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SSD Prices On Parity With High-End HDD By 2011

Posted by kdawson on Sat May 24, 2008 01:43 PM
from the at-least-it's-not-five-years-out dept.
Data Storage Hardware
kgagne writes "EMC executives were heavily pitching the virtues of solid state disk drives at their annual users conference in Las Vegas, saying that SSD will not only be on price parity with high-end Fibre Channel disk drives by the end of 2010 or early 2011, but that NAND memory will solve all sorts of read/write issues created by spinning disk technology. EMC's CEO and its storage platforms chief said the company will do everything it can to drive SSD prices down, and adoption up, by deploying them in their products. One issue might be that EMC is using SSD from STEC, which is being sued by Seagate for patent infringement." The article also mentions some of the work EMC has been doing to make sure SSD is enterprise-class reliable, such as developing "wear leveling" software.
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[+] Your Rights Online: Seagate Sues STEC For Patent Infringement 51 comments
Lucas123 writes "Yesterday Seagate filed suit against STEC, claiming several of its products, including solid state disks and some DRAM devices, infringe as many as four of its patents. Today STEC responded that it holds patents on the technology 10 years older than Seagate's. A Seagate win in the suit, or a settlement, could result in the equivalent of a tax on SSDs and potentially other flash memory products, increasing prices to end users at a time when demand for SSD storage is exploding."
Submission: SSD Prices on Parity With HDD by 2010 by kgagne (983841)
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  • SSD from STEC (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quarrel (194077) on Saturday May 24 2008, @01:49PM (#23530082)
    > One issue might be that EMC is using SSD from STEC, which is being sued by Seagate for patent infringement.

    Why is this an issue? If EMC think the technology is a winner, and they don't have a stake in a particular player (of course they have to choose a supplier, but that hardly indicates a long term commitment) then what do they care who wins?

    One of the great things about being in EMCs shoes is that you want these things commoditized.

    Either way, as a the sooner SSD is directly competitive the better. They're ICs - you churn them out, and only worry about yield. HDDs are mechanical and will always have their mechanical shortcomings.

    --Q

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by vax (251660)
      if seagate has the patent then they better start making some damn SSD drives. (that are actually on the market)

      it would be good to have some competition anyway to drive the prices down..

      still. I cant wait for 100gb SSD drives.. finally a laptop for gigging that can handle a beating.

      really once these are standard in laptops I think you will see more robust laptops on the market since the spinning disks have always been one of the quickest parts to fail (well assuming that the laptop has decent cooling design
  • will they be competitive with mid range priced hard drives? You can get 500GB for $100 these days.

    • Re:But when (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pyite (140350) on Saturday May 24 2008, @03:27PM (#23530914)
      will they be competitive with mid range priced hard drives? You can get 500GB for $100 these days.

      In a few years. Right now SSDs perform incredibly in terms of IOPS (I/O operations Per Second) that enterprise storage type folks are eying them longingly. They just need a little bit more space for the money. Until such time, it's very possible that we'll see more in terms of using SSDs as caching components in front of more antiquated spinning media.

      • Or, use them for different purposes. Do you backups to a RAID, boot from read-only flash and have your database in SSD.

        I mean, even in the old days they could choose between punch cards, tape, and teletype for data storage and retrieval.
      • Yeah, but currently the largest SSD are only 64 GB, and cost about $1000. By 2011 will you be able to get a solid state drive that measures 500 GB? Will it cost anywhere close to $100? Probably not. By price comparable do they mean you will be able to get a solid state drive for under $200? Probably, but the capacity will be much lower than a even the high end hard drives they are price matching. You can get a 146 GB, Fibre Channel, 15K RPM drive for under $350. In 3 years, I don't think you'll be ab
    • More than six years away, following from current price points and reduction trends, which is to say "there is no predicting".

      C//

  • The Future is Solid State (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bananatree3 (872975) on Saturday May 24 2008, @02:24PM (#23530394)
    Spinning disk hard drives are the mode, median and mean today. You can grab a 1TB platter hard drive for under 200 bucks. It may not last as long as a SSD, but at that price you can certainly buy a bunch of backup drives for a lot cheaper than a 1TB Solid State drive.

    However, SSD is the future wave, as it Just Works better than platter drives. A high quality, high density, low priced SSD would knock the socks off any platter drives today if it were available. Platter drives will be the mainstream market for a while because of cost and size availability. However as SSDs become cheaper and hold more space, the WILL push platter drives out.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by arbiter1 (1204146)
      i've had platter hard drives go 8+ years, and one i know of is at 9 years old and still goin strong

      • Longevity (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Bananatree3 (872975) on Saturday May 24 2008, @02:42PM (#23530532)
        I agree that high quality platter drives will last a long, long time. The issue is that anything with moving parts is inherently more prone to breakage than a device with no moving parts. A SSD with no rewrite issues would by principal be inherently longer lasting.

