SSD Price Drops Signaling End of Spinning Media? 646
gjt writes "When Intel and OCZ recently announced new 'affordable' Solid State Disk drives — offering a meager 32-40GB — we initially yawned. But, then we took a closer look at the press releases and the in-progress research and development in SSD technology and opened our eyes. While the new drives aren't affordable on a cost per gigabyte basis for everyone, it does set a precedent — and most importantly a barometer price of $100. And it really does start the death clock for hard drive technology."
...Or an arms race (Score:5, Insightful)
I think HDD will continue to stay enough ahead of SSD in raw capacity that it will stay relevant for a long time. When SSD is affordable at 200 GB then HDD will already be affordable at 2 TB, etc.
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:4, Interesting)
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Essentially: I expect my next PC to have an SSD for important program files and data, and HDD(s) for big data files which don't need fast random access (e.g. video files). Or I'll offload them to an OpenSolaris server with a bunch of HDDs in a RAIDZ.
The idea that cheaper SSDs will kill HDD is silly when most peoples' storage needs expand to meet whatever they can afford to buy. Certainly they are likely to kill HDDs in simple home and office systems, but for everything else HDDs will continue to be vastly c
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Re:...Or an arms race (Score:4, Funny)
...and Floppies are the new punch cards...and punch cards are the new abacuses...and abacuses are the new ...what? Fingers and toes?
And the middle finger is the new raised eyebrow.
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I think part of the confusion here is that you're confusing the word "backup" with the word "archive". They're not the same thing, though a lot of IT people try to use backups as archives, which is why folks cling to archaic technology like tape.
Hard-drives aren't intended for long-term storage, but that's okay because backups don't have to last long-term. Backups are short-term, by definition. They just have to last long enough to guarantee that you have two or three complete backups of the data, prefer
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I thought the same thing, which is why I bought a used 10-tape Exabyte library for my home network. And then I found CrashPlan and its ilk (MozyBackup, etc), and realized:
Statistically, yes, tapes are more reliable than disk - but not perfectly reliable. Which means you need to check them every once in a while to make sure you still have the backups you think you do. And if you're going to fetch the tapes once in a while, it's not any harder to fetch the disks. And if you're fetching the disks every once
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Dunno about magentic leakage as tapes aren't really my area (mainly because I hate the damned things :))
Personally, I don't really think people using a single tape drive without a robot/library count as "enterprisey" enough for my blood - if I had a single drive, I too would use a nearline HDD-based storage system to keep the last few versions close at hand so there's no need for the rigamarole of spooling through a tape to restore just one file. We implmented just such a "on the cheap" system in a previous
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200GB ought to be enough for anybody.
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:5, Insightful)
SSDs will replace all the small hard drives.
When you get down to small enough drive SSDs will be cheaper per Gig than HDs.
Right now you can buy a 1TB drive for right around $90.
But you can not buy a 5ooGB drive for $45 or a 250GB drive for $22.50. There is a limit to how cheap you can make a harddrive.
At some point SSDs in the 120Gb range will be cheaper than spinning platters. It is probably close right now.
When that happens you will see SSDs replace HDs in that range. That range will keep creeping up and up.
So HDDs will be what you get when you need a lot of storage. Maybe they will eventually be used only for externals and NASs.
Eventually 1 TB SSDs will be cheaper than HDDs but for all I know we will have 100TB HDs for $90.
BTW as someone that paid several hundred dollars for a 30MB HD in 1984 the idea of a sub hundred dollar 100TB HDD just seems like a matter of time.
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how long it will be before SSDs lose the traditional 3.5" form factor. There's no reason why you couldn't say, drop the guts into a PCI form factor. That cast aluminum enclosure is probably $3-5 of a product that probably costs $45 to make. With less heat and mass requirements it's likely we'll start seeing naked chips on a breadboard to save 8-9% of the manufacturing cost.
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:4, Informative)
(most SSD are 2.5", not 3.5")
PCIe "hard drives" already exist.
Here's a 1TB model: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227500 [newegg.com]
There are others in 250GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities.
I doubt that the cost goes down much though. The PCIe interface chip isn't free, and neither is the card bracket. The PC board itself is also much larger, and has to be thicker than those used on most hard drives. The cost differences are probably a wash.
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, I was just talking about something that mounted in the PCI slot and was held in with a single screw like an old school sound card. There'd be no pin connectors interfacing directly with the motherboard; it'd still have a SATA jack to wire it to the motherboard.
