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.

Comments

What about long-term data integrity?

[halivar]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't SSD's have a point where they put on too many write's per bit?

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[KingSkippus]

Well, the Samsung 3.2 TB drive claims that you can read/write the entire drive every day for five years before failure. It's my understanding that at one point, SSDs were notorious for gradually declining over time, but that today's generation of SSDs basically has reliability out the wazoo. I can't quote you stats on it, but anecdotally, I've had a couple of SSDs in my computer for several years now, I leave it on 24x7, and I've never had a problem.

...Yet. YMMV.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[AaronLS]

Yes, but they employ alot of techniques to mitigate this. The endurance is so high that unless you are recording audio/video almost constantly, it will usually not become an issue. There's plenty of literature on it so not going to be redundant.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[i kan reed]

And of course, there's always RAID, if you're the kind of person who actually seriously beats on your drives, and just can't deal with the loss of data ever.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

They do, but it's a high number and would take years to achieve. Well into territory you'd expect a mechanical harddrive to fail with age.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[MozeeToby]

In theory yes, in practice it's unlikely to ever come up. Wear leveling does wonders, over provisioning does more on top.

If SSDs had come first you'd be saying the same thing about HDDs: Don't HDDs have fragile mechanical parts that fail randomly?

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[unixisc]

I believe what they do is spread the data all over the memory, to mitigate the issue of a small part of the memory being heavily bombarded w/ writes while 90% of it never gets touched. I'd imagine that Copy-on-Write filesystems, such as ZFS, would enable one to do it more effectively, since no actual data ever gets deleted, and only the metadata info is changed, and the changed data is written to another portion of disk. If this is done effectively, then the disk utilization is increased, and endurance issues don't come into play at all.

Otherwise, you are right - cell design does seem to be hitting a wall, and I don't see silicon getting much smaller. Certainly not for price decreases. Also, multiple bits per cell don't lend themselves to too many write cycles, being as unstable as they are.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Effective SSD lifespan goes up with size due to wear leveling techniques. If you manage to write 100 GiB per day every day to a 1 TB Samsung 840 EVO (which uses low endurance memory to get better speeds at its target price point), it would take you over 30 years to physically wear out the NAND cells. If you somehow manage to overwrite the entire drive every day it'll take 3 years on average to break it, the Pro models have tougher memory and would last upwards of 15 years constantly overwriting the entire thing.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Nite_Hawk]

It really depends what you are going to use it for. If it's your desktop PC, consumer grade drives are fine. If you are going to use the SSDs for scratch storage on a supercomputer or the journal devices for Ceph, you probably are going to want high write endurance drives.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[unixisc]

Typically, the endurance of any non-volatile memory (read flash/hard drives) is measured per sector/block, where the latter is the smallest number of erasable bytes/words/quad-words that an erase operation can erase. Typically, for flash, that number is 1-10 thousand cycles. That number is eroded as one increases the number of bits per cell.

Like I mention below in a response to the GP, if you have it so that every byte is written only once and any overwrites happen to other bytes/sectors, you can avoid multiple erase cycles and thereby maximize the life of such an SSD.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[beelsebob]

RAID doesn't protect against loss of data, that's what backup is for. RAID protects against loss of uptime.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Eunuchswear]

But make sure to put the SSDs into the RAID a few months apart -- it would be embarrassing to have them all fail at the same moment.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[i kan reed]

RAID 15 absolutely protects against data loss.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[sexconker]

All RAID levels protect against loss of data due to failure of individual drive(s), port(s), or data cable(s).
RAID 0 is not RAID.
RAID is not backup.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely it protects against data loss due to (some) hardware failures.

It doesn't protect against rm -rf /* type data loss.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Mad Merlin]

It doesn't matter what RAID level you use, rm -rf / will still dutifully delete all of your data for you.

Repeat after me, RAID is not a backup.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[sabri]

Most current MLC (multi-level cell) implementations can sustain anywhere between 1000 and 3000 write/erase cycles per cell. This is better than TLC (triple-level cell, max 1000), but far worse than SLC (single-level cell, max 100k up to a million, depending on the technology).

The problem is the way how flash itself works, and how smart your controller is. Unlike a disk, flash must be erased before writing. And here is where the problem comes: flash data is stored in a page of cells, with typically 8 pages of data per "block". Erasing happens on the block level. So in order to erase a single page of data, you need to erase all 8 pages in a block. Since you need to keep the data of the other 7, you first need to copy that data into another block, erase the original one, write all data back and erase your "tmp" block. The churn on blocks happens a lot faster than what you'd think.

Having that said, for consumer products, MLC or TLC is perfectly fine. For enterprise, not so much.

You'll see that in the price, obviously. TLC is the cheapest, followed by MLC, and the most expensive technology is SLC.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[SeaFox]

Well, the Samsung 3.2 TB drive claims that you can read/write the entire drive every day for five years before failure.

Such statistics are meaningless in my book. Light bulb manufacturers claim their bulbs will last five years or seven years but when you look at the fine print they say that's given under the idea you're turning the light on, leaving it running for 3 hours, and turning it off once per day -- nobody uses light bulbs like that.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Essentially this.

Anyone that REALLY needs a heavy amount in IO for file access will most likely buy loads of RAM and cache out the ass since it is still a hell of a lot faster.
Periodic cache backups in the event of crashes or faults.
That combined with a basic UPS is the best kind of system really.

The worst problem will be system drives.
I would love if it could become a standard for 1.8" system drives. SSDs don't have the limitations hard drives do, and density is now through the room on SSD storage, so, 1.8" system drives would be a great thing since they could be replaced easily.
Of course, you can still more or less do this now using things like CF cards, SD cards and such. But that isn't the same.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

you first need to copy that data into another block, erase the original one, write all data back and erase your "tmp" block. The churn on blocks happens a lot faster than what you'd think.

If that's the case, then why are they not copying the data to ram contained on the drive itself? Seems like an awful waste of cycles with a relatively simple fix. Is it just a cost issue?

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[i kan reed]

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.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's actually what they do.
1) Select an empty block.
2) Copy the data into ram on the device
3) Write the new physical block
4) Update the virtual/physical block map
5) Mark the old block as empty

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[deviated_prevert]

Surely it protects against data loss due to (some) hardware failures.

It doesn't protect against rm -rf /* type data loss.

rm -rf /dev/sd(*)"whichever drive you mounted that has been infected by the manufacturer with windows", can protect the user against infections by Windows 8 very nicely indeed though. Or for those who like to watch a drive slowly kill it off, a good session of dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sd(*)"whichever drive you mounted that has been infected by the manufacturer with windows"

Either way a very satisfying result and a sense of real accomplishment happens, without any serious data loss.

These simple actions are the best known method to increase the life span of old computers with less than 8 gig of ram with hdd drives and a primitive OS that constantly overtaxes drives by constantly indexing a pagefile.sys section to disk for no good reason other than to kill the drive in a short period of time, so the consumer will go out and buy a new 'puter ever other year! GRRR

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[sabri]

If that's the case, then why are they not copying the data to ram contained on the drive itself? Seems like an awful waste of cycles with a relatively simple fix. Is it just a cost issue?

Cost and reliability/latency. If you copy it to RAM and get a power outage, data is gone. So that will ruin your reliability. Which means that you have no choice but to ack the write after it's written to the actual block itself. Which in turn increases the latency between receiving the data and ack'ing it.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAID 0 is also RAID.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAID 15 absolutely protects against data loss.

ORLY?

rm -f -r *

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[jedidiah]

Exactly. RAID prevents a drive failure from being an immediate data loss.

Plus, RAID allows me to keep all of my bulk storage online while I am replacing a drive. That portion of my data hoard is not completely unavailable to me while I am copying data to the replacement drive.

Of course you want at least 2 copies of your data.

This is where the relative cheapness of HDD wins the day. You don't just need 1x of what you think you need but at least 2x.

Yes. Take that large number associated with SSD tech and DOUBLE it.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[rbmorse]

Or, if your house burns down

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[gigaherz]

Under common usage patterns, you can expect up to 25 years life for first-gen SLC, 15 years for first-gen MLC, 10 years for current-gen MLC, 5 years for current-gen TLC. MTBF is lower due to defective cells and such, but that's also true for HDDs.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

They also wear out. Remember how crappy mechanical drives were before they got wear leveling?

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[godel_56]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't SSD's have a point where they put on too many write's per bit?

Tech Reportchecked a bunch of SSDs for write durability and virtually all of them made it to 600 terabytes of data writes or better.

For an ordinary desktop user, write durability is not a problem. Now what about storage durability? With 3 bits per cell, how long before the data fades?

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[nine-times]

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.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[cnettel]

you first need to copy that data into another block, erase the original one, write all data back and erase your "tmp" block. The churn on blocks happens a lot faster than what you'd think.

If that's the case, then why are they not copying the data to ram contained on the drive itself? Seems like an awful waste of cycles with a relatively simple fix. Is it just a cost issue?

Any wear levelling worth its salt will not do what the grandparent wrote. You simply do not change one page in a block. If you write a single page, that is handled by mapping that page to another (free) block and maintaining a mapping table for which LBAs are currently stored in what blocks. However, if you are doing single-sector writes, or in turn repeated I/O flushes of the same sector, you still see a lot of write amplification. To keep data integrity, the mapping tables also need to be kept updated in a correct way (or at least uniquely recoverable by scanning through all blocks after a hard power off).

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAID 0 is AID

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual wear leveling algorithms are proprietary, but rest assured that they do not use flash as temporary memory, and neither do they read an erase block, change one sector and write the erase block back. One thing flash controllers do is maintain a list of unused sectors. So, if you write to one sector, the data goes into an empty sector of a different erase block and the controller remembers that the sector's old location is now unused (and where the sector is now). That's where the TRIM command helps: It marks sectors as unused without using up a different sector somewhere else. When the drive needs more free erase blocks, it copies the remaining data from mostly "abandoned" erase blocks and flashes (erases) the old erase block. All that and more brings down the write amplification, which measures the average number of sectors actually written for each write to a sector. Intel claims a write amplification of just 1.1 for one of its controllers. Also, wear leveling makes sure that erase blocks are used evenly. Otherwise writing the same few sectors over and over again would burn out the drive in seconds. All in all you can expect to write at least a few hundred times the capacity of the drive, in any order and to any sectors you want, before you need to worry about flash cell wear.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[sabri]

Any wear levelling worth its salt will not do what the grandparent wrote.

Yes, which is where the smarter controllers come in, and where you have the process of "garbage collection". There was a piece a while ago on TRIM not being support on some Apple gear, if I'm not mistaken.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[ChrisMaple]

RAID in acronym only. The R means redundant, and RAID 0 is not redundant.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[sexconker]

The moron above me said "RAID doesn't protect against loss of data" when it absolutely does, in the exact ways I described.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[beelsebob]

No, it doesn't. It doesn't protect you against losing data in a fire, it doesn't protect you against losing data to malware, and it doesn't protect you against losing data to making a mistake. All changes are automatically propagated across all disks. Backup protects you against losing data.

What RAID 15 does is protects you against losing a day of work because one disk failed - that is, it protects against loss of uptime.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite true.
You can have mirrored ram.
you can have battery backed-up ram.

That is how old-style SSDs worked.
Mirrored battery-backed RAM, with a HDD on standby for destaging in case power was lost.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until a power supply glitch fries all the drives.

It happens.

Re: What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

This 'R' is the sound of whoosh.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't just keeping the original data in RAM potentially cause a data integrity issue if the drive lost power? It seems like you could save a step by copying 7+1 pages to the "tmp" block and then just erasing the original location. Of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Alain Williams]

No, you do not have to write large amounts of data to break the drive - you can break it by causing one block to fail - an important block. On a file system one of those heavy write blocks will be: the super block, the index to the free list, the transaction log; in a database it is going to be parts of the index. All these blocks will have writes many more times than most of the file/file-system. These blocks are also the really important ones. Damage one of these and you don't lose data, but you lose the ability to access it.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[CylanR77]

With 3 bits per cell, how long before the data fades?

This is the reliability issue that nobody wants to talk about. I am sure that many others are like myself, with a closet full of old PCs. I like the idea that if I were to pull one out and power it on after having sat unplugged for a span of years, it would still boot (CMOS battery BIOS issues not withstanding) and would still have all of the data I left it with.

SSDs on the other hand won't even guarantee that your data will still be there after *only one year* of being powered off, and as we've dipped below the 34nm process, sometimes SSDs are warranted for even less.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[SuricouRaven]

More accurately, recent versions of OSX have their use of TRIM commands limited to the 'apple endorsed' models of SSD, the ones the machine ships with. There's some dispute over the reasons for this. One faction claims it's Apple trying to sabotage upgrades, making it so that if you buy an after-market SSD rather than paying their insane markup performance will become awful. Another faction claims it isn't deliberate sabotage, but rather a lack of interest in testing for unsupported hardware configurations: TRIM can potentially malfunction horrible if the SSD doesn't impliment it in quite the expected way, and Apple has only coded and tested it for their preferred models. By disabling it on third-party hardware they remove the need to test for fifty-odd different devices to make sure it isn't going to corrupt data.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[SuricouRaven]

Risky Array of Imminent Disaster.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[omibus]

All RAID levels protect against loss of data due to failure of individual drive(s), port(s), or data cable(s).
RAID 0 is not RAID.
RAID is not backup.

It also isn't a backup if the data isn't offsite...which is beyond the scope of any individual hard drive.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[sabri]

You can have mirrored ram. you can have battery backed-up ram.

Yes you can. Now name me one vendor that actually offers that today....

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. They're not suitable for high bandwidth circular buffers.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[crunchygranola]

One faction claims it's Apple trying to sabotage upgrades, making it so that if you buy an after-market SSD rather than paying their insane markup performance will become awful. Another faction claims it isn't deliberate sabotage, but rather a lack of interest in testing for unsupported hardware configurations...

Seems like a distinction without a difference.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Zargg]

Such statistics are meaningless in my book. Light bulb manufacturers claim their bulbs will last five years or seven years but when you look at the fine print they say that's given under the idea you're turning the light on, leaving it running for 3 hours, and turning it off once per day -- nobody uses light bulbs like that.

But this is the opposite direction as your light bulb example, very few people write 3.2 TB of data every day for 5 years straight, so for most users something else will break before cell writes becomes a real issue.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Forever Wondering]

Engineers in Taiwan have supposedly solved the cell wearout problem. See http://phys.org/news/2012-12-t...

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[MachineShedFred]

Yes and no - they simply don't QA every drive that ever existed or will exist, because they didn't ship them and it would be ridiculous to do that anyway. Where the change was, is that they implemented code signing on kernel extensions in order to beef up security a bit, and the side effect is that the ugly binary patch people were applying to the AHCI kext is quite broken. If anyone out there was patching any of the other 200+ kexts that ship with OS X, they have a similar problem; unless they turn off kext signing. Which you are free to do with a simple nvram flag.

Or, it's postulated that you could create your own signing cert, import it into system.keychain, and then re-sign the patched kext; but I'm not aware of anyone doing that. The third option is for some nice SSD manufacturer to make a proper signed driver, but they don't want to spend the time or resources.

Either way, it's a tempest in a teapot. Software vendor is blamed when unsupported hack applied without their knowledge is broken in a major upgrade. In other news, fire is still hot.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man do I want a SSD NAS in RAID 6. Only thing is that 10Gb ethernet needs to become retail level. I still don't understand why we have 1Gb connectors when you could easily have a 100/1000/10000 instead of 10/100/1000.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that a flash memory does not hold data forever. Unplug it for a year, and all data is lost. It is like a dynamic memory, with retention in weeks, not milliseconds. As long as a controller keeps refreshing data, you are OK - subject to a limit on rewrites, which few of us will ever reach.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[MachineShedFred]

Which is where wear leveling comes in.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how drives do it these days. Maybe the very first ones used that naive implementation.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAID 0 is RAID, you twat.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Megol]

Make that 10-20 years in a hot environment (~60 degrees Celsius). For most intents and purposes flash is a non-volative memory but yes, some applications must treat it as a type of dynamic memory.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[mjwx]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't SSD's have a point where they put on too many write's per bit?

They do, but it's high enough that your computer and hard drive will be obsolete and replaced well before the point you reach it. Even if you keep your computer for a decade. I'm more concerned that every SSD I've owned has had a serious bug discovered after I bought it.

Crucial M4 - the 5000 hour bug.
Samsung EVO - slowdown bug.

I like SSD's but I have to question the maturity of the technology.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[fnj]

And Amazon says the battery in their Kindle ebook reader lasts 4 weeks - fine print: when used 1/2 hour a day. Pssst - that is an actual 15 hours. And they have a graph with the line for their battery dozens of times longer than the competition which has - ready for it - 13 hours battery life.

I guess my car will only need its tank refilled once a year if I only drive 5 miles once a week.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Backups aren't the discussion here, data loss due to drive failure is.

The loss of one or more drives isn't the only failure mode you have to protect against. For instance, RAID does exactly zero to protect against controller failure, which sometimes will irretrievably corrupt all the drives attached to it. It's not fun when it happens. The original responder was correct - RAID should be considered a high availability solution, not protection against data loss.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Whereas if you use an HDD, your data will be safe forever!

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

And a controller failure will often make all of the ways you mentioned irrelevant.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[fnj]

Oh get over it. RAID protects against *some* data loss scenarios and not against *some other* data loss scenarios. Pretending that it doesn't protect against data loss at all is just silly.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Qzukk]

Why do my modpoints always disappear whenever someone comes up with something worthy of them?

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[xaotikdesigns]

They make SD cards with WiFi that will automatically upload pictures you take to your laptop. Not the same, but I wonder if there would be any benefit to setting something like this up in a hard drive as well. If windows crashes, as long as the drive itself has power, it can continue to backup your drive to a NAS or possibly even to a cloud service.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[PRMan]

They use capacitors to ensure they have enough time to write out the RAM after power down.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[petermgreen]

And crucially for this discussion conventional raid* does not protect against silent corruption because it doesn't know which copy is the good copy. I've found SSDs to be far more prone to silent coruption than hard drives were.

* Some filesystems with integrated raid features can protect against this but of course that means you have to use those filesystems which bring their own issues.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[egarland]

Drive Writes Per Day is *the* important metric for judging the write load capabilities of a drive. 1 DWPD is perfectly adequate for consumer/desktop use and many fileserver applications but impractical for backing a database, where 5 DWPD is more appropriate. You pay about 50% more for a 5 DWPD drive than a consumer level one, but if it saves you from having to replace the drive 5 times, it's worth it.

Inaccuracies aside, this is an important property of SSD's to keep in mind when procuring them.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Ksevio]

That's exactly how I use my light bulbs...well maybe not exactly 3 hours - usually more in the winter and less in the summer.

