At this point it's really demand that's keeping the cost up. Between NAND and RAM, the fabs are all running full tilt and the memory cartel of Samsung, Micron, and Hynix doesn't seem all that interested in opening up new capacity. It's still a ways to go before it can hope to match HDD in price per GB, but it's not purely a technical hurdle anymore. I think you will see HDD demand start dropping in the coming year, and eventually that will push HDD prices up. I suspect in another decade or so SSD and HDD prices will reach parity, or at least get close enough that it won't matter.
What else are you going to use them for?
You can't have mechanical disks in laptops or other portable devices, they just break.
You can't have them in you workstation, they make too much noise and are too slow for gaming.
The only remaining application for mechanical drives is in servers.
Well you can use them portables they just suck because you usually end up with 5400rpm drives and no one wants them. They work fine in workstations and many have them as secondary drives, booting and loading frequently used apps off of a smaller SSD because large SSDs are still somewhat expensive (for now, this is rapidly changing) . Also most games don't really benefit from faster storage. Some do, but most don't.
As for servers, nope, that's going away too. I just ordered up a bunch of Cisco UCS blades for a customer and guess what they boot from? No, not SSDs. SD Cards. Yep, a pair of SD Cards in RAID 1. They stick into the side of the blade. When most physical servers going in these days are just metal for hypervisors or compute nodes for some clustered task, putting drives in them isn't all that important. You just need them to boot reliably. So most of the storage is happening on SAN and NAS and those are going pure SSD at an ever increasing rate as SSD costs drop year over year.
I'm afraid in another decade or so the spinning disk is going to be a niche legacy product relegated to old systems and oddball situations where they might make more sense to use. One day you will be able to pull one out of a dusty box in the attic and show your grand kids how primitive data storage used to be.
Like I said: No one is really buying SSD in the enterprise based on it's price vs HDD. You won't save Capex buying the same size array going SSD vs HDD. However, the price for SSD storage is at the point that the advantages (performance, density, and reliability*) outweigh the price difference. You can get enterprise SSD solutions for under $0.30/gb from multiple vendors. At some point it's cheaper to go SSD than to invest in "spending a lot of time" trying to make it faster on HDD. I'd say probably close to 70% of the storage systems my company has sold in the past 12 months are SSD, closer to 90% in the past 6 months.
*I've spoken with our support guys, customers, and with field techs (not SE's, but guys who actually go out on service calls) from several vendors and they are all saying about the same thing: drive failure rates are much lower than those with spinning disks on the new SSD systems. I'm sure someone will pipe up with "But SSD's wear out!!! BLARG!!" That's just not what we are seeing when we looked at the SSD wear rates vs traditional drive failures in production environments.
Why would they need to be more reliable than a RAID 5? These aren't going into anything as single drives but as part of large dedicated storage systems. Also who the heck is still doing RAID 5 at the enterprise level? What is this 2002?
While I usually agree and even encourage this tactic when companies sue Google over search results, exactly how would one do that in this case? Ask Getty for a copy of every photo they ever had so they can filter search results? These won't just show up on Getty's site, but on sites that have licensed images for web use from them.
Well if you remove the labor cost differences, it can start to make sense to start manufacturing closer to your end customers.
But don't worry about those laid off workers. According to the Slashdot Buggy Whip law they will all get higher paying jobs making the robots that replace them.
basically checking for leakage current so patients and staff don't get electrocuted - not such a bad thing to do
I don't know, sounds like an untapped profit source to me. Just make sure there is plenty of legal verbiage around the ports to prevent liability in a lawsuit.
Turning it into planted forest would seriously disturb that life.
This is a question only really asked by some militant greenies. The far more interesting question is what would terraforming a landmass that size do to the wider ecosystem? You can't change that much land without having massive knock-on effects in the surround. For one, turning one of the driest arid areas of the planet into a forest would change the weather patterns and climate in all of Africa.
A few stinking lizards is the least of our problem.
Unless the lizards mutate and destroy Tokyo.
Well if you go back up to the post I replied to, the problem isn't really the Sahara itself but the fact that its dust provides nutrients to the amazon basin. So green up the Sahara but at what cost to the Amazon?
