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How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive
itwbennett writes: For too long, it looked like SSD capacity would always lag well behind hard disk drives, which were pushing into the 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB. That seems to be ending. In September, Samsung announced a 3.2TB SSD drive. And during an investor webcast last week, Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Meanwhile, hard drive technology has hit the wall in many ways. They can't really spin the drives faster than 7,200 RPM without increasing heat and the rate of failure. All hard drives have now is the capacity argument; speed is all gone. Oh, and price. We'll have to wait and see on that.
That's the thing. Most people who need 3.2 TB of space will only write to each location a few times, and data won't change very often. Sure, some writes will be happening, but not even close to the magnitude that you'd need to wear out one of these drives. There might be some cases in commercial applications where you'd need to write that every day, but the typical desktop or laptop is never going to see that kind of usage.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
SSDs will likely get there in 3-5 years by Moore's law. The question is where hard drives will be by then.
RAID doesn't protect against loss of data, that's what backup is for. RAID protects against loss of uptime.
It's not disingenuous at all. It merely demonstrates the primary problem here, namely the price gap. Larger SSD drives are low capacity and expensive. They are priced outside the range of most consumers while also being inferior in terms of bulk storage. A larger SSD is less able to justify it's price premium than a larger HDD.
Even if SSD prices get less ridiculous, chances are that HDD prices/capacity will keep pace and continue to keep HDDs relevant.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We'll have to wait and see on that.
What's wrong with you people. We are waiting already for 5+ MORE THAN FIVE fucking years. Still hasn't happened.
1TB HDD - 60-80€, 1TB SSD - >350€.
The problem is that once PC is turned on, there is not much use for the SSD speed. It's not like I'm moving terabytes of data around everyday. And even if I have to, I do not have to wait for it: I simply leave it overnight.
Another problem is that (some) SSD have the nasty habit, once failed, to deny you access to the data at all. I hoped that at least those jackasses would straighten out the SMART support and finally standardize the monitoring parameters. But few moronic manufacturers even proclaimed that their drives are so good that they don't need no stinking SMART support...
All in all, SSDs are developing too fast. And have pretty bad history of firmware bugs. And literally all manufacturers, instead of strengthening their stance of data safety, all like one doubled down on the "oh but look how fast it is!"
P.S. And TRIM support is still in shambles. After all the years, some drives still require a proprietary application/driver installed.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Backups aren't the discussion here, data loss due to drive failure is.
Context means everything, and you can't use boring thoughtless mantras to answer every question.
You're both right. RAID can decrease the chances of data loss due to some kinds of problems, but ultimately it shouldn't be considered a reliable protection against data loss. A RAID can be lost or corrupted, or someone can overwrite or delete a file. If you want to assess the risk to your data and talk about the set of data that is protected against loss, you should only consider your backed up data to be "protected". The protection that RAID offers is too weak to be considered to be significant protection.
Therefore, the fundamental purpose of a RAID is to prevent the downtime due to failure of an individual hard drive. If you did not have RAID, then your data volume would stop running, and you'd have to be offline while you repair the device and restore from backups, so that's what you're successfully preventing. All the data that has been backed up (assuming your backup is good) should be safe, and any data that has not backed up is not safe, regardless of whether you have a RAID.
RAID is redundancy, not backup.