The previous comment seemed pretty clear about the usage though I don't think Samsung was able to actually verify that claim.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Ksevio]

So you're saying it does protect against data loss...

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Ksevio]

A computer with a RAID 1 has a full backup to protect it in the event of a hardware failure. Sure there are lots of ways for that backup to fail, but you can find problems with any backup system.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[ILongForDarkness]

I think you are spot on. Back in the day of 100GB drives you could easily fill empty the drive several times a year. Even standard def video you'd go through 10GB of data a week easy (~350MB each so about 300 shows compacity). But now go up to 1080p say 1.6GB compressed using normal codex. You are looking at 1-2000 episodes on a disk. So your write/delete cycle is 3-6X less even at 1080p. For the vast majority of people using large storage that is what it is being used for. Yeah I know: "but I have a lot of photos". 1: even at say 10MB a pop do you really have THAT many photos (about 100 a day for 8 years to fill a 3TB drive)? 2: if you do .. and is this personal or business? Yeah a professional might create a lot of content but then storage is a cost of business not just a routine maintenance thing you have to do to organize your personal life.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but what about the integrity of static long term data in SSD?

Can I write once to SSD and read off it as often as I like for decades?

Is there a limit and what is it?

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[ILongForDarkness]

Admittedly you said NAS but if NAS really means a box sitting next to the powerful computer that needs that kind of throughput then Thunderbolt will do that for you 20Gbps currently. I suspect the issue is a north bridge south bridge type of thing. Well now the north bridge is really in the CPU for the most part but I/O still lives one step removed from the CPU. To fix that you need to use a pcie card or something for the network interface which means you effectively need the equivalent of a dual graphics card mobo worth of hardware just so that 5% of the time you actually need that 10Gbps throughput on the network interface you have it.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

+fucking 50 informative. You blew my mindhole with info ty :)

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[mr_exit]

Photography is a keen hobby of mine and I have roughly 4Tb of photos dating back to my first DSLR in 03. And yes I do a rather thorough pass of removing photos that are not good, duplicates or otherwise not worth keeping from every shoot I do. Raw files from Canons 22 megapixel 5DMkIII are 40 - 45Mb a pop. Jpegs aren't any use to me.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Roger W Moore]

Such statistics are meaningless in my book.

Not entirely - it tells you the number of write cycles each cell has: 5*365=1,825 cycles. You then just have to hope that the load leveller knows what it is doing because a single file like a mailbox could easily exceed that in a day if the writes were always to the same location on the disk.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[nine-times]

Sorry, no, in IT terms that's not a backup. It's a backup when it's an independent system with a history. Calling a RAID1 a backup to protect against data loss is similar to calling a redundant power supply a backup to protect against power failure. It's kind-of-almost-right in a limited sense, but it misunderstands the problem. It's just hardware redundancy, not a backup.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Sure, some writes will be happening, but not even close to the magnitude that you'd need to wear out one of these drives.

You mean such as databases doing heavy traffic in badly organized tables, which is one of the most critical commercial uses for SSD.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

And performance. Reads are interleaved from multiple spindles. Before I had an SSD, RAID was a good upgrade for my gaming box. Now I just use it for uptime, so it's easy to replace failed drives.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Ksevio]

But that's not the case - there is actually a duplicate of all the data on a second drive. It's only one period of time (the most recent), but it allows you to recover the data in the event of a hard drive failure (and the loss of data on that drive).

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[rtb61]

Well why don't those engineers review the whole idea of SSD drives. Really, honestly, they seem rather redundant, once the shift is made over to that format, surely storage slots for chips on small daughter boards makes more sense. why bother with a box in a box, when all you need is the slots, just like ram slots to slip in flash storage. Preferable a reasonable number of slots, with the ability to transfer data from one slot to another and say a specific boot slot. Whether you add in additional drive extension identification per slot or just expand the core drive with each additional card installed. On growing failure rates add a new daughter board, mirror the boot card and swap them.

The concept seems outdated for SSD drives when SSD storage becomes dominant, except of course for external drives. Keeping that storage connected directly to the mother board means data transfer speeds will be improved and overall design should be simplified, mother board and computer case, apart of course from the need for optical drives unless of course they get tossed out the same time as hard disk drives.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[edmudama]

If they're following industry standards, the typical guarantee on client drives is that your data will be available for 1 year of 60C bake assuming you've already cycled it to the endurance limit.

If your temperature is cooler or you haven't used up all your cycles yet, then retention will be longer than the guarantee.

Enterprise drives trade retention for endurance, thus allowing them to support more write cycles within their warranty periods. The trade-off is that the endurance limit at 60C becomes 3 months instead of 12 months, which for typical enterprise applications is more than enough. Note that when powered up but idle, the drive is performing management of the NAND, so the retention numbers are all assuming that the drive is powered off and in storage.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Industrial spec drives that operate at 85C? The SSD versions are still 10x the price. You wouldn't put a cheap MLC SSD device in there it would not go the distance.

I hope something better comes along that has all the high-speed goodness of SSD, but doesn't have write wearout, and block-at-a-time writes.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

You bought Seagate, didn't you?

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly how I use my light bulbs

The lights in your kitchen, you turn them on and off no more than once per day? What about the lights in your bathroom? Those two rooms, I find it highly unlikely that someone would toggle the lights no more than once per day.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

backups aren't subject to fires and mistakes? don't be naive.

and in terms of "uptime", the uptime of not going down since your last backup absolutely protects against loss of that data.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Bengie]

New shingled harddrives have some very complex data-keeping going on, about as bad as SSDs. Pointers everywhere, keeping track of where the LBA actually goes on the disc.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[theshowmecanuck]

And then we can slowly pull the cards out of the slots while the computer sings Bicycle Built For Two in ever slower verses.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[m.dillon]

You might as well ask the same question about a hard drive. If you power down a hard drive and put it on a shelf for a year, there is a better than even change that it will be dead when you try to power it up again, and an even higher chance that it will die within a few days.

A powered-down SSD that has been written once should be able to retain data for ~10 years or so. Longer if kept in a cool place. As wear builds up, the retention time drops. You can look up the flash chip specs to get a more precise answer. A powered-up SSD should be able to retain data almost indefinitely as the self check will relocate failing sectors as they lose charge. However, in practical terms, it also depends on how the drive firmware is stored. The drive will die when the firmware is no longer readable. But that is true for hard drives as well.

-Matt

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Bengie]

Modern wear levelers will even move blocks that aren't being written to, in order to maintain evenness. Older ones only allowed wear leveling to happen with "free" blocks, but now all blocks can be moved.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[c6gunner]

A RAID can be lost or corrupted, or someone can overwrite or delete a file.

And tapes can be lost or corrupted, or someone can burn the building down.

This is an old argument, and every time it gets revisited RAID starts to look better. Overwriting / deletion might have been a concern prior to modern filesystems which incorporate easy and cheap snapshotting, but nowdays that part of the argument just doesn't fly. Corruption is still a concern but, again, that's a risk you take with any backup solution too.

There's no such thing as a guaranteed backup. If you're very rich and very paranoid, you could certainly rig up a "backup solution" that involves copying your data every 5 minutes to 50 different offsite locations in 50 different countries, plus having some cheap third-world-labour transcribe all the zeros and ones to a paper copy for storage in an underground vault. And even that's not 100% because a really big asteroid will result in unrecoverable corruption. In the end it all comes down to how much you're willing to spend and what level of risk you're willing to accept. For most of us who aren't running IT departments that equation comes down to something like "ZFS RAIDZ2".

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

When somebody needs to prevent data loss, and you only have one or two sentences before the person loses interest or their eyes glaze over, it is best to tell them a solution that will work in as many scenarios, instead of meandering into "well this protects against this, and then this protects against this but not this..."

It's a subject that is more complex than you'd think at first, but most people don't care. They just want to feel safe. And when you give them the impression RAID protects against data loss, they'll use that because it's easy, and leave themselves open to pretty much every kind of data loss scenario except a hard drive dying.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple can't afford 50 different consumer drives?

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

But it doesn't allow you to recover data in the much more common event that someone mistakenly erased it. As you'll restore about nine files due to mistakes for about every one you'll restore due to disks failing, that's what backup is supposed to protect you from.

Also, RAID ignores two other major failure modes, and that's faulty hardware/bus, and filesystem software bugs that hurts/destroys your entire filesystem. RAID won't help you from that either. In fact, since such bugs are relatively more common in professional RAID controllers, you're slightly more at risk from those when you run RAID, than without. (As any pro and they'll tell you a story about when the entire RAID-array failed horribly.)

So, no. While RAID can be an important part of any availability strategy, it's not "backup" for any useful definition of that word.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[jones_supa]

That has nothing to do with using RAID or not. Even normal backups wouldn't survive that, unless they are in a fireproof container or stored off-site.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might as well ask the same question about a hard drive. If you power down a hard drive and put it on a shelf for a year, there is a better than even change that it will be dead when you try to power it up again, and an even higher chance that it will die within a few days.

Matt, can you offer us some explanation for that? I don't see any physical reason for that to happen. Magnetic media records are known for longevity, because it relies on bistable physical phenomenon, one state having virtually no more energy then the other, unlike flash which is based on essentially metastable phenomenon, where programmed bit carries more energy then erased one.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[jones_supa]

So what? A meteor could crash on your computer too. RAID still offers extra protection against loss of data.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even worse, a couple of years ago, there was a device where the manufacturer had decided to use a "reserved for future use" command for firmware upgrade, rather than a "reserved for the vendor" command.

That "reserved for future use" command became TRIM.

The result: Sending a TRIM command to that device resulted in the following data overwriting the firmware, rather than the expected "unsupported command".

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[jones_supa]

You must be joking. Mechanical hard disks do not have wear leveling. They only have some extra space to remap some individual failed sectors. The media of a mechanical HDD does not really wear out anyway.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAID only protects you against loss of data, if one of the drives is or becomes offline at the time the loss of data occurs. Otherwise the controller will make sure the loss of data is mirrored to the other drive within milliseconds.

I have needed to restore data plenty of times. So far, RAID would have helped in zero cases.

I've even had a malfunctioning RAID controller decided that both drives in a RAID 1 were bad within minutes of each other. Twice. The second time it happened we blamed the controller (it happened two years apart, so it was not like testing would have shown anything).

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

All RAID levels protect against loss of data due to failure of individual drive(s), port(s), or data cable(s).

The point in "RAID only protects your uptime" is that it will make your system stay up the time that would otherwise have been spent restoring the backup of said data.

Data loss only happens when there was no backup of the data that some moron just overwrote. RAID is not going to save you from that (and human error happens more often than hardware error).

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretending that it doesn't protect against data loss at all is just silly.

Just as silly as backups.

The reason that "RAID does not protect against data loss" needs to be repeated over and over again, is that whenever it doesn't get repeated enough, somebody WILL insist that "we don't need backups, we have RAID".

YOU are giving that somebody (who may just happen to be your manager some day) all the arguments he needs to make sure that no money will be spent on backup hardware, and the IT guys will be blamed when said RAID fails to protect against data loss.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[TheRaven64]

Now what about storage durability? With 3 bits per cell, how long before the data fades?

I was under the impression that the controller would handle this. Cells are typically marked as dead once their thresholds are such that you can't guarantee that they'll hold their contents for a year (there was an interesting paper at EuroSys this year about extending the lifespan by using these cells for short-lived data and exposing that functionality to the OS). If a cell is getting close to the time when the data has been unmodified for long enough that its integrity is in danger, then the controller will use the same mechanism as wear levelling to read it and write it back (either in the same place or somewhere else). Most of the time, this will happen as part of normal wear levelling, as unmodified data are moved around to sit on cells that have been rewritten a few times and spread the wear onto some of the cells that were only written once.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

They use capacitors to ensure they have enough time to write out the RAM after power down.

Only problem is, it doesn't work very well in practice:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/169124-the-mysteriously-disappearing-drive-are-power-outages-killing-your-ssds

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Blaskowicz]

Not really, an easy way to falsify your account is to run an old motherboard, hard drive or pretty anything that's not been used in ten to fifteen years : it works fine. The firmware is usually stored in flash (instead of PROM or EEPROM as was done in the 80s and early 90s) which is also why all it takes is a DOS program to update firmware instead of removing chips and putting them in a programmer.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Blaskowicz]

1.8" is dying, but you have mSATA and M2 interfaces instead.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if you could start with a block being N levels of TLC, then as it wears switch it to N/2 levels, then N/4, then down to MLC and SLC. To the user, the drive's total size would go down over time. I can think of some complications with this scheme, but it might extend drive life.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Blaskowicz]

Thunderbolt is external PCIe, and is thus nice for overpriced laptops and trash can shaped workstations. Else it is a lot cheaper to use your internal PCIe. PCIe 2.0 4x will do the same job as Thunderbolt 2.0 - and so you can either use a PCIe 2.0 4x card for your SSD (or a 3.0 one to yet double the bandwith, seems the 3.2TB Samsung SSD uses that) or for a 10Gb NIC.

Real issue with 10Gb ethernet is the cost and then the power use, not anywhere near a graphics card but around the 10W mark which is significant. A high end motherboard was just announced (2011-3 socket) which has a dual 10Gb NIC built-in, which uses 14 watts.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Blaskowicz]

Indeed, complicated storage schemes tied to a hardware controller that's likely to fail (a computer in your computer), what could go wrong.
Better to use software RAID 1, or even rsync a drive to another.

In the context of home storage anyway, I would say RAID 1 (and checking your RAM yearly with memtest86+) is better than nothing at all, which is the "backup strategy" adopted by 90%+ people. Better yet would be RAID 1 + off-site backup. Note to self : have to make a list of files and folders in my music collection. That would be a useful "back up" already.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[perryizgr8]

If you actually use a kindle, you will realize that the 4 week claim is quite true. I do not know the fine print etc but I have been using one for several years and it still gives me a nice 3-4 weeks battery. I read about 2-3 hours daily.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[nine-times]

And tapes can be lost or corrupted, or someone can burn the building down.

This is an old argument, and every time it gets revisited RAID starts to look better.

This isn't a competition. I'm not saying, "Screw RAID! It's a terrible backup." It's just not a backup. I'm not going to fight with you over this. Go ahead and use RAID as a backup. Maybe you'll be lucky and you'll never need to learn your lesson.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[nine-times]

but it allows you to recover the data in the event of a hard drive failure (and the loss of data on that drive).

Well, it allows you to recover data in the event of a hardware failure specifically on one of the hard drives, nowhere else, in such a way that doesn't cause data corruption first. In much the same way that if you have a redundant power supply, it will protect you against the specific event of hardware failure where one of your power supplies fails without there being a problem with your power source or damage to any of the other internal components.

That is to say, it's hardware redundancy. Nothing more. Of the events that lead to data loss or power failure, hardware redundancy does protect you against the case where the problem is limited to hardware failure of one of the redundant parts, and everything else works properly. A "backup" however should be a more generalized strategy for protecting against a total loss of the service, i.e. power goes out or data is lost.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[ILongForDarkness]

So a 3TB drive is enough to store 15 pics a day for that 11 years a 50MB a piece. I assume back in 2003 you weren't taking 50MB pics but going forward it might grow I suppose. But still say you take 150 pics a day and then delete them all once you fill up the bad boy: it is still over a year between cycles. With at least 300 write cycles on an SSD you'll be fine: in 5 years you'll be picking up a replacement 10TB SSD for $200 from Best Buy.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[ILongForDarkness]

Yeah a 10W nic is drawing "a lot" of power but so is the disks/switches to get you data at that speed. SSDs are low powered but you still are looking at using a few of them in parallel to feed you that quick and presumably the NAS device also must have a nic on its end. Not a huge issue other than heat though since I don't think 10Gbps makes sense on a laptop much yet, well I guess it does because at that speed you don't need much local storage, but if you were pulling stuff into local storage you'd fill up laptop class drives in about 10min of use.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Electricity Likes Me]

The biggest problem with the Kindle is it's very easy to forget you need to charge it "sometimes".

If there was ever a device that would benefit for long range wireless charging, even at just a trickle, it'd be the Kindle.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[oh_my_080980980]

Indexing? Think again. The OS does alot of writing to the HD. So depending on how you have you system configured, it could minimal writes or alot.

But HD failure is huge with SSD. Once it dies, good bye data. Regular HD, you can recover data. Long term data storage is not for SSD.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

With spinning rust the same thing is true. Often the lubricant in the drive dries out, and not spinning can cause it to seize up.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's cute that you still use hardware RAID -- the rest of us figured this out years ago and moved over to software RAID, so we're completely insulated against controller failure.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple doesn't need to support TRIM from any manufacturer. They can simply list the drives which are known to work. Also, they already have a hardware test software which can be used by 3rd party manufacturers. In case the TRIM test is not included in that user land software, they could release it separately for hard drive producers to make perfectly working drives.

But corporations working in the interest of their users? Hah, in your dreams... Apple is just putting up another wall and fanboys will buy whatever you throw at them anyway.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Bengie]

ECC memory triggers an even on error. There are counters to see how many memory errors you've had since boot. After the first multi-day memtest burn-in, you should be good just monitoring the counters.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Bengie]

5 years for current-gen TLC

That's good Samsung's new cheap SSD drives come with a 10 year warranty.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Aqualung812]

I think the point is that the parent has obviously dealt with IT people that think RAID = backup. I have as well. It is painful.

Also, saying "RAID protects against *some* data loss scenarios" isn't accurate. It protects against one, and only one, data loss scenario: drive failure.

ALL other data loss scenarios are immune to RAID.

One =! some.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[blackomegax]

I loved that line of enterprise 500gb drives they made once that all failed on the same day across multiple data centers... fun times.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash devices are susceptaible to evaporation of charge. Your data can just disappear, but the question is how long does it last.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[bingoUV]

For most of us who aren't running IT departments that equation comes down to something like "ZFS RAIDZ2".

For those who aren't running IT departments, rsnapshot daily, weekly, monthly and yearly is easier and cheaper. Or any versioning backup.

Easier because most such people don't work on BSD / Solaris - so setting up a NAS is the extra step making ZFS difficult.

Cheaper because a lot of data will turn out to be not worth backup - rsnapshot can more easily exclude files that don't look like they need backup. So in a typical scenario, 10 timed versions of 1 TB can stay in 1 TB. Lots of nested mounts can exclude ZFS from RAIDZing too, but it is a hassle far bigger than simple regexp.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[blackomegax]

Intel 320 8mb bug too but that was firmware. I've not had any issues at all with my crucial or Sammy Evo 250gb though...

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Yes, I'm not saying that RAID has no place. I use software based mirroring for my "big" drive that has stuff that's annoying to lose, but not critical. And then "offsite" (well in my basement...) backup for the stuff that has to be there in addition to mirroring.