It doesn't need to be an inaudible frequency, it just needs to be hidden from human ears but distinguishable for machines. Nielsen's system (Psychoacoustic encoding) uses audible sounds hidden under the regular broadcast audio (and this is why they don't encode during silent segments of audio in shows or commercials).
Sure, that's why online shopping, self checkouts, travel booking websites, and self-service gas stations with pay-at-the-pump (just to name a few) all failed and went out of business.
Wouldn't that destroy delicate desert habitat and extinct a variety of species?
Not sure if you have noticed... but the Sahara is a bit of a desert. The least number of lifeforms of any ecosystem. Biodensity and biodiversity is very low.
The worst danger is if the winds are no longer able to pick up sand from the Sahara (parts of it are high in nutrients from when the Sahara was a tropical paradise many millennia ago). The sands from the Sahara are currently responsible for feeding the rain forests in South America with certain nutrients. Cut off the sand and the rainforests quickly become weaker. The rainforests are currently ARE high in both biodensity and biodiversity.
I don't know why this is the first time I'm realizing this, but "ads" that cryptomine seem like a great idea. Given the amount of web browsing that is just that, with an otherwise unoccupied CPU, I'd much rather the sites I visit be earning some money directly from my use than displaying crappy ads all over and splitting that income with the middlemen.
I would be fine with this in place of ads if a) it's fully disclosed b) it's opt-in, and c) it's set to consume no more than say 25% of my CPU.
Agreed. People act like when a new phone or laptop comes out and everyone upgrades they throw their old devices in the bin instead of trading them in (where they end up being refurbed and sold or used for warranty replacements or recycled if they are beyond useful) or handing them down or selling them. Apple devices, in particular, hold their resale value pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
OK but what is that in bananas?
MFM or RLL?
ugh, that should read " I think you will see HDD demand start dropping in the coming years"
At this point it's really demand that's keeping the cost up. Between NAND and RAM, the fabs are all running full tilt and the memory cartel of Samsung, Micron, and Hynix doesn't seem all that interested in opening up new capacity. It's still a ways to go before it can hope to match HDD in price per GB, but it's not purely a technical hurdle anymore. I think you will see HDD demand start dropping in the coming year, and eventually that will push HDD prices up. I suspect in another decade or so SSD and HDD prices will reach parity, or at least get close enough that it won't matter.
What else are you going to use them for? You can't have mechanical disks in laptops or other portable devices, they just break. You can't have them in you workstation, they make too much noise and are too slow for gaming. The only remaining application for mechanical drives is in servers.
Well you can use them portables they just suck because you usually end up with 5400rpm drives and no one wants them. They work fine in workstations and many have them as secondary drives, booting and loading frequently used apps off of a smaller SSD because large SSDs are still somewhat expensive (for now, this is rapidly changing) . Also most games don't really benefit from faster storage. Some do, but most don't.
As for servers, nope, that's going away too. I just ordered up a bunch of Cisco UCS blades for a customer and guess what they boot from? No, not SSDs. SD Cards. Yep, a pair of SD Cards in RAID 1. They stick into the side of the blade. When most physical servers going in these days are just metal for hypervisors or compute nodes for some clustered task, putting drives in them isn't all that important. You just need them to boot reliably. So most of the storage is happening on SAN and NAS and those are going pure SSD at an ever increasing rate as SSD costs drop year over year.
I'm afraid in another decade or so the spinning disk is going to be a niche legacy product relegated to old systems and oddball situations where they might make more sense to use. One day you will be able to pull one out of a dusty box in the attic and show your grand kids how primitive data storage used to be.
Like I said: No one is really buying SSD in the enterprise based on it's price vs HDD. You won't save Capex buying the same size array going SSD vs HDD. However, the price for SSD storage is at the point that the advantages (performance, density, and reliability*) outweigh the price difference. You can get enterprise SSD solutions for under $0.30/gb from multiple vendors. At some point it's cheaper to go SSD than to invest in "spending a lot of time" trying to make it faster on HDD. I'd say probably close to 70% of the storage systems my company has sold in the past 12 months are SSD, closer to 90% in the past 6 months.
*I've spoken with our support guys, customers, and with field techs (not SE's, but guys who actually go out on service calls) from several vendors and they are all saying about the same thing: drive failure rates are much lower than those with spinning disks on the new SSD systems. I'm sure someone will pipe up with "But SSD's wear out!!! BLARG!!" That's just not what we are seeing when we looked at the SSD wear rates vs traditional drive failures in production environments.