        Platter drives are here to stay for a while. Once SSDs get the bugs worked out and the price drops to current platter drive levels, there will be a large migration.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by hairyfeet (841228)
          While I agree that the enterprise users will end up on SSD,simply due to IOPS, I'm not sure if it will end up in consumer rigs other than specialized laptop situations, and what is more I'm not sure I'd want them to be. We all know how the big PC makers end up starving the low end machines for RAM,so how well will a SSD survive say, a Vista Basic machine with 512Mb of RAM pounding the swap to kingdom come? I know they have wear leveling but consumers are a LOT more likely to fill their drives with junk and

          • Also,what about data recovery.... If the SSD does as I assume they do and actually erases on delete
            If a file gets wiped when you delete it is entirely up to the file system, not the hard drive. Your disk only reads and writes what the file system tells it to.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by hairyfeet (841228)
              What I meant was that thanks to the wear leveling going on under the file system there might be more of a chance of a file getting deleted from an empty sector as that sector gets overwritten by other files from elsewhere to even out the wear across sectors. Since many of these machines have or will have Windows on them,let me give an example using XP:

              Let us say you have a 6Gb flash with XP installed. For ease let us say the drive is broken up into 12 sectors-A-L. The XP Install is on A-D and the file I

        • I'm not so sure I agree. I've had way more RAM chips die than I've had hard drives die. I've only had 1 hard drive die in my personal computers. RAM chips I've had 3 or 4 die. Video cards I've had 3 die. I've seen many network cards go in my life. Countless power supplies. Most of the stuff that does die is the hardware only stuff. I seems counter-intuitive, but when I think about it, it actually makes sense. The hardware parts that die always have very tightly packed circuits, and are very complex
      • I've had a Maxtor 6.4GB hard drive since pre-melenium time, its been in a computer case hats been dropped down a flight of stairs, the MBR record destroyed itself (for OS purposes you couldn't install a OS to it but it would hold data this happened pre 2000) its been hit with a hammer (fustration at said MBR fault), connected to a PC's whose power supply blew spctacularly and finally it was connected (as slave and on the same power spur) to a 200GB Maxtor Diamond Plus when said 200GB drive short circuted it
        • I had one in a desktop workstation - at least it gave a warning that something was up, it kept making a grating/grinding noise.

          I've lost a Travelstar laptop drive in a similar way - another family member helpfully moved the laptop into direct sunlight during a bright Summer day, and left the laptop lid down. The poor hard disk drive overheated and fried out (gave a whining noise until the laptop powered down).

          The only people who could really make any fair comparisons would be search engine/internet archive
          • Manufacturers of SSD's are claiming in excess of 2,000,000 hours for MTBF.

            High end SAS drives claim 1,200,000 hours for MTBF.

            Western Digital claims 600,000 hours for MTBF.

            There have been studies from Google and Carnegie Mellon both that suggest that hard drive makers greatly exaggerate, and that drives fail as much as 15X more often than the manufacturers suggest.

            SSD makers and spinning disk makers are not the same industry.

            One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers.

            C//

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by kesuki (321456)
              "One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers."

              Sure you can, they're Human of course they lie. MTBF can be generated, based on how long it takes for 'more than 50% of the data sectors fail' but who would keep using a disc that kept having randomly failing disc sectors, even if SMART technology can reduce the risk of loosing data...

              so of course SSD makers are going to calculate a MTBF assuming the type of wear a typical person who boots vista once, for every time it crashe
              • "One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers."

                Sure you can, they're Human of course they lie.

                I have no doubt, but we cannot know if they lie the same. What I mean is that just because hard drives seem to fail 15X more often than manufacturers claim, according to some third party study, doesn't mean the SSD drives will fail 15X more often than the SSD makers claims.

                These are different industries, and different circles of practice and so forth.

                C//
                • my point was they were gerrymandering their MTBF the same way as HDD makers, using only 'complete' failure as a failure. MTBF is done via comprehensive testing, they cannot inflate the number without having the type of testing practice I've mentioned.

                  where the 'statistical rate of partial failure' falls, has nothing to do with how they measure their MTBF tests.
                  • ...my point was they were gerrymandering their MTBF the same way as HDD makers...