But making a list of the filenames, that's a novel idea that sounds about right. Have to do that. (And remember to include it in the offsite backup. :-) )

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[WuphonsReach]

A powered-down SSD that has been written once should be able to retain data for ~10 years or so. Longer if kept in a cool place.

Nope. Most MLC SSDs will lose their data in about a year and the TLC SSDs in about 6 months of being powered off. (Don't confuse older flash media which was probably SLC with newer MLC/TLC media. Or which had larger feature sizes.)

As the size of the feature that stores your bits shrinks, so does the archival lifetime before something bad happens to one or more of the bits. That holds true for everything from tape, to hard drives, to CDs to flash drives.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[GuB-42]

The write count is not a problem : write count exceeded, change drive, copy data, done. It's not like the drive will explode once the threshold is exceeded. And chances are that you will never encounter this problem unless you have a *very* intensive usage.

Perhaps more problematic is fading. Flash cells lose charge over time, and the more you write, the more "leaky" the cells become. That's why we say that the number of writes is limited, because past a certain point, the manufacturer cannot guarantee that the data will stay for more than X amount of time. FYI, X = 1 year for the Intel 520. Note that that's 1 year powered off. If the drive is on, the cells will be periodically refreshed, making the actual duration much longer.
But SSDs are not the only kind of storage medium that lose data over time. Magnetic storage is slowly erased by the earth magnetic field, reflective layers on CDs oxydize, etc... It means that the only way to ensure long-term data integrity is to actively maintain backups, or, if it not possible, use special archival grade storage media. Archival media can be of any kind : (EE)PROM, magnetic, optical, paper, ... but optimized for long-term storage at the expense of other things like storage density.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I rest assuredly.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[PCTRS80]

In my opinion raids are good overall, I use them at work and at home. They offer performance and data integrity, in all configuration except raid 0. Most people i meet that bash on raids on raids either had a bad experience with early raid controllers or don't understand what a raid has to offer let alone how to configure one properly. Modern raid controllers from reputable manufactures are extremely reliable, fast and can offer large disk space with extreme I/O rates. I regularly parse network/application data in to databases that grow in excess of 500GB for a single day of testing there is no single Drive/SSD solution that will work for us. This problem is also compounded by the fact that we may need as many as 20-30 of these databases on-line for the duration of the event. The only solution out there is large disk arrays that allow us to read/write large volumes of data quickly and handle it till we are done. After 8 years of working with raids mainly 5/6/10/50/60 i have yet to lose a single MB of data to do raid failure. This is not to say I haven't had hardware failures but if your mindful of your equipment and keep it cooled and maintained properly most disk array solutions will outlast its usefulness by a good while.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Bengie]

A modern integrated Intel 1Gb NIC's silicon with all of the offload features a desktop can use can cost as little as a few pennies extra. 10Gb NICs require their own chips, which are quite large, and need heatsinks. A basic 1Gb switch will consume nearly 1/100th the power of a 10Gb switch when idle. At load, it's closer to 1/10th, but that's not too bad when you realize 10gb is 10x faster, but most home users are idle 24/7. Even when you're watching Netflix or downloading torrents, your switch is nearly idle. My 28 port 1gb managed switch idles around 5 watts at the wall. A basic 10gb switch idles around 200-300. Now there are fans involved, small fans, that spin really fast, and require ear protection to be near. In a house environment, with dust, you'll need to service these switches and their fans.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Bengie]

ZFS defaults to at least 2 copies of all metadata, but the super blocks are special, so they're replicated an additional time every certain offset of the LBA, on top of keeping the last 256 versions of the super block. You may have 4+ copies of each of those 256 super blocks on a modern multi-terabyte HD by default. A new super block is created every 10 seconds by default, assuming there is any data to be written, this is the "transaction group". It's going to take a lot more than 1 block going bad for catastrophic failure.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Maritz]

This amused me. Thank you kindly. ;)

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Blaskowicz]

A single Sata 6Gbps SSD that reads at 500 MB/s is reasonably close to the 10Gbps ethernet bandwith, and M2 PCIe 2x matches it.
I can agree it's not critical at all to have such network bandwith. It's doable right now essentially as a luxury (Apple sells an external Thunderbolt 10Gbe NIC at around $1K as an option) unless you're working with lots of content creation and convince yourself it's damn nice.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[stoatwblr]

The real killer issue is cell size. Smaller cells have shorter lifespans and are slower

For this reason Samsung backed off from 20nm substantially when they perfected 3d technology. The result is 10 year warranties on the 850pro family and there's no reason to disbelieve them on it.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's actually what they do.
1) Select an empty block.
2) Copy the data into ram on the device
3) Write the new physical block
4) Update the virtual/physical block map
5) Mark the old block as empty

Using ram as the temporary storage for the other 7 pages increases the possibility of data loss in the event of power failure.

This is why I only use disk defragmenters (on spinning platter based disks) which only use Windows API for moving files, as other methods may or may not use ram as temporary storage for moving files.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[ILongForDarkness]

Yeah I'm in the it's nice camp. I mostly consume data. I develop software but that is a pittance of the bits I touch a day. Even counting for test builds and what not it is probably less than 1GB a day. It is really people generating uncompressed video that need this kind of throughput on a local machine. But those I'd lump into: 1) professionals so that is the cost of business or 2) amateurs so that is the cost of your expensive hobby (same like gamers piss money away on multi-GPU, liquid cooled etc systems, or hobbyist golfers on memberships etc). It is the fact that the average person doesn't need it that makes it a luxury and gives little incentive for your $1200 Dell to come with it. The vast majority of people are using a NAS for household backups and to push a compressed video to the tv or whatever. 1Gbps is more than enough for this.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Hamsterdan]

That's BS. I recently found many smaller USB keys and SD cards that haven't been used for at least 5 years, and they were all fine.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Were they as good as the IBM Deathstar?

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[wasme]

Ok, so you probably aren't going to read this 3 days later, but just to note that most RAW file formats are highly compressible. So if your archiving decade-old RAW photos there's little reason not to pass them through gzip or bzip2 or lzma and cut their size in half or more.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[nine-times]

In my opinion raids are good overall... Most people i meet that bash on raids on raids either had a bad experience with early raid controllers or don't understand what a raid has to offer let alone how to configure one properly.

Wait... who doesn't think that RAIDs are good? RAIDs are... well it's not ever really an issue of good or bad. They're a pretty fundamental part of modern computing, particularly when dealing with servers. But that's not the point. The point is, they're not really a backup. That's not bashing RAIDs any more than it's a complaint against hard drives to say that a hard drive isn't a video card.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

I found this to be true with Kindles before the PaperWhite series. With the PaperWhite series, Amazon claimed "8 weeks" battery life, but the fine print describes average user as 30 minutes per day. Like you, I read 2-4 hours per day, so my 8 weeks would turn out to be 1.5-2 weeks. This is a big deal to me because I often travel for work, and with the smaller battery life, I now have to worry about taking a charger. 28 hours of use can get burned up even in transit, if you have long air travel to get to a location.

I still love my Kindle, though.

Re:What about long-term data integrity?

[cthulhu11]

Also TFA describes not a drive, but a PCI card. I can readily source a 1U chassis with 10 SFF disk bays, but not with 10 PCI slots. And PCI cards aren't nearly as hot-swappable. So more needs to happen before a product like this fills more than a niche.

LOL

[Lunix Nutcase]

6TB drives can be had for $250-300. There's no way that SSD is gonna come even remotely close in price. The article writer mist be smoking some amazing shit to come to such a wacky claim.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only wacky if you bet on it happening next year. But, soon enough.

Re:LOL

[opusman]

And 15 years ago I bought a massive 2GB drive for $350.

Computer stuff gets cheaper over time. There's no reason the same won't be true for SSDs. At some point SSDs will be cheap enough that even if HDD are still 1/100th of the price, SSDs will still win because of all their other advantages.

Re:LOL

[PIBM]

> There's no way that SSD is gonna come even remotely close in price.

In which timeline ? I've seen USB 2.0 128GB flash drive offered for 10$ for black friday. That`s 3.8TB of flash memory and tons of redundant parts for 300$. I gather it will not be `too long` before it's not worth it anymore to buy spinning drives.

Re:LOL

[Lunix Nutcase]

And 15 years ago I bought a massive 2GB drive for $350.

Then you got ripped off. Seagate sold 28 GB HDDs for $350 in 2000.

Re:LOL

[Macrat]

And 15 years ago I bought a massive 2GB drive for $350.

4 years ago I bought a few 2TB drives for $69 each.. Then the prices sky rocketed and still haven't come back down to that price.

Re:LOL

[Guspaz]

SSDs will likely get there in 3-5 years by Moore's law. The question is where hard drives will be by then.

Re:LOL

[Lunix Nutcase]

To add to my previous post, going even farther back Seagate in 1998 sold a 6.4 GB HDD for $350. If you paid $350 for only 2 GB 15 years ago, you got royally boned.

Re:LOL

[Chas]

Okay, 3 years ago, a 256GB SSD cost $900.
Today, you can get them for $100-200.

Re:LOL

[Lunix Nutcase]

Newegg has 2TB HDDs refurbished for $69. New ones at $79 or higher. Even the 3TB for $105 they sell is actually about the same $/GB as those $69 2TB HDDs.

Re:LOL

[David_Hart]

And 15 years ago I bought a massive 2GB drive for $350.

Computer stuff gets cheaper over time. There's no reason the same won't be true for SSDs. At some point SSDs will be cheap enough that even if HDD are still 1/100th of the price, SSDs will still win because of all their other advantages.

I agree, eventually SSDs will become cheap enough that it won't be worth it to manufacture spinning hard-drives anymore. It's kinda like Plasma TVs today. They are being dropped by TV manufacturers because it's cheaper to scale up LED TVs.

That being said, it's not going to happen overnight. The drive manufacturers need to make their R&D money back, at the very least....

Re:LOL

[danbob999]

And they had 5 years warranty. Today it's 1-2.

Re:LOL

[jtownatpunk.net]

Comparing a $10 USB stick with an SSD is like comparing turtles to cheetahs. Those USB sticks might write at 2-5 megs/sec. Maybe. 1/100 the speed of a good SSD. It's not a cromulent comparison.

Re:LOL

[Lunix Nutcase]

Companies still make tape drives. There is no reason to beleive HDDs are going anywhere anytime soon. People have been wrongfully proclaiming the death of the HDDs for most of this decade.

Re:LOL

[CrimsonAvenger]

And 15 years ago I bought a massive 2GB drive for $350.

Seems to me that I bought my first 85 MB HDD for about that much 30 or so years ago....

Re:LOL

[Pentium100]

Usually USB flash drives have really poor write endurance and reliability in general compared to proper SSDs.

Re:LOL

[rahvin112]

The writer is simply ignoring cost as an inconvenient fact of SSD adoption rates.

Re:LOL

[camperdave]

Comparing a $10 USB stick with an SSD is like comparing turtles to cheetahs. Those USB sticks might write at 2-5 megs/sec. Maybe. 1/100 the speed of a good SSD. It's not a cromulent comparison.

That may well be, but have you ever looked at a turtle's drag coefficient?

Re:LOL

[AaronLS]

You said: "The article writer mist be smoking some amazing shit to come to such a wacky claim."

Are you referring to the article summary, or one of the specificly linked articles? Because summary says: "Oh, and price. We'll have to wait and see on that."

So they are not making any claims about price. It seems maybe you are the one smoking too much?

Anyhow, there are only a few niche roles where a desktop needs that much space. Give me a 240 GB SSD with 10 times faster IOPs, 10th of the heat and power consumption, zero noise, and no moving parts. That's plenty.

HDD's still have there place for certain use cases, but SSDs beat them by an order of magnitude on just about every factor except price per gigabyte. $/gb is not as relevant when you realize $150 will get you enough of space on an SSD for most desktop roles, and way more than you need on an HDD.

Re:LOL

[PIBM]

My USB 2 sticks do something in the range 12-15MB/s

30 * 15MB/s would be 450MB, which is close to an SSD speed. And we don`t know if the bottleneck is the memory, the controller or the bus/drivers. I was mostly showing that it will be possible to reach that price and that the current value of the memory itself is already close while the parent was saying that SSD will never reach price parity with HDD.

I could also have pointed out that in the last 3 years HDD prices have mostly stagnated while SSD prices went down very fast for even better performances. I guess we will see!

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Your username is very appropriate, since it's been over several confused posts today.

Re:LOL

[Archangel Michael]

There is storage, and then there is storage. 6TB drives are nice and all, and good for things like Pictures and Movies, where you don't need access speed. The moment you have databases, which need things like IOPS then size doesn't matter nearly as much. When you see the difference in IOPS between Spindle Drives and SSDs, you'll start to realize there is more to storage than size.

Your high end 15K spindle drive can do about 150 IOPS The only way to increase this is to go to RAID. A good High End Spindle RAID can do about 10,000 IOPS, or perhaps a little more.

On the other hand, the Samsung 3.2 TB Drive claims to do 750,000 IOPS, or 75 times more. So, while you can get all sorts of storage using RAID and Spindle drives, the money spent for IOPS is better spent getting SDD and RAM (yes) drives. Hard Drives are the new "Tape Backup System".

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

2 MB/s for each of the 64 64 GB parts that makes up the 3.8 GB is 128 MB/s of parallel writes. If these el cheapo USB drives are instead made out of 2 stacked 32 GB parts on each of two side of the board, each writing at 2 MB/s, that would be write speeds of at least 256 MB/s

That's *half*, not 1/100, of the write speed as my current workstation SSD. Using slightly less expensive 5 MB/s write parts, that would be 1.2 GB/s writes.

I would gladly pay an extra $200 for all the additional controller chips and SATA multipliers to get 8 times the storage at 0.5-2.5 times the performance.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

No more so than many commenters here are ignoring performance differences.

Re:LOL

[0123456]

To be fair, SSDs seem to be progressing much faster than HDDs. If HDDs continue their sluggish capacity growth, SSDs will pass them in cost per terabyte in a few years.

Re:LOL

[houstonbofh]

I agree, eventually SSDs will become cheap enough that it won't be worth it to manufacture spinning hard-drives anymore.

Capacity per dollar. Home use, 2TB is fine. But in business, arrays of 50TB are common, and size will only grow. Eventually spinning rust drives will become the near-line storage we used to have when tape and laser disks actually had large capacities.

Re:LOL

[Mashiki]

First HDD that I had in my first PC was 40MB, it was $600 so yeah prices sure have gotten better.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Short sighted.

When the 6 TB SSD drives can be had for reasonable money, say $200, you will still need to keep your collection of 4k movies and months worth of family movie clips on your the 100 TB home nas, probably set up as a RAID5 using 25 TB drives. Slow as hell, for DB work, but perfectly adequate for long term storage or a few streaming clients.

Re:LOL

[ebh]

In 1987, I bought an 80 MEGAbyte drive for $775 (around $1600 today), thinking how amazing it was that disk drives had broken the $10/MB barrier. When the first 1GB drives came out a few years later, I remember thinking, "Who would trust that much data to a single device? What an amazing single point of failure!" Now there are 128GB MicroSD cards for under $1/GB. Even understanding the technology, the mind boggles.

Re:LOL

[Tough Love]

It's only wacky if you bet on it happening next year. But, soon enough.

How soon is soon enough? 5 years? 10 years? And on what physical principle does your argument rely?

Re:LOL

[Tough Love]

SSDs will likely get there in 3-5 years by Moore's law...

Moore's law does not predict prices, it predicts transistor density. Even if you permit yourself to conflate price with density, say there is a factor of 16 to make up, by Moore's predicted semiannual doubling, that is 8 years, not 3-5.

The big fat fly in the ointment is that process costs are rising dramatically and there are yield issues. Plus as you say, magnetic media technology is not standing still. I say, after 8 years have passed, the big price differential will still exist. By that time disks will have moved firmly to an archival/heirarchical role and a typical workstations will only have them as secondary storage, if at all. This will drive up production costs somewhat by eroding the economy of scale, but the world's archiving requirements pull in the other direction, which should put something of a floor under shipped volume. Where will that floor end up? Possibly permanently in the 10X range. Disks just aren't going to die if that happens.

Re:LOL

[aaaaaaargh!]

On the other hand, you're also royally boned if you buy a Seagate in the first place. They break unbelievably fast in comparison to any other brand I've tried.

Re:LOL

[SuricouRaven]

My first computer stored data on audio tape! I don't know what their capacity was, but I remember my father borrowing games from work to run through a dual-cassette deck. Some of them were copies of copies, and you had to fiddle with the treble knob to get them to read.

I don't think we're beating that unless someone here is old enough to have used core memory or fluid delay lines.

Re:LOL

[m.dillon]

A 7200 rpm HDD can do 200-400 IOPS or so, semi-random accesses (normal database access patterns). A 15K HDD can do ~400-600 or so. Short-stroking a normal drive also gains you at least 100 IOPS (so, say 300-500 IOPS on a short-stroked 7200 rpm HDD). That's off the top of my head.

A SATA SSD, of course, can do 60000-100000 IOPS or so and a PCI-e SSD can do even more.

-Matt

Re:LOL

[Guspaz]

6TB for $300 is $50 per terabyte, while current pricing is around $400 per terabyte. That's a factor of 8, not 16. I based my math on 18 month doubling, but that's for performance rather than density, so I was admittedly off. Still, that should take you to roughly 3 * 24 = 6 years, not far off my original figures.

In terms of the applicability of Moore's Law to SSD pricing, prices for SSDs have been dropping far faster than Moore's law since the first practical SSDs hit the market. My first consumer SSD was purchased in 2009 at $8750 per TB. Prices today are at about $400 per TB. That's a factor of 22 price drop in roughly five years.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

The writer is simply ignoring cost as an inconvenient fact of SSD adoption rates.

Agreed. No ad I've seen lists a price, but Samsung 800GB Pro series SSDs are currently $1,600. I'll wager it will three or four years before the 3.2TB one breaks the $1,000 mark. By then you should be able to buy a 12TB HD for $200.

Re:LOL

[MachineShedFred]

Tape drives still serve a purpose. Show me any other removable storage mechanism that can store 2.5TB before compression for $40 and have them still readable after 10 years in a safe.

Spinning rust STILL can't do that.

No, you don't get very good performance from tape, and tape is a general pain in the ass; but if you need to keep something for a long time, and you need it to be reliable, tape is how that's done.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

and because USB is CPU-bound, you still wouldn't be able to write as fast as SSD without your entire computer hitting the pause button every time it goes to disk.

Re:LOL

[Kjella]

My first computer stored data on audio tape! (...) I don't think we're beating that unless someone here is old enough to have used core memory or fluid delay lines.

Commodore 64 or similar right? Heck, I did that and I don't think that's anything special here on /. it's 80s tech. Now let me get my dad in here so he can tell you all about vacuum tube computers, you kids and your fancy schmanzy transistors. In other words, I think you're solidly beat.

