Slashdot Log In
Seagate Announces First SSD, 2TB HDD
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri May 30, 2008 05:42 PM
from the get-with-the-program dept.
from the get-with-the-program dept.
Lucas123 writes "Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said today that the company plans to put out its first solid state disk drive next year as well as a 2TB version of its Barracuda hard disk drive. Watkins also alluded to Seagate's inevitable move from spinning disk to solid state drives, but emphasized it will be years away, saying the storage market is driven by cost-per-gigabyte and though SSDs provide benefits such as power savings, they won't be in laptops in the next few years. A 128GB SSD costs $460, or $3.58 per gigabyte, compared to $60 for a 160GB hard drive, according to Krishna Chander, an analyst at iSuppli. 'It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard drives,' on price and reliability."
Related Stories
[+]
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."
[+]
Seagate Ships Billionth Hard Drive 245 comments
Lucas123 writes "Seagate's first drive, shipped in 1979 was the ST506, which had a capacity of 5MB and cost a cool $1,500 — or $300 per megabyte. Today, a typical Seagate holds 1TB and cost just 1/5000th of a cent ($0.0002) per megabyte. Seagate, which claims to be the first company to ship a billion drives, says all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs." Update: 04/23 14:56 GMT by CT : The quoted fraction is wrong. Someone complain to ComputerWorld. Update: 04/23 15:13 GMT by CT : TY. The site is corrected to say '"just 1/50th of a cent ($0.0002) per megabyte'. The universal equation is once again balanced.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Every news source (Score:5, Informative)
Seagate is announcing two seperate products. One is a SSD and the OTHER is a 2TB hdd.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Every news source (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Every news source (Score:5, Interesting)
Truthfully, I'm really looking forward to hybrid drives with, say 64-128 GB of flash, where all the "load-often, change rarely" data goes, like applications, OS, etc., and 2^N (N >= 8) GB of classic HD storage space for stuff that may need gazillions of writes (browser cache, working documents, SVN repositories, etc.).
In fact, wouldn't it be great if the drive could be smart about it and--over time--identify files that were mostly read-only (iPhoto archives, MP3s) and migrate them to the flash storage area where fast, low-power reads would be a benefit.
While we're dreaming, database engines could even be optimized to read only from the SSD-portion of a hybrid drive if a particular data point had not been written to in over N minutes, or since the last collation (explained later), but would write to the platters, and then during quiet cycles, it could do a collation. The collation would move data which was on the platters, but which did not have a pattern of large volumes of writes back to the SSD volume.
And... I'd like a pony...
Parent
Re:Every news source (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Every news source (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Every news source (Score:4, Interesting)
My HD has 186gb usable, and I'm using 172 of it. (eek...) I bet I only access at most 20 gb of that most of the time. Even making a say, 32gb or 64gb buffer would work great for how I use the computer - I'd be running entirely off the SSD part most of the time.
Most users could probably accommodate a dual drive anyway. One partition for the SSD and one for the HDD. Put your media and other things you don't need access to often but want to have on tap on the HDD.
Parent
SSD Performance (Score:5, Informative)
For 100% read applications SSDs tend to be similar in performance to hard disks when reading linearly, and a lot faster than hard disks when reading randomly. This shows up in linear read speeds of 100 MB/sec for a typical Flash SSD which is "close" to a hard disk. For random 4K reads, Flash SSDs can stomp any hard disk. Most disks are in the 10,000 4K read IOPS range where 15K SAS drives are in the 250 range or 40x slower. So for applications that are 100% read SSDs can be as much as 40x faster, although the average is usually in the range of 15x to 20x.
When you start writing to Flash things get interesting. Flash is really designed for large, linear, aligned, writes. With most drives, you can get maximum write throughput only if you write exactly aligned with the drives internal erase blocks. Thus you can write exactly 2 megabytes on exact 2 megabyte drive boundaries and get 100% of the theoretical write throughput of the drive. Unfortunately, no application acts like this, so you are at the mercy of the file system and Flash controller to turn your smaller, probably random, and probably mis-aligned writes into what the drive can handle. The net impact of this is that good Flash SSDs have 4K random write IOPS in the 120s which is 1/2 the speed of a 15K SAS drive. I have measured Flash SSD with 4K write IOPS with values like 135, 120, 64, 43, 24, 13, 4.0, and 3.3.