Hell, there's no reason why they couldn't just integrate a 20 or 40gb SSD right into the motherboard. Talk about a microcomputer! Lenovo has some pretty tiny nettops nowadays, I imagine the physical dimensions of the hard drive more or less doubles the thickness of the unit. With a different form factor they could probably reduce the size of the packaging even further.
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Because otherwise it might run too fast? The SATA interface is the big bottleneck holding SSD speeds down. If you put the whole thing directly on the PCIe bus it would be a lot happier. Fitting a fast SSD into a PCIe slot and then tying it to SATA is just cruel.
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And a waste of a PCIe slot.
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I reckon we'll need a couple more years of SSD acceptance before this becomes mainstream - for one thing, we'll need an OS-agnostic method of using PCIe cards as bootable block devices, which will probably take a while to work out. Heck, I'm not even sure if FusionIO is bootable yet (I think they're working on it). And then there's all those filesystems in use that all assume they're on spinning discs.
SSD will be made of awesome when this happens though - SATA has been a bottleneck for flash for quite a whi
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the scary thing is now that we have 64 bit processors it could be possible to just map the flash right to the address space. I could see a netbook with a flash drive right on the motherboard.
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I believe mainframes already do the whole memory page == disc block thing, but I'm not an expert.
I asked the same question on /. a while back regarding more common operating systems and got this response [slashdot.org] from m.dillon, which seems to indicate it's not really feasible unless the whole software stack is (very) radically altered, or the performance delta between memory and storage becomes alot smaller.
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He is correct but that is not what I was thinking.
The OS would know that it is flash and protect it from general access. The applications would still access it through a device driver but instead of going through an IO chip and the sata bus the OS would handle the IO on the memory bus.
The way things happen now is that when you do a disk read the data is copied from the drive across the bus and into the controller chip. The controller chip then does a direct memory access to a block of memory that you have t
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Figured you were a programmer (I'm an infrastructure guy so have only a murky view of the internal workings of software) - part of the question about the apps was why two different speeds of memory would be an issue - I figured it'd be bad practice for an app to assume that it'd always be able to map memory at 20GB/s or whatever, but I don't really know the ins and outs of low(ish)-level programming.
I figured it'd work in a similar way to file cache now - a map of blocks/tables is given to the OS to use for
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The problem with mapping mass storage to memory at the application level becomes one of locking and threads.
You will have a very difficult time with any threaded applications if you just do a map to memory. Locking goes from being a real pain to a total freaking nightmare.
In effect traditional disk io acts like a message passing system which is much simpler to deal with when doing threaded applications.
The real issue I think was a failure to communicate between you and m.dillion.
m.dillion was thinking of th
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:4, Informative)
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What you will probably see soon is a new mini-pci standard. The current mini-pci standard has a USB port as part of the standard. Once they start putting USB 3.0 on there it will be trivial to put a USB 3.0 Flash drive chip on a card. You may even see a card that is both an SSD and WiFi which would be great for netbook makers.
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:4, Insightful)
I think HDD will continue to stay enough ahead of SSD in raw capacity that it will stay relevant for a long time. When SSD is affordable at 200 GB then HDD will already be affordable at 2 TB, etc.
Ah, but when 200 GB of storage is $20, no hard drive will ever be able to be that cheap. There is a fixed minimum cost for building a hard drive. Spindle, motor, etc. It's about $70. When "enough storage" for the average user, let's say 200 GB costs less than that base cost, almost all new storage sold will be SSD devices due to their overall advantages, especially in a battery-powered machine (which are the majority of all computers sold today).
This will completely gut the market for hard drives and R&D into them will cease. All money will move to SSDs and they will improve even more rapidly.
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This will completely gut the market for hard drives and R&D into them will cease. All money will move to SSDs and they will improve even more rapidly.
Indeed: no-one will ever need more than 200GB of storage.
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:4, Informative)
There is a fixed minimum cost for building a hard drive. Spindle, motor, etc. It's about $70.
Not quite. A shop near my house (Rome, Italy) has 320GB drives on sale at 35.4 EUR (roughly $48) including 20% sales tax - and this is just the first I bothered to check, it's a street price, it includes their own profit, and it's a 3.5" unit. When 3.5" go obsolete once and for all, the 2.5" drives will stop costing a premium and actually become cheaper, most likely.
So - while there definitely is a price level where mechanical units stop making sense, it's nowhere near $70 and probably it will keep shrinking over time.
Anyway - the entire point is moot. A sum of other factors (weight, power consumption, heat generation and tolerance, shock tolerance) will most likely push hard disks away in the lower capacity ranges.