                    I personally have no idea how they are gerrymandering their MTBF, hence my comment. The advantage of this particular statement of mine is that it has a 100% chance of being correct. *wink*

                    C//
            • It would be even nicer if you went and looked for the facts yourself instead of expecting them to be handed to you on a silver platter.

              If you write any sort of research paper, you can't go and write, "and I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to confirm all my supposed 'facts.'" There is an accepted procedure that the burden of proof of claiming anything lies on he who claims it, at least in professional and academic circles.

              • This isn't a professional and academic circle. Information is available at the touch of a button. Anyway, if you read Spatial's response, there was a funny in it. Silver platter, get it?

                C//
              • This isn't a research paper, this is a geek oriented discussion forum. You score points for pedantry though. There is little professional and nothing academic about slashdot. Go read peer reviewed journals if that's what you're looking for, and stop being too lazy to look up a few facts for yourself :-)

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by hostyle (773991)
      -1 Re-Iterating The Damned Obvious
    • Eventually, without a doubt. Although by that time SSD may have little to do with what we regard as SSD today.

      How it plays out depends on how the hard disk manufacturers deal with it; personally I'd prefer they play their strength and simply forget about speed and concentrate on their forte; storing lots of bits.

      I already have all the fast storage I need (if I wanted more I could stripe over more disks). Bulk storage, however, is something I'm permanently short of; I could easily use up to the petabyte rang

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by renoX (11677)
      The future is very near!
      Sure currently buying a 1TB Solid State drive would be too expensive, but do we need really it?

      No: on my HDD, I have two partitions: one of 30 GB for the OS and the software (which has still a lot of free space), and a big one for the data.

      Replacing the OS&software partition with a SSD would bring 99% percent of the benefits of having a 'full' SSD: fast boot time, fast application startup, etc.. Especially as we can use a part of the SSD as a cache for the HDD.
      So IMHO, we don't r

    • You can grab a 1TB platter hard drive for under 200 bucks
      Obviously, you haven't tried to purchase 1TB of EMC DMX disk lately. HighEnd storage is NEVER cheap. EMC will tell you, "These drives fail less, thereby giving you higher uptime. However, you will pay a premium for them." It also allows them to add yet another layer of storage tiering.

      Also, SSDs, if they have a lower MTBF will enable EMC to cut costs by having fewer CEs out there replacing drives.

  • What about filesystems... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by epiphani (254981) <epiphani@dal. n e t> on Saturday May 24 2008, @02:40PM (#23530516)
    Given that many filesystems are designed specifically with the spinning magnetic disk in mind, what open source filesystems are out there that will work to the advantages of solid state storage? Has anyone started thinking about that one as something to address before the major switches start taking place?

    Or... does solid state storage take care of those oddities in firmware with the whole automatic write leveling technology?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by v1 (525388)
      Driver level can make certain assumptions about the physical drive, such as seek time, and for example, work to decrease disk fragmentation. Fragmentation is very minor issue with SSDs. So there will be a minor performance hit (from maximum possible in the SDD) due to the things the drivers and os do to try to get the most performance out of a HDD.

      The only adaptation I can see is trying to minimize wearing on certain blocks, but from the looks of it the SDD's are being designed with wear leveling in mind

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by kesuki (321456)

          The only adaptation I can see is trying to minimize wearing on certain blocks, but from the looks of it the SDD's are being designed with wear leveling in mind so I doubt even that will matter to the software.

          Actually with proper software you'd probably like to do the opposite - try to wear out certain blocks as fast as possible. This way the lossage is more predictable and rest of the disk is kept in a better shape. Point being that bad sectors aren't really a big deal if you're prepared for those.

          When NAND memory fails, it can fail in such a way as to make the ENTIRE flash memory device unreadable... this is from real world NAND memory devices failing from real world use, all of a sudden not wear leveling seems like a suicidal mode of wear... if the entire chip can short out from a single block failing.

          "In case of a massive damage,

          * If the device is not accessible at all (circuitry failure), no software can even attempt the recovery. Physical intervention is required.

            • Re:What about filesystems... (Score:5, Informative)

              by kesuki (321456) on Saturday May 24 2008, @07:28PM (#23532618) Journal

              When NAND memory fails, it can fail in such a way as to make the ENTIRE flash memory device unreadable... this is from real world NAND memory devices failing from real world use, all of a sudden not wear leveling seems like a suicidal mode of wear... if the entire chip can short out from a single block failing.
              There's 0 reason for a properly designed flash device to fail like that due to wear, leveling or not. That's just shitty engineering.
              "Tunnel injection is the quantum tunneling effect, also called Fowler-Nordheim tunnel injection, when charge carriers are injected to an electric conductor through a thin layer of an electric insulator."