This is why Flash SSD performance is so hard to judge. The random write performance can suck up the available "drive time" and dig a system deep into dirty buffer flushing. We talked with one Dell laptop user that described their system becoming "unusable" while an Outlook indexing operations was randomly updating a big file. Unusable in this case was 2+ minutes for to bring up task manager.
These random writes also have a real impact on the wear of the drive. Every time you seek a write, you basically chew up a write/erase cycle, even if the write is only 4K long. If you look at a drive that claims 50 GB/day for 10 years, this is 50 GB of linear writes on exact erase block boundaries. If you write 4K randomly, the 50 GB really means 25,000 4K writes or 100 Megabytes of random writes.
The solution to this is to not write randomly to the drive. There are file systems designed for Flash that address these issues. These are typically called "Log File Systems". Unfortunately, there is no generally available file system really designed for performance. In Linux the LogFS options are really tuned for small memory small storage systems and for hardware where the flash chips are directly accessible. They do help drive wear a lot, but they are just not tuned for Gigabytes of space or database crunching performance.
Another solution is my companies product called MFT (Managed Flash Technology) which is a software block mapping layer that runs on the host. It gives you the random write performance benefits and wear benefits of a LogFS while allowing you to use whatever file system you wish. MFT was developed on 2.6 Linux and has been ported to Windows. With MFT, the same drives that do 25 4K random write IOPS usually measure over 10,000. The linear speed of the drive is still equal to a hard disk, but the random speed is now closer to symmetric with reads and writes. Thus jobs like updating databases can literally run 20x faster than the fastest hard disks.
In the end, Flash SSDs will find specific markets initially. I can say with certainty that they won't get used for off-line backups or storing/edit large quantities of HD video. But give them databases or file systems with lots of small files, and they can really smoke a hard drive.
Parent
Re:Every news source (Score:4, Informative)
With modern wear leveling algorithms, you can write to an SSD continuously at its maximum write rate for about fifty years before you wear it out. They are, if anything, much more suitable for rapidly changing data than a regular hard drive.
Parent
Re:Every news source (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, I saw the headline in my RSS feed and misread it the same way everyone else did. I expected the next story to be about the new finance company Seagate was opening to provide mortgages on 2TB SSDs.
Parent
Oblig Simpsons (Score:3, Funny)
Bart: A thousand dollars. But your ad says "no money down".
Hutz: Oh, they got this all screwed up. [corrects ad with felt-marker]
Bart: So you don't work on a contingency basis?
Hutz: No, money down. Oops, I shouldn't have the Bar Association logo here either.
Oh, no.. Here comes the nostalgia again.. (Score:5, Funny)
-jcr
Re:Oh, no.. Here comes the nostalgia again.. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Oh, no.. Here comes the nostalgia again.. (Score:5, Interesting)
An extra 2Mb of RAM came with that drive, for a system-wide total of 2.5Mb. Of course, with such a limited system, all I could do was run office and desktop publishing software, paint programs, 3-d modeling and ray-tracing software, and the latest games like Turrican, Lemmings, and the Indiana Jones adventure game.
It's amazing to see how far we've come these past 18 years.
Parent
Re:Oh, no.. Here comes the nostalgia again.. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also incredible how little we archived during this period. It really amazes me that it takes more than 20 seconds to change your IP address (on windows) or 30 seconds to load the system preferences (in vista on hardware wich comes with it). It also applies to other platforms: Word 6.0 for DOS was snappier than Office 2008 on the Mac (comparing a 25 MHz 486 without a mathematical co-processor and a C2D running at 2GHz with a very advanced inst
Re:Oh, no.. Here comes the nostalgia again.. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Me Too! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's so nice to see a company that fought this at every step pretend to embrace it.
