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There's No End In Sight For Data Storage Capacity (computerworld.com)

Posted by timothy on from the heat-death-of-the-universe-comes-to-mind dept.

Lucas123 writes: Several key technologies are coming to market in the next three years that will ensure data storage will not only keep up with but exceed demand. Heat-assisted magnetic recording and bit-patterned media promise to increase hard drive capacity initially by 40% and later by 10-fold, or as Seagate's marketing proclaims: 20TB hard drives by 2020. At the same time, resistive RAM technologies, such as Intel/Micron's 3D XPoint, promise storage-class memory that's 1,000 times faster and more resilient than today's NAND flash, but it will be expensive — at first. Meanwhile, NAND flash makers have created roadmaps for 3D NAND technology that will grow to more than 100 layers in the next two to three generations, increasing performance and capacity while ultimately lowering costs to that of hard drives."Very soon flash will be cheaper than rotating media," said Siva Sivaram, executive vice president of memory at SanDisk.

2 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Reliability? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Informative

    Don't we all have cron jobs to scrub our zpools?

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  2. Re:Reliability? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Bull.

    SSD's reliability, from experience, is less than half, maybe barely even a quarter of that than spinning drives in enterprise use.

    SSD's are only "reliable" from a end-user desktop/notebook where they have 50% of the space free most of the time. In enterprise use, they are often in RAID arrays themselves, and what happens when you near the capacity of a drive? the data gets put onto another drive, so changes to that first drive run out of useable spare flash blocks.

    Spinning drives can be used in any RAID configuration. SSD's can only be used as Raid 1 or Raid 5, but are more ideally suited for ZFS Raid JBOD pools. If being used as part of a RAID 1 set, the drives have to have identical performance characteristics, which often means using exactly the same drives from the same factory production set, which means if that set is bad, you lose the entire array. With mechanical drives, that also tends to happen (and has.) Ultimately SSD's performance over time is unreliable to use in a RAID set and are only useful in a ZFS JBOD pool setup with multiple redundancy.