              you should have said 'IANAEE' for i am not an electrical engineer. because the way NAND ram works it is entirely possible for failure to be a complete and total failure of the device, or at least 512 blocks of the device, if it doesn't create a short that prevents the whole device from working.

              first today's flash memory is NAND memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory [wikipedia.org]

              NAND memory is written with tunnel injection, which causes charge carriers to be injected into a conductor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_injection [wikipedia.org]

              Charge carriers "In semiconductor physics, the traveling vacancies in the valence-band electron population (holes) are treated as charge carriers"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_carrier [wikipedia.org]

              So we're using an electric charge, to fill, and create 'electron holes' in a conductor. what could POSSIBLY go wrong, in the real world, rapidly changing if a conductor has electron holes or not, by forcing the electrons in or out of the material ...

              so trying to intentionally wear out a NAND memory chip can cause a severe problem whereby instead of creating an electron hole, you've created a short circuit. "A short circuit (sometimes abbreviated to short or s/c) allows a current to flow along a different path from the one intended." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_circuit [wikipedia.org]
    • JFFS2 for one.

    • I found at [wikipedia.org] least [wikipedia.org] 3 [wikipedia.org] for Linux. I also found some references to Microsoft's "FFS2" and M-System's "TrueFFS", but I can't find any info about them.

    • Re:What about filesystems... (Score:5, Funny)

      by tooyoung (853621) on Saturday May 24 2008, @03:32PM (#23530984)

      Given that many filesystems are designed specifically with the spinning magnetic disk in mind, what open source filesystems are out there that will work to the advantages of solid state storage? Has anyone started thinking about that one as something to address before the major switches start taking place?
      No, no one has even considered that yet. I'll alert the academic world while you clue in the industry.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by 4e617474 (945414)

        Flash drives have been around for a while, you know. And so have the filesystems:

        YAFFS and JFFS2 look to me like they might be showing their age.

        From Wikipedia:

        "YAFFS2 is similar in concept to YAFFS1, and shares much the same code... The main difference is that YAFFS2 needs to jump through significant hoops to meet the "write once" requirement of modern NAND flash.

        YAFFS2 now supports "checkpointing" which bypasses normal mount scanning, allowing very fast mount times. Mileage will vary, but mount times of c. 3 seconds for 2 GB have been reported.

        Measuring mount times in seconds per gigabyte is not encouraging for the design goals we're talking about here. The disadvantages section of the JFFS2 article pretty well speaks for itself, but note

        "All nodes must still be scanned at mount time."

        Overcoming that hurdle was how YAFFS2 even moved up to the seconds per gigabyte range - the introductory paper for LogFS says

        "On the authors notebook, mounting an empty JFFS2 on a 1GiB USB stick takes around 15 minutes. That is a little slower than most users would expect a ïlesystem mount to happen."

        The developer's g

  • SSD will not only be on price parity with high-end Fibre Channel disk drives

    Yeah, right, just what I buy for my home system right now. The really high-end expensive stuff.

    For nearly all of us, this isn't news until SSD is competitive at the consumer disc drive level.

    And competitive means price and projected lifetime. Watching my SSD start dying in pieces after only weeks, or months, isn't current hard drive reliability.

    • Re:Yeah, Right (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Courageous (228506) on Saturday May 24 2008, @03:28PM (#23530924)

      Well. These drives (FC, SCSI, SAS) are 10% of the market, very lucrative, and quite important for data center operations, server rooms, and so forth.

      Projected lifetime for modern SSD drives is now getting to the point where they are more likely to be discarded due to technological obsolescence than they are to significantly deteriorate, BTW.

      The projected intersection curve is further than six years out for SATA SSD price parity. That's an eternity in technological time, which is to say, there is no predicting it.

      Price per unit of storage is by far not the only deciding factor, even in the consumer market. Flash can scale up performance much more quickly than spinning media. You can expect flash performance to more than double annually from here on out, I would say. You would of course be right to be wondering how the SATA and SAS busses will keep up.

      Look at FusionIO (http://www.fusionio.com) to see how flash will accelerate in performance. These devices have 160 internal channels in order to make the bytes flow at the rate they do. You can think of it as a sort of 160-wide RAID-0 striping mechanism.

      $2400 for one card is of course way out of consumer space. However, point: 1) the cost of the flash in the system will drop to a fraction of its current price within two years, and 2) the ASICs on board this device will be "paid for" within the same period, allowing them to charge only a small fraction of their current price.

      Expect other similar products to develop soon.

      When FusionIO proves out the market for these devices--and mark my words, they will--competitors will follow in their footsteps, like bees drawn to honey.