Re:Me Too! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Me Too! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Me Too! (Score:5, Informative)
Separately, it's nice to know that analysts agree with research I've done that it's only 4 years before SSD surpasses HD, at least in 2.5 inch drives. I've been comparing the relative price improvement of hard disk prices to flash and its pretty easy to estimate a crossover point.
You can have a look at my data (charts) and conclusions here. http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashdiskcomparo.html [mattscomputertrends.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised if they'd be shopping for a Flash supplier or at least a cooperation right now.
Re:Me Too! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say they're being smart. Right now Seagate DOES have market recognition for storage. A proper, forward thinking CEO(I know, rare), should always be thinking on how to adapt to evolving markets.
Much like how, when IBM started, they were a tabulating machine company. If they had tried to stay that, they wouldn't be around today.
Much like how, if you start digging into them, you'll find many oil companies are busily attempting to become 'energy' companies, diversifying into solar, wind, biological fuel production, etc...
Sure, right now SSD doesn't make financial sense in most applications. But it's out there, it's selling. It doesn't take much work to look at a graph comparing SSD vs HD cost per gig for various form factor hard drives. It doesn't take much to look at computer usage and realize that the majority of laptop users aren't filling up their existing hard drives. It doesn't take much to look at the dropping cost of a usefully large SSD vs the more or less constant 'minimum cost' low capacity HD. Just looking at these factors a competent CEO will realize that Seagate could be relegated to special purpose needs, and maybe even bankrupt from the loss of the mass market.
Parent
Re:Me Too! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm all for adjusting to your environment, but there's a difference between being a leader and innovator, and a gadfly-turned-also-ran. Not saying I wouldn't buy their products, but even when they were saying, "never never never" (wish I could cite a source), I know it was BS BS BS.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Price / Performance isn't always king (Score:5, Insightful)
For the average consumer, SSD's aren't yet the way to go, but for what I'd bet is a good proportion of the
$460 for 128G SSD? Hell Yeah! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Tricky miss (Score:3, Insightful)
The false dichotomy is that it's an either/or thing.
There will be SSD components with high speed and low power and their price/GB will decrease very quickly. Largest capacities will always be expensive. For a long time they will cost more than magnetic media, but it probably won't always be so. Their speed and reliability will improve as vendors build out the drive intelligence that abstracts the physical media from the logical media and parallelize atomic access with internal RAID to compensate for the
Re:Price / Performance isn't always king (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel has better performance at the top-end right now, but that doesn't mean they win performance-per-dollar.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen the 2.0 Ghz X2 go up to 3.0 Ghz on air cooling alone. If you're giving the benefit of overclocking to one, you have to give it to the other.
And one only costs five times as much as the other.
I simply see market for a hybrid drive (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I simply see market for a hybrid drive (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:I simply see market for a hybrid drive (Score:4, Informative)
The only hybrid drive I see is an 80 gig seagate though, although there are likely more offerings.
Parent
Re:I simply see market for a hybrid drive (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously you'd need to write some good software to get full use of it, but the same is true for an all in one with any intellligence (i.e logfiles are low-use but deserve to be on solid state since it means not spinning up the disk for idle activity)
It's not too different from the old scene setup of
New release comes out, it hits
No reason you couldn't do similar on a desktop with one "fast&small" and one "slow&large". It's all about being able to define what goes where, and preferably having software take care of that for you.
Parent
Summary and article fail at simple comparisons.... (Score:3, Informative)
Is it that fucking hard to include the cost per gigabyte of the current hard drives ($0.375/GB for the example given)? Why quote one $/GB figure if you can't be bothered to include the other?
Analysts are dumb (Score:4, Interesting)
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM. Cache: 32MB. Form Factor: 3.5". $184.99
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM. Cache: 32MB. Form Factor: 3.5". $209.99
Next year these will be 4TB, 8TB, 16TB? $100-$200 range. Call me on it; by December 2009 (i.e. in 2009, next year) it'll happen. Where will we see the SSD price point?