Re:...Or an arms race (Score:5, Funny)
A lot of things can change in 10 years. Just think back to the year 2000: computers only ran at 2-3 GHz and Linux was just getting into the mainstream!
Price isn't everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Price is only the first hurdle for SSDs. There's also the issue of reliability, and reports from the field suggest that SSD reliability is highly variable, and in no case as good over the long term as hard drives. That will probably change in time, but they're not there yet.
Re:Price isn't everything (Score:4, Interesting)
Where did you find reports from the field? All I've seen are lab studies and guesses.
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SSD reliability is highly variable, and in no case as good over the long term as hard drives
SSDs are much like anything else, you get what you pay for.
Buy the cheapest hard drive you can find; it won't last 5 years. Same for CD-R media and SSDs.
It's a pretty safe bet that under normal workloads, a good SSD will outlive just about any HDD.
I'm going to have to agree, especially considering I've just recently suffered a premature HDD failure. If you read the customer specs for any of the larger capacity platter drives, you really notice the failure rates: failures at the 3-6 month mark should be one in 100,000, not a one in 100 (or less).
Re:Price isn't everything (Score:4, Informative)
Google, being a very big consumer of HD's, has published such data.
3% die in the first 3 months, another 4% die by the end of the 1st year.
8% more die in year 2.
Maybe you have missed the fact that these monster capacity drives actually suck in the reliability department? yeah.. 3 out of 100 convert themselves into worthless crap within 90 days.
Re:Price isn't everything (Score:4, Informative)
Careful on Your Terminology There (Score:3, Insightful)
SSD Price Drops Signaling End of Spinning Media?
Blu Ray and CDs are still "spinning media" aren't they? I think I've seen many holographic storage disc products (touted to be THE FUTURE) that were spinning as well. I agree that our mechanical media may be just atop the apex or turning point but our non-mechanical disc based media is most likely set to be a some form of spinning disc [wikipedia.org] for at least a few years longer. If the article thinks that movies and albums will switch to SSD based distribution, I just don't see it happening real soon or even now.
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Blu Ray and CDs are still "spinning media" aren't they?
To be replaced with network-accessed or network-streamed material. Read-only rotary optical media will be a "way back" story our children will tell our grandchildren. (In other words, my 4-year-old daughter will tell HER 4-year old daughter "I used to watch Dora the Explorer on DVDs.")
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CDs are tiny... ~12 full CDs will fit on a $30 USB thumb drive. Blu-Ray isn't all that big, either... ~40 Blu-Ray movies on a $100 HDD?
Optical media will succeed only if densities can continue to increase, all the while the pressing technology remains fairly simple. As soon as Disc+ yields / speeds are low enough that writing data to Flash
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Streaming video is great for a computer screen or an SD TV. But streaming enough pixels to fill a 1080p screen requires a lot of bandwidth. Blu-ray spec is 54Mbps at the low end.
While some people may be lucky enough to have that in download speed, most don't and upload speeds like that are a long way off.
Nikon F6 and FM10 (Score:3, Interesting)
There are only two advantages SSD has over spinning media at this time: Access speed and Durability. Storage space is still not up to par, and cost is definitely a weak point. However, technology progresses and we're hitting the limits of the current hard disk technology. SSD technology is definitely the future of most personal storage.
But it won't replace it in all areas. There are still "obsolete" technologies in widespread use due to technical superiority over perceived convenience. No one is going to say digital cameras are lousy, but compared to film, they are simply outmatched. Where is Velvia for digital? Where is Kodachrome? These films have no equal in the digital world except as poorly implemented filters in Photoshop.
Spinning media is going to be with us for a while, and I expect, like film, that eventually prices will go back up and this technology will be a specialty market targeted at high-end users and professionals.
This just in! (Score:5, Insightful)
Helicopters signal the end of automobiles, just as soon as their poor $$/mile traveled ratio reaches parity, but you can buy helicopters from Air Hog right now!
Solar panels signal the end of nuclear power AND the oil industry, just as soon as their poor $$/watt ratio reaches parity! But you can get a solar powered calculator RIGHT NOW!
Can I be a tech pundit yet?
Re:This just in! (Score:5, Insightful)
Helicopters signal the end of automobiles, just as soon as their poor $$/mile traveled ratio reaches parity, but you can buy helicopters from Air Hog right now!
Solar panels signal the end of nuclear power AND the oil industry, just as soon as their poor $$/watt ratio reaches parity! But you can get a solar powered calculator RIGHT NOW!
Can I be a tech pundit yet?
Yeah, and LCD's signal the end for CRT's...
Oh wait.