      C//
      • Good point. It'll be a long time though before this stuff is obsolete and we can fish it out of a dumpster.
  • They keep sending out press releases, but when do they plan on making product available?

    I need four of 64GB or more. Price not important, but they must perform well and be reasonably reliable. SAS preferred.

  • not only price, but density (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fermion (181285) on Saturday May 24 2008, @04:14PM (#23531264) Homepage Journal
    If we reflect back on the floppy disks days, we see that it was not only cost, but density, that killed the floppy oh so many years ago. A floppy was no longer useful for installing apps. MS often needed upward of 10 disks to ship an app. While 3 MB was big enough to hold most files, we were entering a period in which one could no longer survive with a single 3.5" disk. The CD-R, then the DVD-RW, made sense as they could replace the floppy, though in many ways at a higher costs, due to their higher density. The fact that CD was cheaper than other optical solutions made it a good choice. What did finally kill the floppy was the available of USB drives for the sneaker net. Though expensive, they too had a density benefit, as well as not requiring additional hardware, other than a USB port which initially were scarce on MS Windows machines, and the drivers buggy.

    I think that density, not price, is going to drive the SSD market as well. We need space on our small computers, and the mechanical solution is not keeping up. I believe this is why Apple went to flash memory for the iPods, although initially they were dedicated to hard drives. My iPhod mini only has 4 gb, the same as the nano that replaced it. The new nanos have more memory than even the EOL minis. The microdrive, though a good tech, were not scaling. The larger physical size hard disks are now up to 160GB, but that is small for modern times in which many of us have a terabyte sitting on our home machine.

    So I think we will pay for SDD prices if they give us more space. The problem right now is that we have more for a SSD drive, and get less space. We pay $1000 to Apple or practically anyone else for 64GB SSD. That is paying money for nothing. Wait until we can buy a Macbook Pro with a terrabyte SSD for $4000, or a Mac Book air with a 250GB SSD for $2000. Then we will be seeing the SSD laptops flying off the shelf.

    Of course for low end machines many will stick with HDD for many years, just like people entered the 21st century still storing things on floppy. Of course this will hasten the downfall of HDD, as the cheap unreliable HDD will take an even bigger share of the market than they have today, and, just like today, users will attribute a high failure rate to a problem with the technology, and not that they chose to buy a cheap hard drive. With the last major mechanical part gone, computer will become much more reliable, just like when the stereos, for better or worse, left vacuum tubes behind.

    I also hope that DVD drive as a standard goes away soon, and applaud Apple for making the Mac book air drive free. The main reason for a dvd drive, other than installing software, is because we cannot rip out DVDs to a more convinent format. I would much rather carry around a couple Flash Drives than a bag of DVDs. It would seem that in not too many years shipping software on USB dongles would be just as cost effective. Already 4GB flash cost less than $10.

    • "Already 4GB flash cost less than $10."

      Yes, but a DVD+R only costs about fifty cents. It will be interesting to watch flash prices.
  • On June 15th, Mtron will start shipping the 1000 series MLC drives. Put these in an array with the right software and you end up with price/GB parity with 36GB 15K 2.5" SAS drives and about 12x the random IO performance.

    HDD Array:

    8 Seagate Savvio 2.5" HDDs: $350ea $2,800
        configured raid-10
    1 SAS raid controller $600
    Total cost for 144 GB $3,400 or $23.61/GB

    SSD Array:

    6 Mtron 1025-32 2.5" SSDs: $290ea $1,740
        configured raid-5
    1 SATA raid controller $250
    MFT Software License $1,250
    Total Cost for 144 GB $3,240 or $22.50/GB

    HDD Performance:
        4K and 8K read IOPS: 250/2000 (single-threaded/multi-threaded)
        4K and 8K write IOPS: 1200

    SSD Performance:
        4K read IOPS: 8000/48000 (single-threaded/multi-threaded)
        8K read IOPS: 6000/36000 (single-threaded/multi-threaded)
        4K write IOPS: 40000
        8K write IOPS: 22000

    These performance numbers are with the MFT driver in place. Without MFT, the 4K random write performance is about 140 IOPS (>250x slower).

    Endurance for these SSDs in this configuration is good enough to overwrite the entire array with random data three times a day (500GB of random updates/day) for about five years.

    These drives make a wicked mail server (EasyCo just moved one of it's mail servers mirrored to MLC flash and the difference is amazing).

    Sorry for the blatant advert, but SSDs are here now.

    Doug Dumitru
    EasyCo LLC
    http://managedflash.com/ [managedflash.com]
    +1 610 237-2000 x2

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