Re:LOL

[NormalVisual]

They break unbelievably fast in comparison to any other brand I've tried.

Some people have problems with Seagate. Some have issues with WD. The Seagates in my soon-to-be-replaced colo box both have 50K+ hours on them, and the SMART logs are still clean as a whistle. I have standbys just in case though. ;-)

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have my hard disk that weighs more than I do :) $120/MB...those were the days. How about 2 lbs/MB ? 80MB in a 175 lb, $10000 cabinet.

Amazing how far it advanced is a short time. That ran 2 companies for years and now I could lose the data in my pocket that I could barely push across the floor when I started.

  I suppose eventually SSD might get cheap enough to displace HD but that still looks quite a ways off yet. I love they discount the little issue of price given that is probably THE basis for the majority (no, YOU aren't the majority) of purchasing decisions.

hurfy

Re:LOL

[Rich0]

And 15 years ago I bought a massive 2GB drive for $350.

Computer stuff gets cheaper over time. There's no reason the same won't be true for SSDs. At some point SSDs will be cheap enough that even if HDD are still 1/100th of the price, SSDs will still win because of all their other advantages.

You can get a 32GB SSD for $40 these days. Since 32GB is more than enough for anybody (if you live in the year 2000), there is clearly no reason for anybody to buy anything bigger.

The problem is that while prices come down, the demand for more storage goes up. Today everybody wants to store hundreds of hours of 1080p video. Tomorrow everybody will want to store hundreds of hours of holographic video at 40k pixels cubed. You can never have too much capacity, and spinning disks are likely to stay ahead on that front for a while to come.

Re:LOL

[martinQblank]

Sadly the ram air intake at the front of the structure does little for aerodynamics. There is too much damping material (soup meat) in the chamber to pass through cleanly to the exhaust port. Additionally, the locomotive openings are often shaped in such a way to create lift at higher velocities, thus reducing overall stability.

Re:LOL

[Roger W Moore]

I don't know what their capacity was...

Well a C90 tape had a 90 minute length and, depending on you computer the data was written at 1200 baud (BBC Model B) to ~1500 baud for a ZX spectrum. Unfortunately there was some overhead so lets say this was 20% (guesstimate). This would give a tape capacity of 90x60x(1200/8)x0.8=648000 bytes or ~633 kB. Some people used to use C120s which would get you an extra 33% but those tapes were thinner and more likely to break or suffer degradation in sound quality which meant you lost your program. With a Spectrum and a C120 you'd might be pushing the dizzying heights of a whole MB on tape.

Re:LOL

[GumphMaster]

Late 1980s: I used magnetic core memory attached to the AQS-901 acoustic processing system once fitted to Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft. Also had the joy of paper tape and magnetic tape.

Re:LOL

[JakartaDean]

In 1987, I bought an 80 MEGAbyte drive for $775 (around $1600 today), thinking how amazing it was that disk drives had broken the $10/MB barrier. When the first 1GB drives came out a few years later, I remember thinking, "Who would trust that much data to a single device? What an amazing single point of failure!" Now there are 128GB MicroSD cards for under $1/GB. Even understanding the technology, the mind boggles.

You got a deal. Around 1989 I sold a 315MB IBM "Winchester" drive to the phone company, for a whopping $10,095 (list price at the time). It slid into a fairly clunky PS/2 Model 80, as I recall.

Re:LOL

[edmudama]

At the largest of the large sizes, hard drives will likely stay behind rotation for another decade when only considering cost.

However, if you don't need terabytes of fast storage, we've already crossed the threshold where SSDs are cheaper.

Smallest hard drives you can buy these days are $60 new and store 500GB. That same $60 gets you a 128GB SSD from a "Tier 1" manufacturer (Samsung, Intel, Micron/Crucial, Sandisk, Toshiba)

For just about any storage application that fits in ~100GB or less, SSDs are both cheaper and more reliable TODAY than rotating drives.

That 100GB crossover threshold with the cheapest rotating drives will double every year or so, since today's rotating drive prices are almost completely based on the cost of the electronics and a single head/single platter mechanical system. You can't make a rotation drive significantly cheaper than today, but with each generation of SSD they can halve the number of NAND packages, shrink the PCBA, build controllers with fewer channels, etc.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

My first computer, an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P used a tape player, but some of the Challenger models also had an optional paper tape system which was even older.

Re:LOL

[rrohbeck]

When I started university the central ICL 1906 mainframe had 384 K words of core, and a year or two later we upgraded to 512KW (24 bit each) of "solid state" memory with the unbelievable access time of 0.3 microseconds. The paging devices were drums because of their much lower latencies compared to disk drives - we had quite a few drums with a couple MB. No mercury delay lines but the VDU display memory was coax delay lines. At least we didn't have to submit our programs on punch cards like the ME and EE peons - we were CS so we had *online* access!

Re:LOL

[rrohbeck]

Moore's law has been dead for years. It applied to Flash only in the beginning and the cells have reached physical limits, that's why it's only about cramming more cells into a package today.

Re:LOL

[Blaskowicz]

I'm using a 12-year-old Seagate fine. Yay, really a drive that old still is big enough to run the latest OS and it is nicely quiet compared to a Maxtor or worst, Quantum.
Seagate had its shit series that's not good for anything, 7200.11.

Re:LOL

[oh_my_080980980]

What, speed? That's the only advantage.

Re:LOL

[oh_my_080980980]

They have 5 today as well. Western Digital Black drives have 5 year warranties.

Re:LOL

[oh_my_080980980]

LMOL yeah sluggish. Considering how long SSD capacity has been stuck at 320 MB, I would not say they have been progressing fast. Couple problems with HD, the OS not being able to see sizes over 2 TB. EFI was a recent development and not all systems run them. Then there were density issues. Those two seem to be overcome.

Wake me when I can get a 1TB SSD for $70.

Re:LOL

[oh_my_080980980]

Because my computer will boot up 1 second faster? Wow.....performance gains are to be had with memory, size and speed.

Re:LOL

[Bengie]

EFI was deprecated 10 years ago for UEFI. Unless you're talking about 10year+ old machines, they support 2TB+ boot drives. I don't mean machines sold in the past 10 years, I mean the actual age of the tech. Some bargain bin computers are several years old at the time of purchase.

Re:LOL

[Bengie]

A 4x increase in resolution is much less than a 4x increase in storage requirements. Unless we switch to holographic recordings, storage requirements for media is being outpaced by storage growth. Videos have gone from 100MB/hour to 1GB/hour(1080p) in the past 15 years but HDs have gone from 10GB to 8TB, and still cheaper and faster. For only several thousand dollars, I could build a RAID6 setup that could hold every movie I've ever watched in BlueRay quality. 15 years ago, I couldn't store more than a few days of binge watching of blurry videos for the same price.

Re:LOL

[Bengie]

That's good they learned to stack silicon vertically and dropped my SSD's price by 50% in the past 8 months. I paid about $120 for a 120GB during tax season earlier this year, and now the 240GB model is going for $120. 50% price drop in less than a year is pretty good. The new 120GB models are $115, but they come with a 10 year warranty and are much faster and lower power.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard drives will still be there, with their moving parts. Grinding. Spinning. Making noise. Eating lots of power. Being bulky and heavy with inflexible sizes.

HDs will be replaced because if flash density increases in proportions with Moore's law, the space/power/flexibility benefits of flash will overshadow the the single benefit HDs offer. (Which is price per bit)

Consider this, and consider the drive to ever smaller and lighter consumer computing devices. You can't get a macbook air with a hard drive because there is no physical room for one. (Well, they do make very small hard drives but they're probably nearly all off the market now as the "very small storage device" market has been completely taken over by flash)

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

My first computer stored programs on punched paper tape. The speed was limited to how fast I could pull the tape over the reader.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh - I forgot. The terminal had core memory - the screen retained the text even if the power was off for months.

Re:LOL

[danbob999]

2TB hard drives that could be bought for $55-70 back then weren't WD Black drives. Even cheap regular and green drives had a 5 years warranty a few years ago.

Re:LOL

[Bengie]

I'm seeing this on the Internet. I saw slightly different numbers from many sites, but they were all nearly the same +- some percentage.
7,200 rpm SATA ~75-100 IOPS SATA 3 Gb/s
10,000 rpm SATA ~125-150 IOPS SATA 3 Gb/s
10,000 rpm SAS ~140 IOPS SAS
15,000 rpm SAS ~175-210 IOPS SAS

Re:LOL

[zwarte piet]

One series is made in Indonesia, the next in Malaysia, the next in Mexico, parts from different subcontractors etc. They all bear the name Seagate but they're not all equal.

Re:LOL

[zwarte piet]

But big sequentually accessed files like video or music are perfect for a hardddisc, It's random access & thousands of little files where SSD's shine because of zero seektimes.

Re:LOL

[NormalVisual]

This is true for a lot of stuff. Buying a Fender electric guitar? You can get one made in the U.S., or Mexico, or Japan, or China, all priced/featured differently and of varying quality.

Re:LOL

[Rich0]

But big sequentually accessed files like video or music are perfect for a hardddisc, It's random access & thousands of little files where SSD's shine because of zero seektimes.

Sure. However, there seems to be some kind of argument that SSDs will completely replace hard drives for consumer use. That doesn't seem likely to me. SSDs are great for many things, maybe even for most things, but there are many common use cases where they just aren't adequate. Their cost may very well come down, but so do hard drive costs.

Re:LOL

[Tough Love]

...today's rotating drive prices are almost completely based on the cost of the electronics and a single head/single platter mechanical system. You can't make a rotation drive significantly cheaper than today, but with each generation of SSD they can halve the number of NAND packages, shrink the PCBA, build controllers with fewer channels, etc...

And magnetic media continues to improve its linear and areal density at a rate not much different from improvements in flash density, largely maintaining its cost differential vs flash. As I alluded to above, the net effect is to push magnetic media out of workstations (and personal devices), and also out of high value data center applications. However, the mass storage, archival, and heirarchical sectors that remain are huge and growing rapidly with no sign of slowing. This means that rotating media will not be going the way of punch cards for many years to come.

Re:LOL

[Tough Love]

6TB for $300 is $50 per terabyte, while current pricing is around $400 per terabyte. That's a factor of 8, not 16. I based my math on 18 month doubling...

I stand corrected, the price differential has narrowed recently, however a factor of eight (8.4, more accurately) is still plenty big enough to keep flash out of many mass storage applications. This relationship whill gradually change, but it will take a lot more than 6 years to erode rotating media's share of mass storage to something similar to tape, say, where economies of scale start to be eroded. Just pulling a number out of my ass, I think we are looking at 15-20 years before rotating disks start looking like the tape market. After all, you're still going to want a hard disk to store your bootleg videos.

Re:LOL

[Guspaz]

The question is, will we get to a point where it won't matter? There will be a point where solid state drives will be cheap enough that you'll be able to get enough storage at a low enough price that people generally won't care. For example, if $50 got you a 500GB SSD or a 2TB hard disk, how many people would pick the hard disk? Even then, those who want more storage might just pony up the extra cash.

Supplementary storage will be the last to go, so perhaps your timeline is more accurate there, but I think we'll see hard disks almost completely disappear from new computers long before then. It's already starting to happen: many notebooks use SSDs now, from the really cheap Chromebooks to the really expensive retina macbooks.

Re:LOL

[Tough Love]

The question is, will we get to a point where it won't matter? There will be a point where solid state drives will be cheap enough that you'll be able to get enough storage at a low enough price that people generally won't care. For example, if $50 got you a 500GB SSD or a 2TB hard disk, how many people would pick the hard disk? Even then, those who want more storage might just pony up the extra cash.

You seem to be limiting your thinking to consumer storage. Think data center, where even a small cost per byte saving can drive the engineering decision. With the quasi-panic migration to the cloud currently underway, data centers will make up an increasing slice of the pie, including offloading a lot of consumer computing. In the cloud, the long access time of spinning media usually does not matter, it is small compared to other lags. In the cloud, most data storage is bulk data, simply because there is more bulk data. It is going to be many years before any operator that needs to be competitive will be able to afford a wholesale migration to flash.

Quote seek times all you want

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one actually like being able to hear the load on my hard drives.

Re:Quote seek times all you want

[__aaclcg7560]

You mean the click of death when the hard drive fails? That I don't miss.

Re:Quote seek times all you want

[Anonymous Coward]

HDD:
Trashing for few minutes once a day = updatedb
Continuous clicks/ no sound / screeek = failed
Random activity = normal

SSD:
Nothing, can't even get neodymium magnets or nice machined parts if it fails.

Re:Quote seek times all you want

[Archangel Michael]

That's Adorable.

Re:Quote seek times all you want

[SuricouRaven]

You can get the flash chips off. Chances are one of them will be dead, but very few SSDs have just one chip - most seem to have eight of them, so you can get seven good ones.

It's not an easy thing to do though. You need a very high level of skill with surface mount desoldering, and an even higher level to reattach them to a test platform to see which ones are duds.

Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hope that they don't sacrifice reliability for capacity just as HDD manufacturer's have.

Re:Reliability

[beelsebob]

Actually, one of the nice things about SSDs is that as capacity increases, reliability increases too. More cells means more options for wear levelling, means more life span.

Re:Reliability

[rahvin112]

Not if you fill that space up. The excess capacity used for wear leveling only works if there is non reported space used for such or you don't fill the drive all the way up. The minute you fill the drive you are using the flash to it's extent. And putting things like page files on them will increase the wear rate significantly. A smart installation puts the page file/swap space on a magnetic disk and uses the SSD for everything else that isn't doing caching where there are heavy writes.

Until they can solve the wearing problem that gets worse with each die shrink of NAND they will never reach the wear capacity or costs of spinning rust.

Re:Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

A smart installation just puts enough RAM in a machine and turns the swap off.

Re:Reliability

[PlusFiveTroll]

Most manufactures leave any number of gigabytes of flash unmappable for filesystems, that way you can never fill up the drive, even if you fill up the file system. Most pro/enterprise versions of the drive just leave a larger area unmapped.

Re:Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

A smart installation doesn't use swap to begin with. I disable swap on all my servers. Unified page caching in modern operating systems is so sophisticated these days, you don't really need swap for anything. Executable data (programs, libraries) are already mapped straight from disk and can be temporarily evicted without copying to a separate, redundant swap space. For loading and juggling large data sets, well-written software will use mechanisms like mmap.

Swap is needless data duplication and I/O amplification.

Re:Reliability

[m.dillon]

Depends on the application. For a workstation or build box, we configure swap on the SSD.

The point is not that the build box needs to swap, not with 32G or more ram, but that having swap in the mix allows you to make full use of your cpu resources because you can scale the build up to the point where the 'peaks' of the build tend to eat just a tad more ram resources than you have ram for (and thus page), which is fine because the rest of the build winds up being able to better-utilize the ram and cpu that is there. So putting swap on a SSD actually works out quite nicely on a build box.

Similarly, for a workstation, the machine simply does not page enough that one has to worry about paging wearing out the SSD. You put swap on your SSD for another reason entirely... to allow the machine to hold onto huge amounts of data in virtual memory from open applications, and to allow the machine to get rid of idle memory (page it out) to make more memory available for active operations, without you as the user of the workstation noticing when it actually pages something in or out.

A good example of this is when doing mass photo-editing on hundreds of gigabytes of data. If the bulk storage is not a SSD, or perhaps if it is accessed over a network that can cause problems. But if the program caches pictures ahead and behind and 'sees' a large amount of memory is available, having swap on the SSD can improve performance and latency massively.

And, of course, being able to cache HDD or networked data on your SSD is just as important, so it depends how the cache mechanism works in the OS.

So generally speaking, there are actually not very many situations where you WOULDN'T want to put your swap on the SSD. On machines with large ram configurations, the name of the game is to make the most of the resources you have and not so much to overload the machine to the point where it is paging heavily 24x7. On machines with less ram, the name of the game is to reduce latency for the workload, which means allowing the OS to page so available ram can self-tune to the workload.

-Matt

Re:Reliability

[petermgreen]

On linux I do just that.

Unfortunately whenever I try doing that on windows it just declares it's created a "temporary swapfile" anyway when I set the swapfile size for all disks to zero. Is there a hidden setting somewhere to really turn swap off?.

Re:Reliability

[Blaskowicz]

If you're worried about that it's easy to not fill it up, make partitions so you leave out 10 to 20 GB that will never get used at the end of the (logical) drive, in addition to the overprovisioning that is already there.

Perhaps the OS needs an option to artificially slow down the swapping. Or just get over it. If you're too worried about the various caches, temp files etc. eating your precious I/O reserve then your SSD will be wasted because you're afraid to use it.

Re:Reliability

[Blaskowicz]

On a desktop you will have gigabytes that come from dailywtf-worthy javascript from the internet, pixmaps and buffers that came from rendered html and jpeg files etc., that sort of crap. If you leave that shit running for days (tab hoarding, even mild) and the OS puts some old unused shit into swap so you get more free memory and disk caching, that seems a win.

Consuming all RAM with only an OS and browser is also all too easily doable. So I would say you have it more easy on a server (unless maybe you run garbage software there which I'm sure there's no shortage of)

Price not yet announced

[Dorianny]

If the price for GB is below $0.50 then they got a winner.

Re:Price not yet announced

[Twinbee]

It is already. See: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsun...

Re:Price not yet announced

[Pinkfud]

Yeah... when I can buy a terabyte drive for a hundred bucks or so, it might be interesting.

Re:Price not yet announced

[Guspaz]

The price per GB on SSDs has been below $0.50 for some time now.

Re:Price not yet announced

[pla]

$0.50/GB? Seriously?

That would put this thing at $1,600, vs an HDD with twice the capacity at $300.

Until they get below $0.1/GB, HDDs will have a very, very safe hold on the "capacity" side of the market.

Re:Price not yet announced

[Sesostris III]

From the first review I stumbled upon;

Cons:
- Samsung recommends turning off indexing for reliability. Doing so means that you can no longer search for files from the "Search programs or files"

Eh?

Re:Price not yet announced

[Twinbee]

Like as if you'd want to use Windows own search. It's poor compared to third party search programs.

Re:Price not yet announced

[YrWrstNtmr]

That commenter at Amazon is totally incorrect. Of course you can search an SSD when indexing is off.
Indexing simply makes searching faster. And seeing that searching an SSD is already several times faster than an indexed HDD, it is not needed on the SSD.

Re:Price not yet announced

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung vertical SSD, 1 TB for 700 busks at Newegg.

And the price will be dropping...

My Linux boxes, a 128-256G Samsung SSD and a 1 or 2 TB WD black.
The best of both worlds.

I do RAWPOD, Redundant Array of Powered Off Disks.
I install a key switch on the +5 and 12V SATA power, and turn on for back-ups every week or so as needed.
Can't accidentally delete. Chance of mechanical failure way down when it operates 1% of the time.