Re:This just in! (Score:5, Funny)
Dammit man, I'm a slashdot troll, not a market researcher!
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Perhaps I failed at properly representing my point.
There is always some new technology signaling the end of current technology. There are always some hurdles that remain before this technology overtakes current tech because otherwise, well, it already would have.
Apparently, there is also always a market for tech writers who can sensationalize incremental price drops in consumer tech. HARD DRIVES WERE HERE TO STAY, FOREVER, UNTIL THESE NEW AMAZING PRICE DROPS HAVE FINALLY OPENED OUR EYES AND STARTED THIS AMA
Who really needs SSDs for Porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean really, who needs an expensive big SSD for your porn collection? Unless you have 12 monitors running porn simulcasting...SSD speeds are really only needed for heavily accessed files. HDDs offer cheap storage for those not-so-often used files. The solution is relatively inexpensive, and here today
Interesting assumptions (Score:3, Insightful)
The article seems to assume that a typcial laptop user needs a 120Gig harddisk. I don't think that's true. I can most certainly live with a 20Gig to 40Gig harddisk in a laptop. As a matter of fact, my current laptop (3 year old AMD Turion with "120Gig" HD) has two parts: about 16Gig fro WinXP MCE and the remaining 100Gig for Ubuntu. The 16Gig has all the productivity apps I need + 1 game (Portal), which still leaves me 2Gig free for data. If I didn't have the game, I'd have ~8Gig free for data. For typcial data like word processing documents and the like that is more than enough. It is perfectly usable for day to day tasks. (The Ubuntu part is my playground, but it could live just as wel on a 16Gig partition)
If you enter digital pictures into the landscape, it does change a bit. Still, that's still a lot of pictures. Besides, you don't want all your pictures on the move. They're much safer at home on server and/or NAS.
Music you say? We're talking about "needing"... You don't "need" music on your laptop, unless that's your profession, but that doesn't make you a typcial user.
While I don't think I'm going to shell out 100€ for a 32Gig SDD, because I'm a cheap bastard and what I have works, I could most certainly live with a 32Gig disk in my laptop.
Re:Interesting assumptions (Score:5, Informative)
Typical users keep music on their computer.
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Re:Interesting assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
Music you say? We're talking about "needing"... You don't "need" music on your laptop, unless that's your profession, but that doesn't make you a typcial user.
Fail.
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Definitely agree here. The vast majority of 'average Joe' computers that I come across have a 160-500GB hard drive, of which they've generally used less than 20-25GB, including all of their apps, music, etc. Unless they have an absolutely massive music collection or like to play a whole bunch of high-end games, a 40-80GB SSD is PLENTY.
Even a more tech-oriented person like myself doesn't need a ton of space. I keep all of my files on a server at home, which I access from my other computers when I want som
32-40 GB isn't bad (Score:3, Interesting)
While most computers come with bigger disks (because the cost of making spinning disks makes the marginal cost bigger, and bigger numbers are always easier to sell), I've had 30-40 GB Linux setups on dual-boot machines where the primary was Windows, and never really had space problems. And lots of the things that eat up space on consumer machines (like video) are stuff that is better on a hard disk anyway. So I could easily see computers that aren't heavily used for video or similar applicaitons going to SSDs if 32-40 GB SSD are affordable, and computers with a 32-40 GB primary SSD as well as an HDD, where the HDD is mainly used for things where sequential transfer speed rather than random access time is key. The trick for the latter is getting a good configuration/UI setup that makes it "just work" for the most common applications without the user manually choosing locations (mapping locations appropriately, and maybe implementing MIME-type-based defaults for download locations), while giving power users precise control.
Damned fast, worth the price (Score:4, Insightful)
I received a 128 Gb Kingston SSDnow as a gift from a friend, to put in my laptop. The laptop had a 320 Gb hard drive, so I've had to not lug 2 years of photos around, but it's well worth it because this this is damned fast. Things that had 10 second times now are sub-second. The thing boots Windows 7 in less than 10 seconds.
Capacity is nice, but once you get past 40Gb or so, you only need it to store images and things in bulk. It's like having the speed of a SAN in a laptop. SSD is an order of magnitude faster as far as the user experience goes, and if you can get one for less than $200, it's well worth doing, IMHO.
Once the end users see this in action, the price/Gb won't matter to them, because responsiveness is the name of the game.
Not so fast. (Score:5, Informative)
Don't be fooled, people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not so fast. (Score:5, Informative)
I'll edit the article later. For now...
- Wear leveling used on flash-based SSDs...
