SSD-HDD Price Gap Won't Go Away Anytime Soon

storagedude (1517243) writes "Flash storage costs have been dropping rapidly for years, but those gains are about to slow, and a number of issues will keep flash from closing the cost gap with HDDs for some time, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. As SSD density increases, reliability and performance decrease, creating a dilemma for manufacturers who must balance density, cost, reliability and performance. '[F]lash technology and SSDs cannot yet replace HDDs as primary storage for enterprise and HPC applications due to continued high prices for capacity, bandwidth and power, as well as issues with reliability that can only be addressed by increasing overall costs. At least for the foreseeable future, the cost of flash compared to hard drive storage is not going to change.'"

Comments

Re:RAID?

[Anonymous Coward]

For most applications, the performance bottleneck with a hard disk is seek latency, not raw streaming bandwidth. There is basically no way for a mechanical hard disk to match the seek performance of a SSD.

Re:RAID?

[MachineShedFred]

I was shocked when we got one of the MacPro6 units in, and I ran a disk benchmark on it. It was sustaining 950MB/sec, which is good enough to write 10-bit YUV 4:2:2 2k video at 117fps.

That is a realm you could only really get to with fiber channel previously, or a ridiculously expensive PCI-E card with SLC flash.

Re:RAID?

[operagost]

RAID 10 and RAID 0+1 shouldn't be used interchangeably. RAID 10 is striped mirrors, and 0+1 is mirrored stripes. Both fail if all copies of mirrored data are lost, but with RAID 10 that's only 1 disk to worry about after the first failure while with RAID 0+1 it could be any of the disks in the remaining stripe set, which is at least 2.