We would disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
- SSDs aren't as vibration sensitive (both will not take a bullet, but only SSD can likely survive a normal drop of 2M on to concrete)
- SSDs don't have the temperature/altitude constraints
- SSDs don't have latency and no rise/shutdown time for green needs, in fact, they use hardly any power at all
- SSDs are generally faster, although there are algorithms needed in flash to prevent bucket overuse because reads are almost infinite, but writes are not
- SSDs take less in terms of precious metals and present fewer QA problems
- No electromechanicals to wear out.
The price point? Going down. It's an obvious solution to a long time problem. Magnetic versus flash storage will tend to favor flash, as magnetism decays sooner than flash will-- when flash is written to correctly.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
While it's true, on average, they may use marginally less power, I think you'd be surprised at how much juice these SSDs can use up. Typical hard drives use most of their power spinning up the platter, and then momentum helps keep them going at a lower draw. SSDs also have a tendency to get rather warm, along with the CPU and RAM chips inside the machine. Overall, I still think SSDs are prefera
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Analysts are dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Rotating disks get closer to physical limits and designers are planning for some big technology changes that will have an effect on cost. Check out Mark Kryder's video presentation on future disk technologies at CMU (I don't have the URL handy.)
2. SSD technology can go up with Moore's law for the foreseeable future.
3. We're getting to the point where SSDs reach practical sizes. I don't need 1TB in my laptop - I could live with 64GB quite well (I only have 120GB right now.) So, in a year or two I can probably get an SSD for my typical usage pattern at a decent price. At that point the volume for SSDs will grow dramatically and rotating disks will be used mostly for very large capacity and/or very low $/GB. Less profitable => fewer engineering dollars => slower density growth. Just what happened to tape a decade ago.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Finally, the interface has nothing to do with the re
Re:Analysts are dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
SSDs will probably take over in the consumr market (Score:5, Interesting)
So what will happen is pretty obvious. Laptops are going to push SSD storage into the mainstream, giving it the critical mass needed to start the research bandwagon rolling, and 5-10 years after that happens hard drives will become the 'new' tape storage and most production systems will be using SSDs.
Even more pointedly, with power costs being the premium concern for data centers these days, and the hard drive being the only thing left in the computer that can't be engineered down to near 0 power consumption when idle (short of spinning it down, which has its own problems), my expectation is that large commercial concerns will see a huge cost benefit to using SSD storage despite the higher front-end cost of purchasing it.
-Matt
strange. I'd very much consider.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Cost/IOs/s (Score:3, Insightful)
Flash will beat hard drives there much sooner than it will beat hard drives in simple $/GB.
Flash has fast reads and slow writes. Sun is promising flash drives with 25% of the space reserved for bad block remapping, and a huge amount of supercapacitor-backed write cache. They are promising to release this in SFF HD form factor with a SAS interface, and SO-DIMM form factor with a presumably proprietary interface.
Even if Sun breaks its promise, as is typical for them, someone else will come out with the product.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or the MacBook Air, or the Lenovo x300.
Re:Eee PC not a laptop ? (Score:4, Interesting)
manufacturers avoid the term laptop nowadays because of the fact that using them on your lap is strongly discouraged due to heat related issues (both the possibility of a hot laptop burning you and the fact that being on a soft uneven surface can interfere with ventilation on some models)
imo most laptops fit into one of a few categories
* craptops: built with price and headline specs (cpu mainly) as the main design consideration theese are popular with first time laptop buyers. They come to regret it when they run into the reliability and build quality issues. I don't see theese going solid state any time soon.
* ordinary decent laptops: (lattitudes, thinkpads macbooks) etc. Theese cost more than the craptops and that money mainly buys you better build quality. I see solid state being a build time option on theese in the near future but I don't see it being the default for cost reasons.
* desktop replacements, high performance and big screens but heavy and bulky,
* ultraportables: (smaller vaios, librettos, EEEPCs, OLPCs etc) many of theese are already using solid state drives.
Parent