Oops! Wear leveling is done on HDDs too. And it isn't a disadvantage: it is a solution.
- More expensive, lower capacity
Don't need to address that, since that is the topic of the article...
- Asymmetric read vs. write performance
Oops! Platter drives have this problem too!
- Requires TRIM
Solved.
- Limited lifetimes
Funny, that's considered the major downside to platter drives. Anyway, this is the same as the first point.
- Performance of SSDs degrades with use.
Solved. See TRIM. Note that this is also a problem on platter drives.
- SATA-based SSDs generally exhibit much slower write speeds.
This one doesn't even make sense.
- DRAM-based SSDs
Aren't what we are talking about, so that's irrelevant.
Re:Not so fast. (Score:4, Informative)
- Wear leveling used on flash-based SSDs...
Oops! Wear leveling is done on HDDs too. And it isn't a disadvantage: it is a solution.
Wear-leveling is done for bad sectors on a HDD, not as standard practice.
- More expensive, lower capacity
Don't need to address that, since that is the topic of the article...
- Asymmetric read vs. write performance
Oops! Platter drives have this problem too!
Wrong. I just ran a benchmark and saw widely varying performance based on sector size and sequential vs random, but the reads and writes were the same speeds. I tested all 3 of my HDDs. If this is true, [citation needed]
- Requires TRIM
Solved.
- Limited lifetimes
Funny, that's considered the major downside to platter drives. Anyway, this is the same as the first point.
- Performance of SSDs degrades with use.
Solved. See TRIM. Note that this is also a problem on platter drives.
These two are related. SSDs may last longer than HDDs for certain use environments (space?) and types (maybe even a typical user) but they're definitely not a given. Try to defrag a MLC drive a few times and it'll be dead in a week (yes I know you don't need to defrag a SSD, but there are processes that can mimic it). And every HDD I've owned (dozens) for the past 15 years is still spinning, though I suppose I may be lucky. And a SSD will have cells go bad as a consequence of the technology, while a bad sector on a HDD is a fault. If a HDD goes bad, it's due to mechanical failure of the supporting systems, not degradation of the media itself.
--
Look, SSDs are great. I love coding on one because compiles are wicked fast. But they are not ready to replace HDDs. And they're not the panacea you're making them out to be. Like literally everything else, you pick the right tool for the job. I'll keep my backups and my movies and music and 11 days of recorded TV on my 2TBs of spinning media, and my OS, applications, and code on a smaller 128GB SSD.
HDDs are Done When Google Says They Are Done (Score:5, Interesting)
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This article claims Google is using Intel SSDs [informationweek.com]. There's no source though, and Google declines to comment. Oh well.
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A few test installations does not constitute a wholesale change in direction, but they do serve as portents of the future.
Disks are dying -- AGAIN... (Score:5, Insightful)
But somehow, the rotating storage business manages to innovate its way back to relevance -- Winchester technology, thin film heads, headerless architectures, increased spindle speeds, bigger caches, perpendicular recording, 4k sectors, continuing advances in encoding and ECC, continuing advances in media -- the advances keep coming.
And whatever happened to bubble memory, anyway? Wasn't that supposed to save the day and obsolete rotating storage once and for all? Isn't that what Intel promised us?
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Insightful)
In 5 years, people will still be maintaining COBOL systems.
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Depends on the purpose, really. As the basis for your OS, the number of writes might be an issue, but for general user data it's less so. I can see a trend developing in smaller hard drives to carry the heavy loads while data which doesn't require constant access is pushed onto increasingly larger SSD, and of course the move away from desktops to laptops and notebooks will drive this forward too.
Having said that, for home media servers it's not unusual to have several TB of linked hard drives, until SSD can
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Depends on the purpose, really. As the basis for your OS, the number of writes might be an issue, but for general user data it's less so.
This sounds kind of backward to me. The advantage of SSD over HDD is speed (especially seek time), but only the OS really benefits from reduced seek time, and what benefits the most is the pagefile, which gets written often. Only in certain circumstances user data would benefot from reduced seek time mostly video editing etc. Movie files not intended for editing, Office documents, audio files and photos won't benefit from reduced seek time, but SSDs will be more expensive per gigabyte than HDDs for some ti
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, if you really want to compare apples to apples, measure MTBF.
Oh, and let's not forget the SSD's far superior ability to decay gracefully.
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Pity the lesson of Y2K went unheeded - where every COBOL programmer was paid whatever they asked to fix their code, but after should have all been taken out to a field and shot in the head.
Why shoot the programmers? Why not shoot the managers too ignorant to modernize their code base?