Combine with an off site drive in the safe deposit box, and data has not been lost so far !

Re:Price not yet announced

[Khyber]

"Like as if you'd want to use Windows own search. It's poor compared to third party search programs."

Windows key and type in what I'm looking for. Oh shit, it finds EVERYTHING.

Windows search only sucks for the tools that don't have a goddamned clue how to organize their filesystem.

Re:Price not yet announced

[Anonymous Coward]

Current situation at work:
Winkey, 'eclipse' - click icon, get java IDE.

Unfortunately this gives a mangled configuration folder, as in our network config you need to start eclipe with a command line option that specifies a folder to use as a workspace. The default is a dud. If you use the start menu icon we made, this command line option is included. Using the search doesn't. And things go wrong.

We're still working on a way to fix this that doesn't involve glaring over the user's shoulders every time they hit the windows key.

Re:Price not yet announced

[Anonymous Coward]

You can. The search is just slower that way, but on an SSD it doesn't matter.

Re:Price not yet announced

[ArsonSmith]

It's getting close https://www.google.com/webhp?s...

Re:Price not yet announced

[Anonymous Coward]

From the first review I stumbled upon;

Cons:
- Samsung recommends turning off indexing for reliability. Doing so means that you can no longer search for files from the "Search programs or files"

Eh?

This is an mistake on the author's part. Yes, you should turn indexing off. No, this does not mean you can no longer search for files (you just search without indexes). Author assumed indexes were required - they are not required, they just make things faster (especially on magnetic storage).

Re:Price not yet announced

[perryizgr8]

you can set default workspace inside eclipse itself! No need for command line options and all.

Empty article..

[Junta]

I don't know why Intel and Micron get any special consideration given that right in the summary the fact that Samsung has already announced the same move.

Also incorrect assertion that drives don't go faster than 7200 (there are 15k drives, just they are pointless for most with SSD caching strategies available).

Re:Empty article..

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's an obvious plug by an obvious serial plugger. There's a bit too many of those around, even if some of them don't plug unreadable websites.

Re:Empty article..

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about the "without increasing heat and the rate of failure" that you seem to have ignored? The summary didn't say there is nothing above 7200...

Re:Empty article..

[crtreece]

From the summary, "They can't really spin the drives faster than 7,200 RPM without increasing heat and the rate of failure. "

I don't see an assertion in the summary, or the article, that drives are physically limited to 7200 rpm. You couldn't finish the sentence before replying?

Re:Empty article..

[Chas]

Also incorrect assertion that drives don't go faster than 7200 (there are 15k drives, just they are pointless for most with SSD caching strategies available).

That isn't what was asserted.

They asserted there's no REAL market for 10K/15K hard drives, as the performance increase isn't helpful, the cost to manufacture and test skyrockets, and the additional physical and thermal stresses shorten the drive's lifespan and make them unsuitable for some applications (laptops).

Re:Empty article..

[Chris Mattern]

And the point is that SSDs fill that market need so much better (the fast disks aren't much cheaper, if at all, and they suffer decreased reliability) that there's no point to them.

Re:Empty article..

[Anonymous Coward]

15k drive have been the norm in most of the servers I've build in the past. I fact I have a Netapp rack full of 15k drives that has been powered on 24x7 365 for the past 5 years without a single drive failure. I don't think that anyone in their right mind could consider 7200 rpm the limit of what's possible. Unless you're only considering hard drives for consumers, in which case cost would be the limitation, not drive speed.

Re:Empty article..

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't say they were impossible...

10k and 12k RPM disks do have a hotter running temp and a higher rate of failure than 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM.

Re:Empty article..

[swilly]

You fail at reading comprehension. There is nothing in the summary that says those drives aren't possible, just that they have increased heat and (therefore) an increased rate of failure. This is one reason why average hard drive speeds haven't improved much in the last 15 years.

I once bought six Western Digital 10000 RPM drives for a RAID setup. Three of them failed within the first year. Two failed the next year (including one of the warranty replacements). I replaced them all with six of their 7200 RPM Red drives and other than one DOA that needed to be replaced, I haven't had a failure in almost two years. Sure, anecdotal evidence is purely anecdotal, but it backs up the summary. (Still pissed off about the DOA though.)

In the same time frame I have owned five SSDs, including an Intel SLC that is almost six years old (works great as a small root partition on my Linux box) and I have had only one failure (a 250GB OCZ Vertex Pro). And unlike the hard drives, the data was recoverable from the dead SSD (I could mount it read only, but it wouldn't mount writable). Other than the failed SSD and my laptop drive (no idea who made it), all of my SSDs have been Samsung or Intel drives, and I highly recommend both manufacturers.

Re:Empty article..

[Gr8Apes]

Since 15K "large" drives peak at about 600GB for $200 or so, I'd say we've already reached price parity, the only thing necessary is reliability on the part of SSDs.

Re:Empty article..

[phorm]

Do you still have the OCZ? I had the same issue with a 120GB but read about how many problems were related to them shipping with shyte firmware. Indeed after re-flashing mine it's been pretty reliable since.

Re:Empty article..

[SuricouRaven]

15k drives used to have a vital role for performance-critical applications, before flash became affordable. SSDs have now effectively displaced them from that position, leaving 15k drives as little more than a curiosity.

Re:Empty article..

[greg1104]

How loud are the fans in those servers? Too loud to put into a home computer, right? Well, the 15K drives are part of what the obnoxious fans in a typical server case are cooling. Even in a server environment where you can handle the noise of ventilating that heat, people can still worry about the total heat production of a server rack. It doesn't help that the 15K drives are normally smaller too, physically and in capacity, which means you need more of them to reach the same total storage.

Re:Empty article..

[MachineShedFred]

especially as that 600GB 15K drive doesn't have anywhere close to the performance of the SSD.

Re:Empty article..

[WaffleMonster]

Also incorrect assertion that drives don't go faster than 7200

Also premise from SSD article spindle speed is a limiting factor is a bogus oversimplification.

Density increases have always translated to correspondingly higher I/O rates at same rotational speeds.

Re:Empty article..

[Anonymous Coward]

why not sell some niche 30k rpm drives for the watercooling crowd?

disclaimer: im a dog

Re:Empty article..

[WuphonsReach]

Also incorrect assertion that drives don't go faster than 7200 (there are 15k drives, just they are pointless for most with SSD caching strategies available).

With Enterprise SSD drive prices hitting $1/GB (granted some are still $2-3/GB), the days of 15k RPM drives are definitely numbered. You get 50-100x the IOPS out of SSDs compared to the 15k RPM SAS drives. That means for a given level of IOPS that you need, you can use a lot fewer drives by switching to SSDs.

I'd argue that if you are short-stroking your 15k SAS drives to get increased IOPS out of the array, it's past time to switch to enterprise SSDs.

Re:Empty article..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd agree, but enterprise storage vendors have huge markup prices, mostly for support and assurance.

And right now, SSDs that I can buy for a server are still too tiny for too much money compared to 15k or 10k SAS drives that provide adequate performance for the majority of workloads.

And since datasets and databases continue to grow, you'll always need some space for the cold storage. Auto-tiering is only as good until your dataset grows too large, and then you have to make a decision on where to put the next set of data. 15k SAS is still useful there. I just think it'll be a long time before I can buy a mostly SSD array for the server and it'll not cost an extravagant amount.

Re:Empty article..

[m.dillon]

Only for linear accesses. Once you have to seek the head, it's all over. I'm kinda amazed that people still try to argue this point, HDDs lost the performance war long ago.

-Matt

Re:Empty article..

[jones_supa]

True. In the same way that it is hard to increase the rotational speed, getting past the average 12 ms seek time is tricky.

Re:Empty article..

[TheRaven64]

The only market for 15kRPM drives is people who care more about IOPS than about capacity. That market switched to SSDs some years ago.

Re:Empty article..

[Anonymous Coward]

And unlike the hard drives, the data was recoverable from the dead SSD

Like hard drives, that depends on the type of hardware failure. Some SSD failures won't leave your data readable, some HDD failures will. It may end up being true that SSDs leave your data readable a higher % of the time though, but I suspect it's too early to tell yet.

Re:Empty article..

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why Intel and Micron get any special consideration given that right in the summary the fact that Samsung has already announced the same move.

Also incorrect assertion that drives don't go faster than 7200 (there are 15k drives, just they are pointless for most with SSD caching strategies available).

??? Not in my data center they aren't "worthless for most with SSD caching strategies". There are many applications that still benefit from 15k drives. How about LARGE database applications with poor cache hit ratios, dozens upon dozens of terabytes of storage that doesn't lend itself well to in-line compression and deduplication (makes flash arrays expensive) but still have massive performance needs?

People who broadly generalize and get +5 mods are beyond my belief sometimes.

Re:Empty article..

[Anonymous Coward]

The only market for 15kRPM drives is people who care more about IOPS than about capacity. That market switched to SSDs some years ago.

Flash arrays in enterprise are still an emerging category.You may be right that it's trending upright, but, no, we haven't. I may have added lots of flash cache and a flash pool for tiering in my VMAX environment, and I may have brought in flash for VDI thanks to high speed, excellent in-line dedupe/compression of typically redundant data, but I still manage petabytes of spinning disk that I can't afford to replace with a few SSDs.

Re:Empty article..

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Some people don't understand just how important random I/O access is.

HDD might have 250MB/s linear read, and 0.8MB/s random read. SSD might have 500MB/s read, and 80MB/s random read.

The linear speed is "only" twice as much, but the random is 100x faster. When a computer is grinding to a halt with the disk access light on solid, open up resource monitor in Win 7 or task manager in Win 8. Usually you will see the system is tied up with random access at less than 1MB/s. This is where people see the "Wow!" improvement of Solid State.

Re:Empty article..

[Junta]

Why I said 'for most'. High end database applications with poor data locality in datacenters is not really something 'most' have to contend with. If I tried to be comprehensive in my statement, the people that understand the nuances would recognize and I'd be preaching to the choir, but most would glaze over and skip it because precisely and accurately describing the entire reality is too complicated for most to want to read.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

hard disk drives, which were pushing into the 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB.
 
You can get a 2TB SSD. What the market wants and what is available are two different things. It seems disingenuous to show the high end of commercially available spinners versus what most people buy in a SSDs.

Re:Really?

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Really?

[Znork]

Indeed. And when reaching larger capacities, it's quite likely that you're dealing with largely sequentially accessed streamed data, ie, video, where you have a maximum needed transfer rate which the HDD is entirely capable of fulfilling which means the SSD gives zero added value for the price premium.

Re:Really?

[edmudama]

That was true over 3Gbit/s SATA perhaps, but hasn't been true for a while now.

A single PCIe SSD in a 2.5" form factor can move sequential data at 2.5GB/s or better (Gen3 x4). Modern rotating drives cap out somewhere around 200MB/s if I remember correctly, even on 6Gbit/s SATA or SAS links. That means that for sequential IO, you need 12 rotating drives to match the performance of one SSD. For random reads (700K/s on the latest samsung) you need 5800 rotating drives (assuming 120 IOPS from the rotating disk). Note that would require a queue depth of almost 700,000 which is impossible from an application standpoint. In reality, your pool of 5800 rotating drives will be MUCH slower.

Re:Really?

[rrohbeck]

There's a significant effect though: The market for lower capacity HDDs has disappeared, and with it much of the volume so the HDD manufacturers have to make their margins at the higher end. 1TB HDDs are an endangered species now because you can get a 120GB SSD for the same price and many consumers don't need 1TB while they appreciate the performance of an SSD.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is capacity still that much of an issue? For most people I mean?
When it comes to taking a laptop on holiday, does it matter if it's got 10 movies on or 20? You watch 2 or 3 on the plane, a couple when it's raining, and the rest?

A 500GB HDD isn't half the price of a 1TB HDD, and the benefit of that extra space drops off, while the benefit of a system that boots that much more quickly is constant. As SSDs catch up to "enough" capacity, prices of HDDs won't drop commensurately to keep them in the running.

Price

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all about the $$/TB. If I have to spend $$$/TB, then, well, why would I bother? Any application I have is not limited by drive access speed anyway.

Sandforce chipsets, that rely on compression to jam things into SSDs, are a huge problem too especially since all my data is encrypted. You know, HIPPA and all those details.

For a 60GB drive, SSD is good choice. For a 1TB drive, spinning disk is a much cheaper choice.

Re:Price

[Guspaz]

Sandforce controllers also do encryption, and certain controllers with certain operating systems can leverage this to integrate the controller-level encryption with the OS-level encryption, at which point the drive compression is done on the raw data before encryption happens.

Re:Price

[Archangel Michael]

It is more than just Price per TB. It is speed (IOPS). What good is all the storage space in the world, if it is slow? If it was just Price per TB, Tapes are even higher density/price, however the IOPS are so slow.

If you read the article on the Samsung SSD, you'll realize why they put it on a bus that wasn't SATA III (Not fast enough)

Size, Speed, Price, pick any two.

Re:Price

[drinkypoo]

Most people don't need their drive to be that fast. We'd all like faster storage, but HDDs are so slow that a fairly slow SSD is still pretty speedy.

Re:Price

[Znork]

If you need a 20-30ms initial access time, and then a constant transfer rate of 20-50MB/sec, that makes tape completely useless as it can't fulfill initial access time, and it makes SSD pointless as it overdelivers without added value for everything above that. IE, for bulk data that gets streamed, such as basically any large datasets like video, price per TB is the factor that overshadows anything else.

IOPS is of course hugely important for the average utter crap database written by an intern that devolves into 512byte random access read/write patterns, which seems to be what 'enterprise solution' means these days. But the disasterous consequences of that usually keep the data sets into whatever fits on a comparatively small and cheap SSD as anything beyond basically using processor L1 cache will make the application too slow to use.

Re:Price

[Archangel Michael]

Your view of OPS is pretty rudimentary and limited. Are you an intern by chance?

Re:Price

[Archangel Michael]

Think back, to the day when we used to run everything off floppy drives, and then hard drives showed up. The first hard drive I ever experienced was a 5 Megabyte drum drive. It was HUGE for the time. AND fast. Then spindle drives came out, and were so much faster (and more expensive) AND could fit inside a computer. Then the drives kept getting faster, and more Storage, and then they started to shrink and ....

Now we're running up to limitations of that class of hardware that new classes (SSD vs Magnetic) are starting to impact the Hard Drive space. The change is coming and once the Spindle drive disappears (like floppies), you'll wonder how we ever lived like that.

Re:Price

[jones_supa]

The change is coming and once the Spindle drive disappears (like floppies), you'll wonder how we ever lived like that.

I already wonder that when I see my system sitting 99% time in iowait if a modern CPU is paired with any mechanical HDD. It's an almost unacceptable bottleneck.

Capacity and Price

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, just those two TINY things.

About that Intel 3D NAND...

[Glasswire]

According to Techreport, Intel's three-dimensional NAND. will enable 10TB flash drives in servers in 2 years

Re:About that Intel 3D NAND...

[ArcadeMan]

I think it will also enable Terminators.

Re:About that Intel 3D NAND...

[ReeceTarbert]

And while Intel will "begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year" Samsung has been doing just that for a few months. For insgtance, here a review from last June: Samsung 850 Pro SSD Review: 3D Vertical NAND Hits Desktop Storage. But, then again, since when has IT World needed any facts? ;-)

RT.

Re:About that Intel 3D NAND...

[Grishnakh]

I don't see the problem here.

Sure, but speed...

[SuperKendall]

6TB drives can be had for $250-300

That's really nice I agree, I have a few 4TB drives that I use for photography... but I would without hesitation pay 4x the price for the speed of an SSD (especially one not bound by SATA speeds, like the Samsung PCiE SSD...)

Re:Sure, but speed...

[Lunix Nutcase]

Even the cheapest SSDs are 10x the price. No way these new ones are going to be 2.5x cheaper.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[jedidiah]

So you would pay $1200 for a hard drive "without hesitation"?

REALLY?

I find it hard to buy a mere 1G SSD and it's not quite as expensive as the thing you seem eager to treat as chump change.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Other people have different priorities than you, news at eleven.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have paid $1200 in the dark past for a video card just to speed up 3d renderings. Time is money.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[grcumb]

So you would pay $1200 for a hard drive "without hesitation"?

Don't scoff. There are a number of scenarios where even several thousand bucks can go over the board without a second thought as long as there's some demonstrable benefit. In photography or video editing, your billing rate can be such that a couple of hours saved waiting on disk I/O can be sufficient to justify some serious spending on storage.

I've got 10 TB on my desk at home, and photography is not my primary work. It was nothing to me to drop over a thousand bucks on a decent hardware RAID controller and disk array. I'd seriously consider moving to SSDs as my primary storage medium if the price got down to 2-2.5 times the cost of a traditional disk.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[Mashiki]

Considering I've seen: Samsung 120GB drives going for $39, Intel 500GB drives going for $100 you can bet as the cost of NAND drops through the floor that capacity and prices will continue to be low. You might have also noticed an increase in DRAM prices, as we're about to make the massive shift to DDR4.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[m.dillon]

A serious photographer is sitting on $20K+ worth of equipment and a potentially ruined contract if any data is lost. Spending $1000 on a highly reliable high-capacity SSD to backup camera cards on a field trip is worth more than god.

-Matt

Re:Sure, but speed...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, time is time. It is far more important than money, but you won't realize that until you're almost out of it.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[fnj]

Considering I've seen: Samsung 120GB drives going for $39, Intel 500GB drives going for $100

Where? Put up, or it's a fiction. And they had better be prices for new product, and current production.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[sudo]

Once they were over 50x the price.
The different in price is dropping as the demand/mass production is growing.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[Mashiki]

Tigerdirect here in Canada, the sale on samsung ended monday when stock was cleared. Though they still have 240GB OCZ(Toshiba) drives up for $69 after rebate, Intel drives were on amazon if I remember. Though there are other ocz 120gb drives for $20 and this was one of the intel drives for $100 with a double stacking coupon. So yeah, I guess you're welcome.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[oh_my_080980980]

Because you're doing what that requires the speed? Boot up? Other than gamers or people who actually use their computers for computing purposes - most users don't care about speed.

Re:Sure, but speed...

[NoOneInParticular]

Question: I've can buy a nice 128 GB SSD drive for about 100 bucks. Where can I buy a 128 GB HDD for $10?

Waiting for the wear-out fix

[Anonymous Coward]

The one where the chips heat themselves and reanneal the cells. The tech is there but there are "no plans" to put it into product. Well, without long-term data integrity for SSDs, I think we're better off with disk for now. In fact tape isn't quite dead yet for good reason, despite all the obvious drawbacks.

Re:Waiting for the wear-out fix

[MachineShedFred]

what's funny, is that SSD and tape could completely replace spinning magnetic.

