if you aren't going to use it to load your games and apps faster?
I like the whine. Sort of like it was lighting up the tires on my '69 Chevelle. WHO NEEDS CHEERLEADERS NOW, HUH!!!?
I run RF simulations at work and loaded up the RAM to cache terrain data.
64GB system memory was $1500 a few months ago. I think it is below $1000 now.
Skip the SSD and load up on ram.
Once it's cached, leave it there.
I'd like to see a thunderbolt RAM drive .. that'd be something; in my youth I'd have given it a go. Put some backup batteries in there, a mirror HD, and voila - block reads to go, in bulk. Sweet little capacitors. Do my bidding!
..don't panic
I would like to see the performance gain in eve. This could reduce lag significantly.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/press/2011/448 $500 and is "face meltingly fast".
Computing and Programming Since 1975 The Best Kept Secret in Technical Support Master of the Bare Metal Clean Install
...And my software raid5 of 3 640GB drives gets 175MB/sec linear read(at the beginning, of course) . I just don't see the point: The OS should be doing the caching to spare ram already, and well, adding more memory never hurt.
Because you should be using ZFS?
I troll, but its true.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Looking up a contiguous block of data vs not looking up a contiguous block of data makes no difference to an SSD.
Then is it safe to say that we should never again worry about running defrag utilities after moving to SSD?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Years is a bit of a stretch, EMC only shipped FASTv1 at the end of 2009, FAST cache just over a year ago. Netapp beat EMC by about 2 months with Flash cache (nee PAM II). The reality is these are very new systems in the enterprise space and there are still way too many restrictions around how they are used (especially EMC and how you have to dedicate drive to a storage pool for FAST). I'd love to use ZFS but a) I'd have to work with Oracle more which I do way too much of anyways, and b) they don't really make a very reliable array around it from what I've been able to gather from others in the industry.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Function of wafer costs, die sizes, test times,... Of course, w/ time, as those costs come down, they'd become cheaper, but still long ways to go from HDDs, whose $/GB was much lower from the beginning. However, flash companies too have been looking @ alternate technology for future as the headroom for lithography shrinkage gets more difficult and expensive.
L2ARC in ZFS was released over three years ago, in mid-2008. I figured such a capability would have shown up in one of the big storage manufacturers before that.
Too bad that a) Seagate's QC on the Momentus XT sucks and b) they don't give a shit about their customers and will gladly wait 3 weeks between confirming receipt of malfunctioning, under-warranty drive and actually mailing another one back to you, leaving you drive-less for a full month. But hey, who actually needs a hard drive? I regret not just buying a small SSD for more money but way less hassle.
On "why does NetApp sell their PCIe NAND flash card $30k?", here is your answer, Chris Rima: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=37
In a 3 words: because NetApp can.
It's not the components or engineering behind the card that cost $30k. NetApp prices it so high because the card boosts the performance of their filers by about the same amount as a ~$50k shelf of SAS disks (click that link and go read NetApp's own marketing documentation). They have got to have price points that make sense to customers.
(I know a fraction of you will think "No way!". Well, arbitrary price markups on enterprise gear do exist. This NetApp Flash Cache is effectively priced $150/GB. How do you think that certain competitors can even sell _enterprise_ flash at well below $10/GB? We are not talking 25 or 50% less, but a whole order of magnitude less expensive!)
No, just do zpool add {pool} cache {device} and it will use that device as a layer-2 cache. It's worked since FreeBSD 7.4, and earlier in Solaris. Oh, you said Linux? Sorry. I'll let you get back to using your hammer to insert screws.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'd love to use ZFS but a) I'd have to work with Oracle
Or you can use FreeBSD, which has supported L2ARC since 7.4. The point of something like ZFS is that it allows you to use commodity hardware, but iX Systems will happily sell you FreeBSD-based ZFS storage up to 540TB. They fund most of the development of FreeNAS and use it as the basis for their storage systems.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Duh?
Has slashdot reset to a different perception of technology?
The youngsters know this, the elders know this. I ask the, who on slashdot does not?
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Early this year, Dell gave our office an M1220 array filled with SSDs (15 of them). To benchmark it, we put it up against an M1220 that we already owned filled with 10K SAS HDDs. Each was plugged into an "identical" (as far as any two individual computers can be identical) machine, we loaded the servers with a fresh Linux install, and booted with a 1G RAM ceiling to avoid RAM caching issues. Same filesystem type and size on both storage arrays. We spent a weekend just writing /dev/zero to the SSD array so that we wouldn't run into any of the "first write goes real fast" phenomenon that sometimes happens.