To get back on topic, I see spinning drives as the new backup or large file storage medium. You boot off your SSD and keep most of your files there, but anything you want a backup copy of or anything large enough to not need fast access, like movies, pictures, and music get stored on the HDD.
Re:In 5 years (Score:4, Interesting)
Tape vs. Spindle (Score:3, Informative)
The price per GB is one concern, reliability and data transfer rate are two others. There are more - thermal considerations/power consumption, portability, media life (bit rot).
Most people have storage tiers - you can have fast/slow JBODs ready and waiting to accept and retrieve data, incorporating slower, offline tape which is SAN-connected, and managed by a robot, which can be transported via station wagon for great justice.
Price-wise, LTO-4 cartridges hold 800GB at a cost of around US$35, which also req
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1.5 TB drives have just been advertised this week for less than $100.
For another 50 I can get a SATA (eSATA/USB) cradle that lets me hot-swap drives, to add as many as I want.
Tape has it's uses, small time backup for lots of data is not one of them.
Re:I think so. (Score:4, Informative)
More than two years ago the balance shifted. It is now cheaper to build massive storage servers with SATA RAID in-house and off-site and backup to both than to put a Tape Library in your office and rotate tapes off-site.
This is true even when you assume $0 for transporting tapes and free off-site storage.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I'll question the more reliable part. Despite having owned way more harddiscs in the last decade that I've owned even tape media (tape was a backup solution only for some years), I had more unreadable tapes than unreadable hdds.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'm doing this already, it works bloody well. I have my OS and Programs installed on a 120GB SSD, which sits around 50% utilisation and use NTFS junctions (aka symlinks) to map storage for stuff that doesn't need superfast seek speed (aka data) onto a group of 1.5TB drives. It takes a little management, so isn't quite ready for the average user yet - but you do effectively get something like 5TB of online disk space combined with SSD performance.
Interestingly, i've found on Windows 7 that by running OS/Prog
Re:In 5 years (Score:4, Interesting)
Which keeps longer if you stick it on the shelf and forget about it?
If you're thinking about backup, you should be concerned about long periods of time. 20 years at the bare minimum. Reports are that DVDs don't last that long. Disks freeze up and need expensive repair to recover the data. How do SSDs stack up here. (Don't judge by current capacity, we're in the very early days yet.)
P.S.: *I* don't know. If you do, I'd like to hear your answer.
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Informative)
Pity the lesson of Y2K went unheeded - where every COBOL programmer was paid whatever they asked to fix their code, but after should have all been taken out to a field and shot in the head.
You don't remember the days of limited storage, do you? Those 2 extra bytes times 100000 records * 20 date fields was 1/10 of your drive back then.
Now get off my lawn!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
More significantly, long-term storage would run you $0.10 per byte per month. Those extra two bytes times 100,000 records times 20 date fields would run the bank a half-million dollars a year in increased data archiving costs.
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Insightful)
The initial assumption here is that there was a design flaw in their code. It wasn't a design flaw; the code was simply never designed to be running for this long. In some cases of very old code, it wasn't practical to use a 4 digit date when the code was written. In some cases the programmers warned well in advance that it would need to be fixed but that costs money and business don't willy nilly spend money unless they have to spend money.
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, the ignorance of youth. Computers were over fifty years old in Y2K, and your cell phone is more powerful a computer than any built in the fifties. Hell, a Hallmark card is more powerful and sophisticated. They used two digits for years because they had to. There simply wasn't enough data storage (which oddly makes this otherwise offtopic comment on topic). You take your terrabyte disk drives and your gigabyte SSDs for granted, but early system were measured in kilobytes.
An example is the IBM 1401 [wikipedia.org] that was announced by IBM on October 5, 1959 (I was seven years old at the time).
Legacy data and cheapassed managers kept the two digit dates around, and programmers and systems analysts warned management of the coming doom, but were ignored until it was almost too late.
A COBOL programmer in the 1950s would be dumbstruck by what we have today. Actually, I'm dumstruck as well; cell phones, flat screen computers, and self-opening doors in Star Trek were impossible; science fiction. You young folks can't imagine how primitive things were when I was a kid, and nobody dreamed we'd see SSDs.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In 5 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, back in the day, all we booted from was SSD (a few kB of ROM) because spinning media (floppy's and 'hard' drives) were freakin' expensive, not to mention gigantic and slow. This made stuff like instant-boot very normal to have back in the day. In the mean time we decayed to using ever faster spinning media until the hardware couldn't go any faster (15k drives since 1997) and the capacity couldn't increase (perpendicular recording a couple of years ago) and we waited minutes for our OS'es to boot. Now we're back at SSD's which don't really scale very well for large amounts of data (smaller chips means more expensive and more potential errors) until somebody finds a better format for storing large amounts of data cheaply (probably in the realm of 3D optical storage) which will slow us down again a bit.