Tape, specifically LTO, is still the long-term backup medium of choice for price, density, and reliability of restore. It's just shit for latency and throughput.

So, basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Look for hard drives to be around for at least another 20 years. I still remember one of those 90's PC magazines running a cover story that boldly proclaimed the CD was dead about 20-ish years ago because of the DVD. Yet, somehow, Target, BestBuy, etc. are still selling music on CDs, all cars manufactured today have CD players, and even some cars with hard drives require that you use CDs to transfer music to them. And, it isn't even the DVD (or BluRay for that matter) that will ultimately kill the CD.

What about long-term data integrity?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, mechanical drives do eventually suffer crashes with scratched platters, especially if exposed to shock.

What about

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Longevity?

Spinning storage is king...

[kuzb]

...as long as high capacity SSDs keep costing as much as an entire computer.

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[Chas]

...as long as high capacity SSDs keep costing as much as an entire computer.

Hard Drive: $429

Whole Computer: $400 or less.

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[AaronLS]

For $150 you can get a SSD with plenty of space for the vast majority of desktop roles, and it will beat out HDD by at least 10 times or more on speed, heat, power consumption, and noise.

The only thing HDD is king of, is being slow. King of maybe certain roles that require a very large amount of cheap space.

And if you want to argue capacity needs for servers, you need to start talking about enterprise HDDs, and their $/gb is not as high as consumer HDDs, and it gets worse when you factor in power consumption and cooling costs(yes HDDs generate heat even though they don't need heatsinks, and in data center cooling costs you $). By the time you factor that in, the $/gb of a enterprise drive gets close to SSDs.

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[jedidiah]

> For $150 you can get a SSD with plenty of space for the vast majority of desktop roles,

Bullshit.

A $150 SSD will only be good enough for a machine you are using like a terminal. Anything beyond that and you will need more space.

I want more storage in my PHONE than that.

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[AaronLS]

Even a thick terminal supporting remote GUIs like X require less than 10 gb of space, even if you are supporting something like X.

A $170 gets you a 480 GB SSD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

If you setting up terminals that take up 480 GB, then you are doing it wrong.

I have 240 GB SSD and I have Windows along with several varations of Linux VMs and a Windows VM for isolated testing. Numerous repositories. SQL Server, Postgre Server, all the client tooling that goes with them. Numerous multi GB games.

Even 480 GB is plenty for most amateur audio/video production if you are moving finished projects off to a NAS.

And as for the phone comment, show me a single microSD that costs $170 and offers 480 GB of space.

Every aspect of your response is littered with stupidity.

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[Anonymous Coward]

$150 will get you a 250GB drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA12K24X8820

What kind of terminal are you building?

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense.
On a large enterprise array, you will ultimately be limited by bandwith in the controller.
For relatively small databases, a few TB,m its fine to put all on SSD.
But what about your 50 TB or 100 TB database?
If lucky, you can use tiered storage if the data is friendly.
If not so lucky, you have 2 choices.

Use HDD,s but buy maybe 2x more of them than you really needed for capacity in order to provide sufficient IOPS and decent response times.

Or use SSDs, at 10x the cost. You will have 100x teh IOPS you needed, but your enterprise storage server will already be bottlenecked at link level, mso you will never see that speed.

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have 240 GB SSD and I have Windows along with several varations of Linux VMs and a Windows VM for isolated testing.

BFD. At my last job I had a 1TB magnetic disk just for all of the Windows VMs (every version of Windows from 2000 through 8.1, consumer and server) and a hundred or so snapshots I had to keep for testing under a wide variety of platforms. Just because your use case is different than someone else's doesn't make their response "littered with stupidity". I suspect that more than a few average desktop users have more than half a terabyte of porn alone.

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[edmudama]

Dual-E5 Xeon systems will get you 80 lanes of Gen3 PCIe.

NVMe was invented to work around controller bandwidth and latency issues that you mention, thus getting you full "link" speed into your database

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[c6gunner]

Hard Drive [newegg.com]: $429

Whole Computer [newegg.com]: $400 or less.

Ah, yes. Confucius say, the path to mastering pedanticism is paved with low UIDs.

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can get a 240 GB drive posted to me for $AU170 ($US145-ish at the moment, an Intel 730 on sale) / $AU180 (an Intel 530 not on sale) and allegedly pick an OEM 730 at a local place that sucks for $AU155.

I'd've said 240 GB is quite a bit, unless you've got a whole heap of massive games installed

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, games take nowadays 30-70GB each, so a multi terabyte drive is really a must to have, even with a moderate collection of games.

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[sjames]

Or get it for $253.

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[Slashdot Parent]

A $150 SSD will only be good enough for a machine you are using like a terminal. Anything beyond that and you will need more space.

Methinks you haven't looked at SSD prices lately. I just bought a 512GB Crucial MX100, a highly-rated consumer class SSD, for $165 or so.

Naturally, 0.5TB won't be enough for certain use cases, but I think that we can agree that it exceeds the specs of a dumb terminal!

Re:Spinning storage is king...

[Chas]

Hard Drive [newegg.com]: $429

Whole Computer [newegg.com]: $400 or less.

Ah, yes. Confucius say, the path to mastering pedanticism is paved with low UIDs.

Hey, if it stops you latecomers' unfortunate tendency to make overly broad (and thus, stupid and incorrect) statements? I'm willing to get as didactic as possible.

Just for you dudes!

Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[Eunuchswear]

So I'm dreaming about the racks of 15k drives I have?

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[danbob999]

You mean those 15k drives which cost as much as SSDs?

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[nabsltd]

You can only get 15K rpm drives at most at 600GB in size. At about $280 for those disks ($0.47/GB), SSDs are a complete win.

You can get a very solid 1TB SSD for $450, which is cheaper per GB ($0.45) and much, much faster. You can get a serious enterprise 1TB SSD (10-year warranty) for $550. You may have racks of 15K rpm drives, but they are truly outdated dinosaurs: slow and plodding, and expensive to feed and care for.

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[silas_moeckel]

Would you buy those 15k's new today? What usage pattern would favor 15k's vs ssd's? Space is similar if not in favor of the ssd's. IOPS SSD's win hands down. Price really depends on how much vendor gouging is going on, but if you need enterprise storage you tend to need IOP's so far fewer SSD's can do the same job as a lot of 15k spindles.

Sure enterprise bulk or near line enterprise 7200's give you a ton of space.

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[Anonymous Coward]

Dreaming about the money you wasted on them when a single SSD will give you more IOPS than the entire lot you have.

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[wonkey_monkey]

No, you're just failing to read properly.

They can't really spin the drives faster than 7,200 RPM without increasing heat and the rate of failure.

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[Eunuchswear]

You mean those 15k drives which cost as much as SSDs?

Ten years ago?

(I actually have a couple of 10 year old SSD's -- thousands of dollars for 4GB.)

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[Eunuchswear]

You can get a very solid 1TB SSD for $450, which is cheaper per GB ($0.45) and much, much faster. You can get a serious enterprise 1TB SSD (10-year warranty).

Those are both SATA devices. Useless to me -- no multi-initiator.

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[Eunuchswear]

You don't think I've tried?

6 way striped rust with a SSD journal is what I use -- experimentally 5 times faster than one SSD and 6 times the capacity for about 3 times the price.

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[Eunuchswear]

You keep your disks online for more than five years?

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[danbob999]

10 years ago it was different but today there is no point in going above 7200 rpm for hard drives. Either get a slow hard drive with plenty of storage or a fast SSD.

Re:Spinning media can't go beyond 7200 rpm

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone here actually work in IT? Most of these comments are based on single disk / laptop / desktop use. For servers, you will require the enterprise versions of the SSDs, which which support advanced features such as NCQ. You will find that most "desktop" SSD drives are not supported for RAID use. This is just like spinning drives, can't use WD Blue, Green, Black, etc drives for RAID without issue. So the pricing people are talking about here for SSDs is FAR below the real cost of SSDs for servers. Add in lack of TRIM support, and the performance of SSDs decreases, as well as the wear / life of the SSD. Then tack on the difference in size, and the storage requirements of systems today (virtualization included), and SSD's end up costing 4-8 times what spinning disks cost. This really varies on the workload, but more often than not in my experience, SSDs still aren't winning when considering price point. Having said that, assuming each server has multiple raid cards, then mixing storage types between the two is very cost effective and provides lots of storage and performance. But all SSDs are rarely done at the companies I've directly worked with (400+).
  I've actually seen them, but typically they are done by contract IT workers. They setup high performance servers/solutions over 3-6 months using standard consumer Samsung or Intel SSDs with the client thinking the systems are great....then they leave. They don't have to deal with the subsequent "pauses" in SSD performance reminiscent of "thrashing", followed by SSD failures in the next two years.

Price

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all about the $$/TB. If I have to spend $$$/TB, then, well, why would I bother? Any application I have is not limited by drive access speed anyway.

If HDDs serve you well, you probably wouldn't bother. On the other hand, other folks might have different applications. The seek times and data rates you get from SSDs would be mighty attractive to people like video DJs, for example. A while ago I was building an audio recording box. It had to be reasonably pokey, it had to be absolutely silent, and it had to be in the same room as the performers (not by choice, by limitations of the space available). I managed a totally passive power supply and fanless cooling for the CPU, and had an enormous, very slow and inaudible case fan that kicked in if temperatures rose. I had a small SSD for the OS but at the time big-ass SSDs were too expensive. Most of the engineering went into silencing the bulk audio data HDD: turns out those head seek transients, even when quiet, are the kind of thing the human ear picks up pretty well. A reasonably priced SSD, even if more than the equivalent HDD, would have been money well spent in saved time and improved design simplicity. And I'm aware of certain applications from a previous job where SSDs were simply essential: HDDs were not fast enough for the job, no matter the cost.

Yes, $s are a factor, but it's not all about the $$/TB.

Even without HIPPA

[Anonymous Coward]

If most of your data is video or audio, in formats like MP3, AAC or H.264, the encoders have already milked as much redundancy out of the data as they could. Those files don't really compress much further.

Intel & Micron

[unixisc]

Also, didn't Intel exit the flash market a while back, spinning off its flash division along with ST Micro to Numonyx, which later got acquired by Micron? I thought that the whole idea then was that memory was so unprofitable that it wasn't worth keeping it as an albatross on corporate margins.

Also, memory fabs are different from the ones used for making processors/controllers - it's not like fabs that don't make more Atoms or Celerons will be repurposed for SSDs. So how does it make sense for Intel to get into this? Micron I can understand, since memory is their prime business. But Intel? It makes as much sense for them to be making this as to be in the DRAM market

Re:Intel & Micron

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel doesnt just make CPUs. They design reference platforms for their CPUs that many manufactures follow. The CPU is not the only thing in a computer. The whole stack is quickly collapsing into SoC. That includes DRAM and SSD.

DRAM was razor thin margins. I am sure the SSD market has nice fluffy ones. They also have an entire line of SSDs they sell themselves. Very profitable if you read their prospectus. Why wouldnt you work with your parts manufacture to make better things for the bobbles you sell? Also perhaps they could just roll over and die and let their competitors (ARM/QCOM) just gobble up that market? I am not surprised they are working on it. If you stop and think about it you shouldnt be either.

Re:Intel & Micron

[edmudama]

The Numonyx venture was specifically for NOR flash manufacturing.

IMFT (Intel Micron Flash Technologies) is the NAND partnership between Intel and Micron.

Re:Intel & Micron

[unixisc]

I understand all that - in the past, I worked on multi chip memory packages, where we'd stack NOR, DRAM and NAND flash: this was particularly for the handset makers. The whole thing about that business was that margins were wafer thin, in a manner of speaking. Which is why AMD spun off Spansion, and Intel spun off Numonyx.

I don't see how putting multiple NAND chips into an SSD makes it more cost competitive, unless their prices have really come down. Although I do see Micron offering up to 128Gb in TSOPs, so one would need 8 of them to make a 128GB drive. To get a 1TB drive, you'd need 16 of those chips (talking about die: looking at their product lineup, it looks like they put several of their 128Gb die to come up with 2Tb flash in a single MCP). So divide the price of an SSD by that, and that's what the price of the flash would have to be to be profitable.

Incidentally, any idea of what exactly are 3D NAND drives?

That last bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, as long as I can get magnetic drives for pennies on the gigabyte, while SSDs are an order of magnitude more expensive for the same capacity, the "ID" in my RAID setups will continue to be magnetic media.

Wait? For how long?

[ThePhilips]

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.

Re:Wait? For how long?

[nabsltd]

The problem is that once PC is turned on, there is not much use for the SSD speed.

Ever tried loading the next level in a game? SSDs make a big difference.

And, you've completely forgotten all the other uses (both enterprise and personal) like database, video editing, running VMs, etc.

Re:Wait? For how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

>We are waiting already for 5+ MORE THAN FIVE fucking years. Still hasn't happened.
Prices have steadily dropped over the years, but we're sorry your majesty, we'll get right on that.

>SSDs are developing too fast.
Okay never mind we'll slow down!

>The problem is that once PC is turned on, there is not much use for the SSD speed.
That's not "The problem." That's your problem. I for one like being able to read and write 10s of gigs a day with extremely low seek times.
If you don't care for the price, quality, or having the drive not using its full potential then stay with good old cheap, reliable hard drives.

>And literally all manufacturers, instead of strengthening their stance of data safety,
Literally no. Talk to texas memory systems / IBM if you want to feel safe about your solid state storage.

Re:Wait? For how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, do you even do anything with your computer?

>The problem is that once PC is turned on, there is not much use for the SSD speed

Right, never used a database on your computer? CAD? Half the business software out there? SSD kicks HDD to the ground in access times and file open and save times.

>Another problem is that (some) SSD have the nasty habit, once failed, to deny you access to the data at all.

Another reason not to buy OCZ, they sucked bad. Then again, any HDD you use can have the exact same problem. Always backup. Always.

> After all the years, some drives still require a proprietary application/driver installed.

Name one that requires it. TRIM support is in all the latest versions of Windows.

Re:Wait? For how long?

[edmudama]

I'd mod you up if I had points.

Intel's X25-M was introduced in late 2008 at $1000 for 80GB ($12.50/GB), and was hard to get demand was so high.

You can currently buy enterprise-grade SSDs from multiple vendors for about $0.65/GB, with failure rates that are a fraction of 1%, and they're ten times faster (random IO) than the X25-M was.

Re:Wait? For how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget they're better on power consumption and more durable which makes them perfect for laptops.

Re:Wait? For how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another problem is that (some) SSD have the nasty habit, once failed, to deny you access to the data at all.

I have some failing Seagate hard disk drives that do this; Power cycling them usually unlocks them though.

Compression

[tepples]

Wear leveling does wonders, over provisioning does more on top.

Add compression on top of that. If your data isn't all ZIP, PNG, JPG, MPG, or some other compressed format, the controller turns repetition into even more over-provisioning.

Re:Compression

[gnasher719]

Add compression on top of that. If your data isn't all ZIP, PNG, JPG, MPG, or some other compressed format, the controller turns repetition into even more over-provisioning.

On my Mac, all the big data items are compressed. (Video, audio, audiobooks, pictures). There is a lot of source code, but compared to the disk size that is minimal.

Hybrids are where it's at (for me)

[jtownatpunk.net]

I've been using Seagate's hybrids for a couple years and the combination of performance, simplicity, and economy hit the spot. I have 750 gig and 1tb drives in my laptops and a 2tb in my gaming rig. The hybrid drives were a small price bump for a big performance bump. Sure, gigantic SSDs would give me a slight performance boost but it's a big jump in price for a small jump in performance over hybrid.

Re:Hybrids are where it's at (for me)

[Applehu Akbar]

Yes, 1T hybrids are the sweet spot right now.

Re:Hybrids are where it's at (for me)

[zwarte piet]

Seems like a really interesting product. Anyone else noticed the 2TB variant has much higher seek times 12ms (for the mechanical part) than the one with 1TB (10ms). (Wich seem to be still slower than the 8ms in 80GB drive in my P4)

Re:Hybrids are where it's at (for me)

[Kjella]

For a laptop I see it but for a desktop I clearly prefer small SSD+big HDD for predictable performance and flexibility. Most big data is videos, photo and audio which are played sequentially or in big enough chunks like one photo at the time that random access times and IOPS don't matter, a defragged hard drive is simply perfect for the task. You get really cheap, slow 4+ TB drives that can't be beat on GB/$. Once I excluded that data, I found a 128GB SSD was slightly cramped and 256GB plentiful, I just checked and I'm using 180GB now but could easily get it down to 110GB if I wanted. I really don't have more data where an SSD makes sense.

Then again with Netflix, Spotify etc. I see a lot of people going very lightweight, with Steam it's pretty easy to nuke a game you haven't used in a while to free up space so I guess the trend is towards SSD being enough with hybrids as a temporary intermediate. Even on torrents download, watch and delete seems to be a trend instead of trying to archive the Internet. Some do, of course because they're pack rats like me. But I did clear out 5TB of content that I figured I'd definitively not watch again and some I guess I never watched at all, just started and got bored thinking I might return some day. The only content I need to keep is the stuff I've made myself.

Re:Hybrids are where it's at (for me)

[Malc]

Most big data is videos, photo and audio which are played sequentially or in big enough chunks like one photo at the time that random access times and IOPS don't matter, a defragged hard drive is simply perfect for the task.

Err, no. Depends on what kind of video you're doing. In the video world it's easy to end up bottlenecked by disk I/O.

HD resolution ProRes files for instance will tax any hard drive, requiring over 40MB/s (330mbs) throughput:
https://documentation.apple.co...

I'm working with 4K sources, of which some are uncompressed. You need RAID or SSD.

Re:Hybrids are where it's at (for me)

[jones_supa]

The problem is that the SSD cache of a hybrid disk is quite small; you can approach the same amount with your file system cache in the RAM, and it's faster anyway.

Re:Hybrids are where it's at (for me)

[Applehu Akbar]

SSD cache is best used for commonly accessed software, especially the boot-time loads. Some operating systems will optimize this for you.

Re:Hybrids are where it's at (for me)

[toddestan]

The SSD cache is non-volatile which means that it can be used when booting up, which is one place where the SSD can really make a difference. Otherwise, I've found that once the computer is booted up, a reasonably fast 7200RPM drive and a large amount of ram isn't all that different than an SSD for many workloads. I've put a SSD in my laptop as they are much faster than 5400RPM drives, they use less power, and are more durable, and in the case of my older laptop it's chipset-limited to 3GB of ram, but for the desktops I haven't bothered.

Re:Hybrids are where it's at (for me)

[OffTheWallSoccer]

Err, no. Depends on what kind of video you're doing. In the video world it's easy to end up bottlenecked by disk I/O.

HD resolution ProRes files for instance will tax any hard drive

Agreed, the suitability of any computer resource depends on whether it can handle the task you have for it.