Can we mod articles troll? Asking THIS audience THAT question? Come on!
Why would they need to be more reliable than a RAID 5? These aren't going into anything as single drives but as part of large dedicated storage systems. Also who the heck is still doing RAID 5 at the enterprise level? What is this 2002?
Currently cheaper to get a three pack of spinning 12TB drives (totalling $1350).
No one is really buying SSD in the enterprise based on it's price vs HDD.
Don't display Getty media in your search results.
That'll learn 'em.
While I usually agree and even encourage this tactic when companies sue Google over search results, exactly how would one do that in this case? Ask Getty for a copy of every photo they ever had so they can filter search results? These won't just show up on Getty's site, but on sites that have licensed images for web use from them.
woops, replied to the wrong post. Meant for a reply to your post
Lundgren does not deny that he made the discs or that he hoped to sell them
Yea but labor costs are so small in most of tech because the labor intensive jobs, particularly in manufacturing have moved to areas with cheap labor.
Well if you remove the labor cost differences, it can start to make sense to start manufacturing closer to your end customers.
But don't worry about those laid off workers. According to the Slashdot Buggy Whip law they will all get higher paying jobs making the robots that replace them.
basically checking for leakage current so patients and staff don't get electrocuted - not such a bad thing to do
I don't know, sounds like an untapped profit source to me. Just make sure there is plenty of legal verbiage around the ports to prevent liability in a lawsuit.
Turning it into planted forest would seriously disturb that life.
This is a question only really asked by some militant greenies. The far more interesting question is what would terraforming a landmass that size do to the wider ecosystem? You can't change that much land without having massive knock-on effects in the surround. For one, turning one of the driest arid areas of the planet into a forest would change the weather patterns and climate in all of Africa.
A few stinking lizards is the least of our problem.
Unless the lizards mutate and destroy Tokyo.
Well if you go back up to the post I replied to, the problem isn't really the Sahara itself but the fact that its dust provides nutrients to the amazon basin. So green up the Sahara but at what cost to the Amazon?
It doesn't need to be an inaudible frequency, it just needs to be hidden from human ears but distinguishable for machines. Nielsen's system (Psychoacoustic encoding) uses audible sounds hidden under the regular broadcast audio (and this is why they don't encode during silent segments of audio in shows or commercials).
Nielsen uses audio signals hidden in broadcasts every 2.5 seconds for their tracking, so I don't see Amazon having issues doing something similar.
and humans like interaction with other humans
Sure, that's why online shopping, self checkouts, travel booking websites, and self-service gas stations with pay-at-the-pump (just to name a few) all failed and went out of business.
#4 is actually already a thing. Just google Robo-advisors.
Wouldn't that destroy delicate desert habitat and extinct a variety of species?
Not sure if you have noticed... but the Sahara is a bit of a desert. The least number of lifeforms of any ecosystem. Biodensity and biodiversity is very low.
The worst danger is if the winds are no longer able to pick up sand from the Sahara (parts of it are high in nutrients from when the Sahara was a tropical paradise many millennia ago). The sands from the Sahara are currently responsible for feeding the rain forests in South America with certain nutrients. Cut off the sand and the rainforests quickly become weaker. The rainforests are currently ARE high in both biodensity and biodiversity.
Not sure why this is marked as flamebait since it's true. https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants
He's face blind, not ass blind.
It's analysts all the way down.... We're doomed.
I don't know why this is the first time I'm realizing this, but "ads" that cryptomine seem like a great idea. Given the amount of web browsing that is just that, with an otherwise unoccupied CPU, I'd much rather the sites I visit be earning some money directly from my use than displaying crappy ads all over and splitting that income with the middlemen.
I would be fine with this in place of ads if a) it's fully disclosed b) it's opt-in, and c) it's set to consume no more than say 25% of my CPU.
Agreed. People act like when a new phone or laptop comes out and everyone upgrades they throw their old devices in the bin instead of trading them in (where they end up being refurbed and sold or used for warranty replacements or recycled if they are beyond useful) or handing them down or selling them. Apple devices, in particular, hold their resale value pretty well.
Here is an article on what happens to those Apple trade-in phones: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/recycled-iphones-apple-products/story?id=37872881