And then ran iozone3 against both, up to 4GB file sizes (once again, to take RAM caching out of play).
Where the SSD did better, the difference wasn't enough to justify either the initial cost difference or the maintenance cost. Where the SSD did worse, in some cases it did MUCH worse.
We called Dell with the results. We sent them our testing methodology. They first told us that we had to put a specific firmware version on the RAID controller and make a couple of changes to the default controller BIOS settings, to trigger some custom code on the SSD on-board controllers. We tried. No difference.
They've got a lab where they do nothing except benchmark hardware 40 hours a week. We invited them to find a configuration -- no matter how contrived and impractical for real-world usage -- that would demonstrate measurable performance advantages for the SSDs.
Six months later, they called us back and admitted that they couldn't find a way to make the SSDs look better.
We'll wait for the second generation.
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
Hi,
I'm just curious what database server are you using in your system. Can you elaborate a bit more, what OS, what usage patterns (data warehouse/web-mostly read/transactions/etc) are dominant in your system?
--Coder
...and would require integration with multiple OS's, require drivers (the quality of which we don't know), etc.
Making it transparent to the OS means you don't have any of those problems. It's a trade off, and for a first gen drive, probably the better way to go.
Don't forget massive vendor lockin, to be avoided like the plague that it is.
Hmm, only works under one OS, perhaps one kernel version of that OS, with one brand, perhaps one model of drive, perhaps they can find a way to lock in the motherboard too. Um, no thanks. Run away! Run away!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You saw how deep he was? I stopped looking way before.
Sure you did, just like everyone else.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
otherwise you'll end up with your swap occupying the SSD and not get any sort of speed increase.
If they drive puts your swap there because its the most actively accessed part of the disk, than you almost certainly are going to see a speed increase, but you could have added ram and likely saw a bigger one. None the less, if you're most accessed data is swap, than thats what the drive should put on Flash.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Fan-freakin'-tastic. Even a cheap USB flash drive makes a huge difference in IOPS. I have a couple of TB of slow storage with a 16GB SSD set up as a L2ARC, and many random access patterns (like "make buildworld") are astoundingly fast once the cache warms up.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I built my gaming machine with some specific goals in mind, one was to tame heat without running 10 fans and to keep costs relatively low. I specifically wanted only ONE HDD. I have RAID arrays too, jsut not in my dedicated gaming rig. I have SSDs too, jsut not in my gaming rig where the cost per GB jsut isnt right yet. AT the time and with the goals I had in mind, the Momentus XT was the right choice. BTW, 90 Mb/s on a 7200 RPM 2.5 in. drive is not too shabby.
Good-bye
I can't see a whole lot of development going into hybrid drives when it's entirely possible that the price point of SSDs will drop enough in a few years to justify mainstream use.
Eh, for business laptops, we've already crossed that point once they got below $2/GB. Why have your sales force sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting on software to start-up because that 5400RPM platter can't keep up? Those people don't need a lot of storage, but they do frequently start programs, or boot up out at a meeting with a client.
I'd argue that any developer desktop who doesn't yet have either a 10k/15k SAS/SATA drive in it is wasting money. And the SSDs are now cheap enough to be a reasonable choice (unless you need 300GB or 450GB drives for some reason). Developers multi-task a lot, and if you pay attention you'll see that they spend a lot of time waiting on the hard drive.
Regular business desktops? Depends on the person, but now that prices are getting down in the $1.30 range on a regular basis, we're starting to roll them out to the power users.
Personal laptops and personal machines probably won't take off until we get below $1/GB and people get hooked on the speed through seeing it in action on a friend's machine.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
500 gb hdd, with intelligent caching using solid state memory
How is that different than a 500GB drive with a 4GB cache? Caching on hard drives is always implemented with solid state memory. What am I missing?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Reading books is passive too, hardly interactive or group activity.
So you also never ever watch any documentaries? no historical docos?
Did you read about 911 on 912?
And porn on a tv is interactive and hardly passive ;-)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
most hard drive cache is volatile memory - which is to say, remove power and you lose the info. because of this nothing stays there - each time you start the hdd, you write all the information to it all over again. Hybrid drives use non-volatile SLC NAND - data written to it remains there, even when the power is off. Because of this you don't pay the penalty of writing high use information to the cache every time the system boots.