I think GP was referring to mainstream use of videos on PCs, which certainly don't require RAID or SSD. GP's use of multiple storage types, while requiring more user involvement (managing which files go on slow/cheap HDD vs SSD), is a good bang/buck value.

Once solid state storage completely displaces HDDs, we can go back to having everything in one volume.

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Nope...

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't kill the HDD anytime soon.
SSDs just cost too much compared to same-sized HDD.
a 8TB SSD cost $7k, that's just ridiculous when you considering it cost less than $500 for that much HDD storage.

Newtonian physics finally being trumped by Moore's

[nunley]

The facts is, data density on solid state has already surpassed data density on magnetic/spinning media. We already have 4TB SSDs at SanDisk, and 8TB and 16TB drives are on the horizon. I highly doubt you'll see HDD do 16TB in a 2.5" package anytime soon. Also, when you factor in power requirements, the economics start to look very favorable to SSD, not 10K or 15K RPM drives which are used in latency-sensitive applications. And, in another unexpected and non-intuitive twist, SSDs have a much higher MTBF then HDDs, around 2.5M hours vs. 1.1M hours. Wear-out has become a non-issue, even in the harshest environments. There are SSDs that are rated for anything from less than 1 Drive Write Per Day (DWPD) on up to 45 DWPD during the length of warranty (usually between 3 and 5 years). Bottom line, SSDs are a far better economical choice in many cases. Of course, this only matters where economics count. Enthusiasts are already seeing the benefit in lower prices and higher densities, but the OP is not about them. Economics is not about "can the consumer afford it" as much as it is about "does this enable me to lower my TCO in the data center". We are there already.

Misinformed

[Anonymous Coward]

HDD speed is not all gone. It has however been on a standstill for a long time now, making the gap between caapcity and performance almost unreachable.
There still are areas where HDD performance shines on par with SSD or better.
And you must compare with enterprise or SLC SSD to be fair. MLC SSD still has big issue with poor performance on heavy writes.
For exceptional SSD performance need to use mirrored, battery backedup DRAM, not flash storage.
Who knows, maybe flash will be chased away by RAM, and HDD will be chased away by flash.
SDD is far from competing with HDD on price, though.
HDD will become the new standard for backups.

Ever notice

[Anonymous Coward]

that NAND flash prices per megabyte have plummeted while EEPROM prices per kilobyte have remained high and then wondered how that could be rational?

NAND flash was a "gimmick" in which a trade-off was made between density and cost versus quality and lifespan. NAND flash ships all start off with failed bits and all the good bits are on the path to failure from day one. With each write cycle, you risk killing an NAND flash bit, and given that all NAND flash devices are being treated as disk drives, if you kill more bits in a sector than can be corrected by the error correction bits then the entire sector must be marked bad and not re-used.

You can write an app that will write new data over old data on a spot of a hard drive and let it run for YEARS without degrading the drive, but if you run that exact same app on a solid state drive you will, depending on the specific NANDs used and the speed of your code, soon begin to lose bits. As enough of those bits fail, you lose those sectors (though the drive and your OS will shield you from seeing this as the drive slowly just appears to have a lower capacity) and eventually the drive will probably fail as the code in the drive runs out of spare sectors to re-map

If your primary use for a drive is to write huge files infrequently and read data from the drive very frequently, then a NAND-based solid state drive will be your best choice assuming the price per GB is reasonable (this is even more so if you are in an environment where jostling might crash a spinning drive). If, however, you are running software that creates and writes lots of data to the drive (like log files, live data being captured, and so-on) with lots of re-writing activity then motors and a magnetic platter are your friend. Ask yourself how many million write cycles your NAND flash cells can take, and then consider how fast your computer can exectute that many write cycles.... remembering that sometimes people unleash code that has bugs and gets stuck in loops while running unattended....

As with many things in life, selecting the proper tool for the job is important.

Re:Ever notice

[houstonbofh]

So... I am using Smasung SSDs as a mirrored ZIL cache for a nas4free array hosting VMware servers and Horizon View desktops. In other words, mostly continuous writes 24/7. And yet I have one drive that failed (and was warranted) at just past one year, and the other drive is over 2 years old with no issues. Yeah, yeah, anecdotal, but a lot of enterprises are finding modern SSDs to outlast some spinning rust.

That said, the rest of the storage array is spinning rust for cost reasons. When you are talking about 15TB or more with parity, SSD is a little crippling to the wallet.

Re:Ever notice

[Anonymous Coward]

You can write an app that will write new data over old data on a spot of a hard drive and let it run for YEARS without degrading the drive

No you can't. Magnetic media also gets worn out.

Re:Ever notice

[AdamHaun]

Ever notice that NAND flash prices per megabyte have plummeted while EEPROM prices per kilobyte have remained high and then wondered how that could be rational?

Kilobyte-quantities of EEPROM are cheap enough that the package is probably a non-trivial part of the cost. The die cost is not the only lower bound on the price of a memory IC.

Re:Ever notice

[TwoEyedJack]

...but if you run that exact same app on a solid state drive you will, depending on the specific NANDs used and the speed of your code, soon begin to lose bits. As enough of those bits fail, you lose those sectors ...

Actually, there is no way to write to specific blocks of an SSD. The controller automatically stripes writes across multiple die, and the wear leveling algorithm makes sure that it is not always the same blocks. SSDs will wear out, no doubt, but not as fast as you think. For some actual data see: http://techreport.com/review/2... Even TLC drives like the Samsung 840EVO 250G got past 600 TB. When you add up all the hours you saved by not waiting for spinning rust to do it's thing, SSDs are a fantastic value.

Re:Ever notice

[MachineShedFred]

Except that when you write to an SSD, the controller puts the data where it thinks it should go, rather than a specific block. You can't do what you're suggesting without writing your own firmware for the drive.

Re:Ever notice

[Bengie]

Spinning drives are starting to became just as bad. 256MB zones that can be moved around that contain dynamically sized physical blocks based on if the data is an inner or outer track, multiple logical blocks per physical block. It's like a tree of pointers. Points to where the zone is located, pointer to where the physical block is located, pointer to where the logical block is located, all being shifted around.

Re:Ever notice

[jones_supa]

Not in meaningful amounts.

Re:Ever notice

[Bengie]

They're working on a "raw" mode for SSD access. Then the wear levelers can be a layer in the file system. FreeBSD is working with some big name SSD companies. Once they have full control of the SSD in software, and all remapping is handled by the OS, it will be possible to have SSDs handle sudden power loss, because the SSD no longer needs to make assumptions that cause race conditions in order to keep everything working transparently for the FS.

Re:Ever notice

[TwoEyedJack]

My day job is working on SSD controllers for a major NAND producer. I have never heard of this. I don't think an OS is going to be able to micromanage SSDs, especially in an enterprise data center.

Capacity and price

[Tough Love]

Two out of three ain't bad.

inFormative 6oatgoat

[Anonymous Coward]

is not proene to superior to 5low,

For all the reliability worriers

[YrWrstNtmr]

The 'wear out too fast' concept is wildly overblown. You can listen to old rumors, or read actual test data.

600TB total writes - http://techreport.com/review/2...
800TB total writes, and some of these consumer grade drives start to fail - http://techreport.com/review/2...

"By far the most telling takeaway thus far is the fact that all the drives have endured 600TB of writes without dying. That's an awful lot of data—well over 300GB per day for five years—and far more than typical PC users are ever likely to write to their drives. Even the most demanding power users would have a hard time pushing the endurance limits of these SSDs."

By contrast, my main home machine (120GB Kingston SSD) has ~7GB total, in over 2 years of 24/7 use. I'll leave you to do the math on lifespan for that.

Re:For all the reliability worriers

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what I came here for.

Thanks!

Re:For all the reliability worriers

[Anonymous Coward]

You only wrote 7GB in 2 years to your 120GB ssd? ;-)

Re:For all the reliability worriers

[YrWrstNtmr]

You only wrote 7TB in 2 years to your 120GB ssd? ;-)

Oops...TB, not GB. But yes. It is the OS (currently 8.1 Pro) and just about all applications. Things that do not need that SSD speed (music, movies, etc) live on spinning drives or PC's. My playlist is not going to switch from one track to the next by virtue of being on the SSD.
Things that DO matter, OS+applications (1 SSD), and working files (second SSD), live on SSD's.
Total writes between the 2 SSD's is ~11TB.

7TB is still tiny in relative terms.

Re:For all the reliability worriers

[jones_supa]

600TB total writes - http://techreport.com/review/2...
800TB total writes, and some of these consumer grade drives start to fail - http://techreport.com/review/2...

I know, it's amazing. :)

Actually that story seems to still continue with two of the disks approaching 1.5 PB written.

Inevitable

[m.dillon]

Happening a little sooner than I thought, but the trend has clearly been going in this direction for a long time now. Just one year ago I stopped buying 3.5" HDDs a year ago in favor of a combination of (short stroked) 2.5" drives and SSDs. I already use only SSDs in all the workstations and laptops, the HDDs are only used by the servers now.

Now it is looking like I will probably not buy any more HDDs at all, ever again, even for the servers. That is going to do wonders for hardware life and maintenance costs.

It's a bit strange having a pile of brand-new perfectly working 1TB and 2TB 3.5" HDDs still in their static bags, unopened, in my spare drawer that I will likely never use again.

I wonder how long it will take case makers to start giving us 2.5"-only hot swap options without all the 3.5" crap taking up room. Of course, there are some already... I mean for it to become the predominant case style.

-Matt

What about

[Anonymous Coward]

At this point, between wear-leveling and over-provisioning, longevity is a wash between SSDs and HDDs.

Shock-resistance?

[davidwr]

The "big win" for solid-state for a lot of applications is shock-resistance.

Most server racks, desktops, and set-top-boxes outside of earthquake zones don't have this requirements but anything mobile does.

Having said that, my ideal laptop would have oodles of storage but the drive would hardly ever need to "spin up" because almost everything I need would fit in the SSD. In "real terms" this would be at least a 128GB SSD plus at least 2TB of less expensive storage.

Re:Shock-resistance?

[pipedwho]

Even more interesting would be if they start hybridizing drive with different SSD types. eg. 128GB of SLC high reliability high write count Flash combined with 1TB+ of ECC protected MLC/TLC storage. The older more static data migrates to the MLC/TLC storage, and the immediate data uses the SLC side of things where re-writes are far more common. This would of course be in addition to a capacitor or battery backed RAM cache.

A good controller could periodically scan the array in the background and rebuild any areas that start to accumulate errors. That way, drive failure becomes all about catastrophic hardware/controller failure rather than death by a thousand cuts as cells degrade.

This is similar to how high quality SDCards have small sections of high endurance (1M+ rewrites) EEPROM that is used for the internal remapping blocks and other fast changing blocks (eg. FAT).

Re:Shock-resistance?

[c6gunner]

Having said that, my ideal laptop would have oodles of storage but the drive would hardly ever need to "spin up" because almost everything I need would fit in the SSD. In "real terms" this would be at least a 128GB SSD plus at least 2TB of less expensive storage.

Try this on for size then. My current laptop has 3 x 1tb drives internal, but they only spin up when I need them to. My many OSs (several flavors of linux, 2 versions of windows, plus BSD) all run off of a single 480gb mSATA Crucial M500 SSD, attached to a cheap M-SATA-to-USB-3 adapter.

All the features you're looking for, plus the portability of being able to use your personal setup on any other computer just by plugging in to a USB port.

Re:Shock-resistance?

[davidwr]

Close. I forgot to say "without anything except the laptop and - when the battery is low - a power cord."

That same machine with one of the internal drives replaced by the SSD would be perfect, assuming of course that it fit within my budget and met my other needs (not to heavy, not too big, not too small, etc.).

[The following is for casual readers NOT you or other Slashdotters as you guys already know this]

Regarding portability: Not only must the computer be bootable over the USB (i.e. not someone else's computer with a locked-down BIOS) but the "core" device drivers required to use that computer must be pre-loaded on all the OSes. I've had brand-new computers not boot common Linux ISOs without special tweaks on the command line due to issues with video or other drivers. I've had brand-new computers refuse to boot Windows install/rescue/etc. disks/external-drives and/or boot them but not "see" the hard drive without either customizing the install disk, loading device drivers manually, or going into the BIOS and changing settings to decrease the hardware's performance. The biggest "gotchas" these days will probably be the USB 3 chipsets (the fix is to just find a USB 2 port and suffer the performance it) or the video driver (the fix is to use "safe"/"low resolution"/"low performance"/"generic" boot options if you can).

Hard drives need to adapt.

[Anonymous Coward]

When everyone is using SSDs as their main drive for speed, hard drives latency stops being important anymore. Their function should be purely raw bulk storage for cheap cheap prices. I think it's time for the 5.25 inch drive to make it's return. We could instantly triple the storage space without using any new technologies. Sure, it's slower, but who cares when we have SSDs to run all our apps from?

http://i.imgur.com/xrt0mKi.jpg

Yes, the gains greatly outweigh that price.

[SuperKendall]

So you would pay $1200 for a hard drive "without hesitation"?

100% Yes for that storage space that ran at Samsung's claimed 1.6GB/s speed...

It would make a huge difference for image management where I'm often loading many 60MB TIFF files in the course of looking over processed images.

Now mind you I'd be backing that up on the cheaper "real" hard drives, but for working with that speed would be fantastic and easily worth the money in terms of saved time and frustration over the life of the drive.

The thing is, that drive will probably be more like $5k which is a much harder amount to take... probably $2k is the edge for my own use.

2 prices that matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Price per performance and price per capacity.
On performance SSD is dirt cheap. You can get 3000 IOPS for $100 or so. but it would cost you $1000 per TB.

On capacity HDD is dirt cheap. You can get 2 TB for under $100. BUt that will only get you 150 IOPS. you woudl need 20 of those drives to match a $100 SSD.

Question

[MAXOMENOS]

Have you investigated the performance/cost of hybrid versus pure-SSD? I use pure SSD on my laptop and desktop and it's brilliant, but I don't have to cram 2TB+ of SQL Server data stores on my desktop.

Re:Question

[greg1104]

Hybrids are useful for accelerating desktop workloads, where you're often using the same data each day. They don't work very well for multi-TB scale databases. If it's in the hybrid drive's cache, unless you rebooted recently it's probably in the hot part of RAM on a database server too. That means the reads that are supposed to be sped up aren't going to the drive at all.

And when there is a cache miss and you have to hit the underlying drive, on some of the hybrids those are mechanically slower. Manufacturers feels they can cut corners on the spinning part due to the flash in front. That means you can actually end up worse overall on a database using a hybrid. The things in the cache can just end up duplicating what's in RAM already, while the cache misses are slower.

Hybrids do speed up cache refills after a reboot a lot, which is an underlooked worst-case sometimes. On random writes they can also provide a durable battery-backed write cache that's integrated better than using a RAID controller for that job too. Database workloads vary a lot, so these may be very important to you.

Re:Question

[m.dillon]

Never buy hybrid drives, period. You are just multplying the complexity of the firmware (resulting in more bugs, as Seagate's earlier attempts at Hybrid drives revealed), and decreasing the determinism of the failure cases. And there's no point. A hybrid drive has a *tiny* amount of flash on it. It's good for booting and perhaps holding a program or two, and that is pretty much it. For someone who does so little on their computer that it would actually fit on the flash portion of a hybrid, a hard drive will be almost as fast. For someone who uses the computer more significantly, the hybrid flash is too small to matter.

My recommendation is to use only a SSD for workstations and desktops as long as you don't need terrabytes of storage. For your server, if you can't afford a large enough SSD, then a SSD+HDD combination (or SSD + HDD/RAID) works very well. In this situation you put the boot and swap space and the SSD, plus you cache HDD data on your SSD.

This is pretty much what we do on our systems now. The workstations and desktops are SSD-only, the servers are SSD + HDD(s).

The nice thing about this is that with, say, a 256G SSD on the server caching roughly ~200GB worth of HDD data, the HDD's do not require a lot of performance. We can just use 2.5" 2TB green drives. Plus we can use large swap-backed ram disks and so on and so forth. Makes the servers scream.

-Matt

Re:Question

[m.dillon]

Hybrid drives do not use their meager flash to cache writes. The flash would wear out in an instant if they did that. It's strictly useful only for boot data and that is pretty much it, if a few seconds matters to you and you don't want to buy a separate SSD. For any real workload, the hybrid drive is a joke.

-Matt

Re:Question

[greg1104]

Hybrid drives do not use their meager flash to cache writes. The flash would wear out in an instant if they did that.

Hybrids that use some of their cache on writes have been around since the Desktop SSHD 2TB in 2013. They play around various flash types and methods for using it to keep that from wearing out too fast.

Slow HDD's

[phorm]

Indeed, I'd forgotten how slow HDD's were until I went to play a game the other day that I didn't often play (and thus was relegated to being installed on my larger 2TB HDD instead of the much faster - but smaller - SSD). The game wasn't too slow to start up, but loading levels resulted in a rather noticeably turtlish progress bar...

Re:Slow HDD's

[Anonymous Coward]

That progress bar is for when you go get the snacks, it's just badly programmed, like the old games when you emulate them and they run faster than they should on faster hardware.

Only 3.2T? *YAWN*

[FuegoFuerte]

Samsung just now announced a 3.2T card? Why are they so late to the party? Fusion-io has had 3.2T cards out for well over a year, and has 6.4T cards out on the market now. Most people won't be buying them anytime soon for home use, but for the person who really feels they need one, they're available. I think the online price to buy through Dell is about $24k right now.

racetrack memory

[Anonymous Coward]

I want racetrack memory. Give it to me now.

Reliability...

[trparky]

Other only that but hard drives have started to become more and more unreliable.

Re: Reliability...

[trparky]

Not only* Typed on a phone with autocorrect. Damn autocorrect.

More dribble on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

The ONLY significant metric for mass storage is cost. And currently, HDD prices are inflated by the same scum who made s speculative stock-market of the RAM market years earlier.

Flash memory, on the other hand, is currently in freefall- and even so 50 units of current will get you 2TB of HDD storage, against 25 units for a 128GB flash SDcard.

This regular dribbler of garbage onto the Slashdot front-page wets himself in excitement at the faster read/write speed of Flash. So what? 99.99% of all mass storage use is for things like documents, video and audio files. None of these uses require anything close to what a commodity HDD offers, let alone the faster forms of flash.

If Soulskill had the SLIGHTEST knowledge of Computer Science, he'd understand that the further away you storage is from the CPU, the slower it can run without impacting general computer performance. Now flash memory SHOULD be correctly used as LEVEL-5 cache (with the RAM being LEVEL-4, and commonly the first layer of storage system outside of the CPU/SoC). Used correctly, flash should exist BETWEEN RAM and the HDD, and perhaps run to several hundreds of GB.