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Insightful)
You are an idiot.
At the time most of that code was written, 32K (words) was a large computer. You SQUEEZED the bits into words tightly. TIGHTLY. People recommended tricks like XORING two pointers together to save space, at the cost of additional computation. And mainframe computer time was in the neighborhood of $700/hour. And that was before several rounds of 12% inflation. At that time a paperback book cost between $0.50 and $0.75, to help you calibrate what that meant.
Also turnaround for many programmers was once per day via courier.
At that time two digit years were the appropriate choice. Four digit years didn't become reasonable, by and large, until the 1980's or even later. (Remember when we moved from mainframes to CP/M computers, our disk storage was trimmed to around 70KB. And our RAM was limited at 64KB. It wasn't until personal computers got hard disks that this limit was lifted. (Networked hard disks came later for most people.)
So for anything written after 1990, you might well have a point, but that's not the code you're dissing. Idiot.
The other respondent who said you should have blamed the managers was more reasonable. Unfortunately current management theory claims that managers don't need to know anything about what they're managing. So the individual managers, themselves, probably aren't to blame. I'd put the blame on the general managers, who should know better than to accept that theory. (Though at their level it becomes true. But a part of their job is to know how the job requirements change as the degree of separation form the actual work increases, and they generally fall down on that. Badly.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
(not 3.3V fed, 12V at a third the amperage, less heat)
P=IV
So I'm having a hard time reconciling how raising the voltage by 3x (roughly), and using a third less current changes power consumption at all. I'm pretty sure transmission distances and losses are pretty low inside a computer case.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
P=I^2 R
So, for the same resistance, the heat is proportional to the square of the current.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You can't use resistors as your model of computer components- well you can, but you get unreasonable conclusions like the one above.
Take as an example CMOS tech, theres a pretty good run down of why any type of semiconductor doesn't act at all like a resistor when it comes to power dissipation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS#Power:_switching_and_leakage [wikipedia.org]
FTR- I'm not saying P=I^2 R is wrong... Its certainly correct, the challenge is coming up with 'R' when you're talking about switching semiconductors (or a
Re:In 5 years (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent down for being simply wrong. Power consumption is directly proportional to clock frequency, not the square of the clock frequency.
An input to a CMOS gate can be approximated as a capacitor, so each time the capacitor is discharged, an energy is consumed equal to the energy stored in the capacitor. The energy in the capacitor is 1/2*C*V^2 where C is the effective capacitance, and V is the supply voltage. The total power consumption is n*k*f*C*V^2 where f is the clock frequency, n is the number of gates and k is the activity level which describes the number of times per clock cycle each gate will change at its input (on average). The 1/2 gets absorbed into the k.
If you double n (two cores), but halve f, the power consumption doesn't change.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
However lower clock frequencies also require less voltage to keep a stable signal (and correspondingly, high frequencies need to be driven by a higher voltage). Taking this into account, power use does drop much more than linearly when clock frequency drops.
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Funny)
If you get rid of the fans, there won't be any funny/troll posts about Microsoft, Apple and Linux.
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you get rid of the fans, there won't be any funny/troll posts about Microsoft, Apple and Linux.
There were never really any fans:
They're all perpetual motion sterling engines running off the temperature differential of their own hot air and the chilling glares of everyone who thinks they're idiots.
Re:In 5 years (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never seen a consumer hard drive last even 3 years
Maybe you're doing something wrong in that case, because all but one of the five consumer drives in my Windows PC are over three years old and it's still working about as well as a Windows PC ever does.
And personally I've never bought a drive which failed in less than three years (for that matter I've only ever bought one drive which failed before I swapped it out because it had become too small).
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Here, too.
My basic "swap cycle" for hard drives was
1) Buy them
2) Use as data storage 2-3 Years
3) Use as OS drive 2-3 Years
4) Use for swap space 2-3 Years
5) Throw them out
I have gone through maybe 25-30 drives for various boxes at home so far, and exactly ONE has failed me so far, while it was already on "swap space" duty. Usually the ones I throw out are about 8-10 years old, just because they are now even to small to be useful as swap space.