Suggesting flash as a general replacement for the HDD is the kind of moronic thinking only a VERY average Beta would think sensible.

Even if flash could be made anywhere near as cost effective as HDD storage (hint- it can't), currently flash has VERY disturbing failure modes, as web-sites that have attempted to host on flash drives rather than HDDs have found out. One would assume such disastrous, unpredictable failures could be engineered out of the design- but no flash company seems to have cracked this yet.

And before the usual idiots respond- YES, there are special use cases where flash is better than a HDD, but as I said, NOT in the general computing situations. For 99.99% of people, as I said, flash should be used as level-5 cache between the RAM and the HDD. Sadly, MS implemented this into the architecture of Vista/Windows 7 but gave up when the industry showed no interest in modifying the PC hardware design to produce the required standards. So, people simply attach a small (relatively speaking) SSD drive to their PC, and move by hand (mostly) the commonly loaded code. The automated file caching system of MS's file operating system should be used instead to do this- but as mentioned above, MS never matured this technology.

Re:More dribble on Slashdot

[m.dillon]

Are you stupid?

-Matt

Constant writes such as backups, security cameras

[raymorris]

> Would you buy those 15k's new today? What usage pattern would favor 15k's vs ssd's?

Anything that keeps the drive fairly busy writing. Our particular application is backups. Our backup servers write pretty much constantly. SSDs might last a couple of years, they might not.

DVRs for security cameras are another example application that writes pretty much constantly, so again HDDs are a better fit.

On the other hand, SSDs are a much better fit for most laptops, where you want fast boot and physical durability. Each is the right tool for certain applications.

Afraid of SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I look forward to technologies where write operations are non-destructive and do not require power hungry and unreliable cap banks to tunnel thru oxide. Spinning platters might suck but I don't give a shit about performance I only care about reliability. Having many dozens of gigabytes of RAM dedicated to disk cache more than makes up for slow platters.

I haven't touched SSDs because I fear them crapping out. From people I have talked to and online comments there is much talk about SSDs getting slow as fuck over time coupled with strange unreliable behaviors a few months into usage. I just don't want to deal with that... nor am I ok with notion of not being able to deterministically wipe stored data when necessary.

Also not down with not having a swap file even or should I say especially with large amounts of RAM.. Given read/write performance the idea you could max I/O capacity for just minutes out of the day and use those figures to calculate long term reliability is frankly terrifying.

I thought someone was tooling up to commercially produce memrister based solutions ... lets do that or mram or whatever flash will always suck for general purpose use as long as it is based on tunneling thru oxide.

HDD Pros

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems everyone is ignoring one of HDD's biggest pros: data recovery

Assuming a non-mechanical failure, you can almost always recover your data from the hard drive, even using FOSS tools. For SSDs, no recovery is possible under all circumcises. Some mechanical HDD failures can be temporarily worked around too: cold storage, changing drive orientation, etc...

As much as I want a fast SSD, I don't keep proper backups so I want the additional data security of a HDD.

Re:HDD Pros

[m.dillon]

HDDs are not as recoverable as you seem to think. I have several bricked drives to show for it. Plus there is a trade-off in that your HDD's chance of failure goes up dramatically over time no matter how little or how much you use it. Even keeping it on a shelf won't make it last longer. SSD failure mechanics are very different beasts. If your SSD is barely worn after 3 years of operation (and most will be), the failure rate will not be appreciably higher than when it was new. The chance of multi-bit failures eventually overcoming the automatic SCAN/relocation (in SMART) will increase once appreciable wear occurs, but the wear is write-based and not time-based and for most SSD users that means reliability will be maintainable far longer than the 3 years one can normally depend on a HDD for (assuming it isn't one of those 5% of HDDs which fails every year anyway).

And, again... You don't make backups? Depending on the recoverability of your hard drive virtually guarantees that you will lose all your data one day.

-Matt

Worst mod of the week

[Anonymous Coward]

Worst mod of the week

What about secure data erasure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Relatively secure erasure of old sensitive data from magnetic hard drives has been thoroughly researched and essentially perfected. Depending on the sensitivity of the data, overwriting with a simple 0 bit pattern or with carefully chosen patterns per DoD algorithms can largely obliterate financial and customer information when it no longer should be recoverable. How completely can a solid state device with its finite number of write cycles supported actually overwrite information that should be deliberately and intentionally gone forever? Can secure erasure even be implemented directly in software for SSDs or do optimization feature make this impractical to attempt? I heard it described that SSDs have an API call that can be used to securely erase files, but how reliable is this in the era of strong NSA influence over electronics firms? In the era of identity theft, the idea of cheap SSDs pushing hard drives out of the market like LCDs pushed out CRTs, could be ominous if personal information may leak from old storage devices like hazardous chemicals escaping from toxic waste dumps. Thoughts anyone?

Re:What about secure data erasure?

[edmudama]

Erases can fail, but that's typically a gross failure in the peripheral circuitry and not a cell-level/array-level problem. It's no different than you being unable to erase your data if you have a mechanical failure on a rotation drive.

Your most likely "leakage" case is with a grown defect or a change in the flash translation layer, however, the specs are written so those old locations must be erased by a secure erase command. I know that based on NAND physics, if you do that erase, the data is gone and never coming back. IMO, there really aren't enough electrons in a charge well to reliably encode "additional" information about the prior state of a bit following an erase.

An NSA hack is always possible where they install rogue firmware on the drive that doesn't actually secure erase properly, but that kind of argument/speculation is outside the scope of my answer.

Price is where it's at

[Anonymous Coward]

SSD's are meaningless to those who need price/megabyte. Even at slow 5400 rpm, p/m metrics rule for them. SSD simply cannot compete in that arena. Also, do not forget to encrypt all your media.

Re:Price is where it's at

[NoOneInParticular]

If price/megabyte is all you need, I'd suggest to remove your hard-drive and replace it with tape. Yes, the seek times are a bit long, but then again, you didn't care about your time, right. Just price/megabyte.

Re:Constant writes such as backups, security camer

[silas_moeckel]

Streaming block writes, a 15k has about the same average write speed as a 6tb 7200 similar cost and 10x the capacity.

Now if your backup or DVR app effectively makes that random writes, sure there is a point but get an app and/or file system that is not broken by design.

I like both

[hyades1]

I'm not the most tech savvy guy in the world, so I'm certainly willing to be corrected, but my major problem with SSD's is this: when they fail, they do so without warning, and in a way that makes even partial data recovery impossible for an average user. On the other hand, in the decades during which I've used HDD's, I've never once had one fail without giving me some kind of warning. The dying drive has either overheated, or started showing read/write errors, or made distressing noises (kind of like that death speech all the soon-to-be-croaked best buddies get to make in action movies). And I've even been able to recover at least some data from drives that were seriously screwed. The only failed SDD I ever dealt with simply didn't report on boot, and I never heard anything from it again. So to me, a big SSD just offers a better chance to lose everything all at once, minus whatever was saved in the last backup.

And then there's cost, of course. I just bought a 2TB HDD for eighty bucks. I know I won't be seeing any SDD's available at that capacity/price for a long, long time.

Right now, my ideal computer would have a mid-size SSD for the operating system and installed programs, and a big, fast HDD for most storage needs. And, of course, my external backup drive would use old-fashioned platters. I'll leave huge, relatively expensive SDD's for those whose need for speed is much greater than mine.

Re:I like both

[m.dillon]

I hear this argument quite often and gotta ask... what, you don't have backups? When any of my storage dies I throw the drive away, stick in a new one, and restore from one of my two real-time backups (one on-site, one off-site). For that matter, I don't even trust any HDD that is over 3 years old. It gets replaced whether it reports any errors or not. And I've had plenty of HDDs fail with catastrophic errors over the years. Relying on a HDD to fail nicely is a false assumption.

Another statistic to keep in mind is that SSD failure rates are around 1.5% per year, compared to 5% failure rates for HDDs. And, I suspect, since HDD technology has essentially hit up against a mechanical brick wall w/regards to failure rates (if you still want to pay $80 for one), that SSD failure rates (which are more a function of firmware) will continue to drop while HDD failure rates remain about the same, from here on out. And that's assuming the HDD is powered on for the whole time. Power-down a HDD for a month and its failure rate goes up dramatically once you've powered it back on. HDDs can't even be reliably used for off-line backups, SSDs can. SSDs have a lot of room to get even better. HDDs just don't.

It is also a lot easier to run a SSD safely for many more years than a HDD simply by observing the wear indicator or sector relocation count ramp (actual life depends on the write load), where-as a hard drive's life is related more to power-up time regardless of load. If I only have to replace my SSDs (being conservative) once every 5-7 years vs my HDDs once every 3 years, that cuts many costs out right there. I have yet to have to replace a single SSD, but have replaced several HDDs purchased after that first SSD was bought. Just looking at the front-end cost doesn't really tell the whole story. Replacement cost, lost opportunity cost, time cost (time is money). There are many costs that matter just as much.

In terms of speed, I think you also don't understand the real problem. The problem is not comparing the 100-200 MByte/sec linear access time of a HDD to the 500-550 MByte/sec linear access time of a SSD. The problem is that once the computer has to seek that hard drive, that 100-200 Mbytes/sec drops to 20 MBytes/sec, and drops to 2 MBytes/sec in the worst-case. The SSD, on the other hand, will still maintain ~400-550 MBytes/sec even doing completely random accesses. Lots of things can cause this... de-duplication, for example. Background scans. Background applications (dropbox scans, security scans). Paging memory. Filesystem fragmentation. Game updates (fragmented data files). Whatever.

People notice the difference between SSDs and HDDs because of the above, and it matters even for casual users like, say, my parents, who mostly only mess with photos and videos. They notice it. It's a big deal. It's extremely annoying when a machine reacts slowly. The SSD is worth its weight in gold under those conditions. And machines these days (laptops and desktops certainly) do a lot more work in the background than they used to.

There are still situations where HDDs are useful. I use HDDs on my backup boxes and in situations where I need hundreds of gigabytes of temporary (but linear) storage... mostly throw-away situations where I don't care if a drive dies on me. But on my laptops and workstations it's SSD-only now, and they are a lot happier for it. For that matter, in a year or two most of our servers will likely be SSD-only as well. Only the big crunchers will need HDDs at all.

Nobody who has switched from a HDD to a SSD ever switches back. People will happily take a big storage hit ($150 2TB HDD -> $150 256GB SSD) just to be able to have that SSD. Not a whole lot of people need huge amounts of storage anyway with so much video and audio now being streamed from the cloud. For that matter, even personal storage is starting to get backed up 'on the cloud' and there is no need to have a completely local copy of *everything* (though I personally do still keep a local copy).

-Matt

Re:I like both

[hyades1]

Thanks for the information. I guess I wasn't too clear on one thing, though: I do back up, but my work is such that if the last backup was an hour before, I lose an hour of work I won't get back, or even more.

And I'm one of those people who actually do require a lot of storage space...and have no desire to have it beyond my care and control. I do professional photography and video. Often, I have five or six versions of a photo on the go at once. I'll want to keep all of them, and any modifications I make...not so much colour correction as actual content...will probably proceed a lot further on two or three versions. I'm not an idiot about keeping my data drive defragged, and nothing goes on my boot drive (which is a 300G SCSI...you'd probably be surprised at how fast it is) except the OS, installed programs and stuff I'm actually working on. I have as little going on in the background as I can get away with. That means my security is cloud-based plus passive.

And I have to say, I've had lots better luck with hard drives than you. My machines are on 24-7, and I don't let my data drives sleep. I've never had one last less than 3 years. Most last easily twice that.

Re:I like both

[LinuxIsGarbage]

In terms of speed, I think you also don't understand the real problem. The problem is not comparing the 100-200 MByte/sec linear access time of a HDD to the 500-550 MByte/sec linear access time of a SSD. The problem is that once the computer has to seek that hard drive, that 100-200 Mbytes/sec drops to 20 MBytes/sec, and drops to 2 MBytes/sec in the worst-case. The SSD, on the other hand, will still maintain ~400-550 MBytes/sec even doing completely random accesses. Lots of things can cause this... de-duplication, for example. Background scans. Background applications (dropbox scans, security scans). Paging memory. Filesystem fragmentation. Game updates (fragmented data files). Whatever.

Linear numbers are about right, but I've found random performance much worse than that. 0.8MB/s on a hard drive, and 80MB/s on a consumer Solid State. This is a 100x improvement, but not near saturating the 500MB/s SATA III interface.

But for sure when my PC at work is grinding to a halt I'll open up Resource monitor and see that Norton is randomly thrashing about.

3.2TB HD's

[hackus]

Gimme gimme gimme.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave an SSD in a safe for 10 years and when you plug it in after you will find half the information missing or corrupted.
Leave an HDD in a safe for 10 years and everything will still be intact.
There's a good reason SSDs are BOOT drives and SHORT TERM storage drives, and nothing more, and it has to do with the nature of how they contain data.
It's the same reason government archives and agencies like NSA still utilize magnetic tapes for data storage.
Mr. itwbennett is really talking out of his behind.

Re:Constant writes such as backups, security camer

[Neil Boekend]

Why use unreliable 15k drives for backups when you can just use 7k2 dives for the same price and sequential speed but far more room?
Sequential speed is not just spindle speed, it's also a result of density. Sequential speed increases with the square root of the density increase. A 2x as big disc with the same spindle speed will be 1.4 times as fast sequentially. A 4x as big disc will have twice the sequential speed.

Thus a 4x as big 7k2 disk will have almost the same sequential speed as a 15k drive, but with 4 times the room. Of course you should still stick them in a suitable RAID.

Re:Constant writes such as backups, security camer

[TheRaven64]

The consumer-grade SSD in my laptop can happily handle 2-300MB/s of sustained writes (and, simultaneously, 200MB/s of sustained reads). If you're doing linear writes, then you're the optimal workload for wear levelling. You'll be hard pressed to find a drive that isn't guaranteed for 5 years of writes at the maximum throughput the drive can handle.

Although, as other posters have pointed out, you'll get better sequential write speed and reliability from a RAID array of slower disks.

Can't spin faster than 7200rpm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did I miss the fact that every version of the WD Raptor series spins at 10K?

Most popular 840 Pro warranted for 73 TB (3 days)

[raymorris]

> You'll be hard pressed to find a drive that isn't guaranteed for 5 years of writes at the maximum throughput the drive can handle.

Hah! I wish. The most popular line of SSDs is the Samsung 840 series. In commercial usage, the 840 Pro is warranted for 73 TB written. That's 3 DAYS at maximum throughput.

The 850 series is warranted for twice as much - 150 TB, or one week at maximum throughput.

People latch on to qualities they don't need.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty funny how easily people latch on to a single quality and are convinced they absolutely MUST have that quality!

With HDDs, if you can't store the entirety of the intertubes on it, it's useless! Nevermind that most people don't store massive amounts of data (and those that do tend to store that data centrally not on each of dozens of devices they might want to access it on), and benefit more from the reliability, speed, low power usage, low noise and other qualities of an SSD.

I have a RAID setup in my basement that stores around 3TB worth of junk collected over the last 30 years. Most of it actually is backups of physical media (CD, DVDs, etc.) rather than day to day usage stuff. My Gaming machine, my laptop, and other machines all run SSDs (a couple 120GB, a 256, and a 512GB). My PVR uses a very small SSD main disk (a recycling of a disk from my first SSD backed machine), and a massive but slow/cheap HDD to store the uncompressed recordings on.

The 512GB SSD in my main/gaming machine cost around $200 (about 1/10 the cost of the full rig) and currently sits with 200GB of free space. Has enough space to store between 40 and 100 games at a time (depending on the size), which is far more than necessary to fullfill its purpose (few are obsessive enough to need instant access to more than that many games I'd wager). If my bulk storage wasn't centralized, it would have a large and cheap+slow HDD for that purpose too.

Of course, I've been running with multi disk setups for decades, because it's always been the best way to get good performance while managing cost. These days instead of a RAID0 or 10k+ main disk, it's an SSD -- for only a slight increase in price, but orders of magnitude better performance).

Doesn't SSD storage "wear out" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks to me that one thing has been overlooked with hard drive vs SSD price valuations. Doesn't SSD storage "wear out" after so many writes? Doesn't that mean more frequent replacements?

HDDs not going away

[Anonymous Coward]

HDDs still provide a price/performance that kicks SSD ass. HDDs will disappear from portable use being replaced by SSDs (obviously) but data centers will still primarily use them, especially when volume matters. There are HDD tech coming that will leap frog pretty much all recent SSD advancements including 3D.

(I'm deeply involved in technology development of both HDD and SSD industries)

Amazing Times

[forbin_meet_hal]

I spent 10 years in Silicon Valley doing PR for flash and other nonvolatile memories. In 1997, we thought we were having Hugo Gernsback visions of the future when we were talking about flash eventually hitting $1/MB. Seems kind of silly now.

and the generica shall prevail

[epine]

the performance war

Because, as we all know, performance comes in only one flavour.

This is an even sneakier version of what Daniel Dennett calls "rathering". This is where you write "The proponents of A would say that A resolves this issue. As we can see, A does not solve the problem, so rather B." The trick here is that no-one ever said the issue was a dichotomy between A and B. It's been implied by a rhetorical device that few readers even notice. Apparently Stephen J. Gould used this technique a fair amount. This surprised me. He was a pretty solid author for the most part.

Do you really think that SSD is the best storage option for Google Earth's highest resolution imagery of the Nunavut territory? I guess your philosophy is that if the data isn't in high enough demand to justify SSD performance levels, there's no point keeping the data online in the first place.

Then there's a few hundred people who charter expensive hunting trips in the Canadian north and afterwards they go to Google Earth to review where they've been and Google Earth says "Imagery 404: not enough demand to make it cost effective to host the data on SSD".

If it's just a few hundred people, so who gives a shit?

Re:Only 3.2T? *YAWN*

[Blaskowicz]

You might as well say "64GB RAM in a consumer desktop? Yawn, my server has 1TB".
It is a consumer SSD, on a smallish card (single slot, single PCB) meaning you'll be able to order it from newegg et al. at one tenth the cost.

Capacity increases speed

[iamacat]

You have more data on that single track rotating at 7200rpm, or more independent heads to access data without a seek. I wouldn't call this "speed hitting a brick wall". Furthermore, you don't have to choose one or another. A hybrid drive with 1TB SSD and 10TB spinning disk would be extremely useful, and much cheaper than an all SSD solution would be in foreseeable future.

Re:Only 3.2T? *YAWN*

[FuegoFuerte]

The Fusion-io cards are also single slot, single PCB. The 3.2T card is even a low-profile card. So it's more like saying "hey, there's a 32GB DIMM out now!" While true, it's been true for quite some time. They're expensive, sure, but the home user who wants one can still stuff a system full of them.