Re:In 5 years (Score:5, Informative)
The point of the shift to 4k sectors (e.g. the WD "Advanced Format" drives) is that the amount of space needed for error correction at ever increasing densities was entering into the bounds of diminishing returns. Larger blocks mean less error correction is needed and thus more storage space for a given platter density. Anand has a pretty good writeup on it here: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3691 [anandtech.com]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My fingers are all digital, you insensitive clod!
Great for digital calculations.
And raising one of the middle ones signals "sign-extended mode".
You can have my digits when you pry them from my cold dead hands! :-)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is, SSDs are expensive primarily because of economies of scale. If a lot of major manufacturers started making these drives available for $100 bucks as a feature, you'd see much wider adoption, and it would be more profitable to build additional fabrication plants that would bring the costs down immensely. Even now, 32 GB USB flash sticks cost on the order of $70. SSDs cost twice as much solely because the controllers are made in such limited quantities.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and don't you have those MP3s, Videos, Documents et al of yours?
Re:Reports of HDDs' demise greatly exaggerated (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong.
A full Win 7 Ultimate install with Office 2010 + Visual Studio 2010 + Project & Visio 2010 sits at around 25GB.
you still have 15GB left. Take off VS2010 and you are sitting around 20-25GB free.
Re:Reports of HDDs' demise greatly exaggerated (Score:4, Informative)
How much for a hard drive that's as fast as that $125 SSD?
The 1TB Seagate hard drive that I recently tested gets random 4k read rates in the ~1MB/second range. My 80GB Intel X25-M gets ~38MB/second.
That's about 40 times more performance for THE SAME PRICE!
Storage capacity is irrelevant in many situations.
A 40GB SSD is more than sufficient for your average manager/executive. They'd almost certainly prefer opening Outlook and Power Point in a tenth of the time it used to take to having an extra thousand gigabytes of unused space on their laptop.
The 80 GB drive I have in my system was the best upgrade I ever bought. Kernel compiles are crazy fast, and all of the media I need can be streamed off the network (sharing a single one of those 1.5TB drives with a dozen or so other people).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It was probably a rhetorical question, but I'll answer anyway: lots. Lots and lots and lots.
We've in the middle of replacing 48U's worth of short-stroked fibre channel discs with 4U's worth of solid state drives. Capacity was never much of an issue with these databases (they only total about 800GB) but to get the performance with an IBM pSeries box cost stupid money - I don't know the exact figure but it was somewhere in the region of 50k a year just
Re:Child pornographers. (Score:5, Informative)
Inside of all harddrives for the last 10 or so years are multiple, very powerful neodymium iron boron magnets that move the actuator arm over the surface of the discs. If magnets outside of your drive would erase data, then surely these intensely powerful magnets inside would do the same, no?
The most conclusive testing I've seen done on this was several years ago. A guy had stacks of dead hard drives, and he decided to harvest the magnets from them. He had a stack of 50+ very powerful NIB magnets. He then took a working HDD, full to capacity, and covered the entire hard drive in them- front and back, with layer upon layer of magnets. Then he set the drive in a desk drawer for a few weeks, after which he plugged the drive up, and all of his data was still completely intact. Not 1 file was corrupted in any way.
Now, if you put a
Re:Child pornographers. (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in middle school me and my buddy wanted to try out linux but didn't want to wait to format* the drive so we stuck the magnet out of the base of a magnet-mount shop lamp (10 lb "capacity", about 5" in diameter). To our surprise, not only did we corrupt the drive data, but the computer wouldn't recognize the drive, either.
*I am aware now that there's more involved to formatting a drive
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If by "cheap" you mean the craptastic OCZ Core series, and the other SSDs of the same gen that used the god-awful JMicron controller, the "cheap" end of the SSD market is full of high-performance drives that don't choke on random I/O. As soon as Intel and Indilinx came out with controllers that were worth the sand they were printed on everyone started doing it, and we've now got a market where the performance delta between "cheap" and "prosumer" SSDs is much, much smaller.
The vast bulk of the cost of the SS
Re:Tiered Storage - Software joining SSD+HDs? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd prefer that software solution to a hardware solution since the OS knows so much more about which files it would make sense to cache and which aren't worth it. Also, you could overrule the prediction algorithms easily to cache the music you want to listen to or the database you are working on. I actually use /dev/shm (a Linux tmpfs in RAM) often to store quickly changing files.
:)
* I know iron oxides aren't used anymore, but I still like the mental image
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Um, no.
RAM disks -- being RAM -- aren't permanent storage, and were never held up as a replacement for any kind of permanent storage. They were always a work around for permanent storage being too slow for applications that had a demand for responsiveness and could accept the risk of data loss to acheive it, and even then were largely useful for applications that had been designed for older (