Are Consumer Hard Drives Headed Into History? 681
Lucas123 writes "With NAND flash fabricators ramping up production, per GB prices of solid state drives are expected to drop by more than half by this time next year to about 50 cents. Even so, consumers still look at three things when purchasing a computer: CPU power, memory size, and drive capacity, giving spinning disk the edge. SSD manufacturers like Samsung and SanDisk have tried but failed to change consumer attitudes toward choosing SSDs for their performance, durability and lower power use. But, with the release of the new MacBook Air (sans hard disk drive), Steve Jobs has joined the marketing push and may have the clout to shift the market away from hard drives, even if they're still an order of magnitude cheaper."
ridiculous story (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ridiculous story (Score:5, Insightful)
have a lot shorter life expectancy than current HDD's
Citation needed.
I tend to hold on to my tech for years... (Score:5, Insightful)
Things like iPods, smart phones, and PDAs are cheaper and easily replaced in whole, but I wouldn't want to face a replacement cost for a laptop.
I would cringe to do secure erases (writing zeroes) to a flash memory drive (solid state drives or Apple's flash "drive" module in the new Airs), knowing I was prematurely killing my storage life. Platter-based disks with sudden motion sensors will still be my huckleberry for a few more years...
Only five times more than magnetic... (Score:5, Insightful)
$0.50 per GB is still about five times the cost of a magnetic drive. Put another way, each user has the choice between paying $50 and $250 for the same amount of storage. Does anyone think there is a real competition here?
And of course, that's by next year. How much denser/cheaper will magnetic drives be by then? Please stop with these "year of the flash drive" posts.
File under (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, they're headed to history, but that might take another ten years.
Not for quite some time (Score:4, Insightful)
Certain technologies have pretty long shelf lives - Hard Drives are one of those. Tape Backups and CDs are another.
Sure SSDs are getting cheaper, but so are hard drives. Hard drives are now a nickel a GB, half the price of just a year ago. The best SSD prices still look like they're 40x as expensive.
Sure, they'll take over the small drive / low power / slim profile market, especially for expensive hardware (SteveJobsthankyouverymuch). But as we do more with large audio/video/photo files, out appetite for storage is still a 5-10 years away for cost effective SSDs at TODAY's rate of use.
Just look at the usenet. DivX was king, with only hard core nuts going with full DVD rips. Then HD was here and everything was recompressed to 720p x264. Now it's mostly 1080p x264 recodes and straight 26GB AVC rips. Our use is definitely not slowing down, and spinning platters is the only thing that can give us that kind capacity for the foreseeable future.
This is silly. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is very much like the blue-ray issue. It's not surprising folks aren't interested in jumping on board because, frankly, there is no real reason to run out and BUY it.
CD's and DVD's had huge adoption because you saw a large improvement on your existing hardware. Bluerays required a new TV to see that improvement - and it was a very expensive TV at the time.
Once people have purchased new TV's (it will probably take another 5-10 years for the older TV's to all fail so that the mom and pops of the world HAVE to go buy a new one) blue-rays will have come way down in price and they'll finally replace the DVD.
Likewise the SSD. I'm sure many other folks are as tired as I am regarding these silly... strike that... STUPID press releases trying to push their sale.
They will be bought when there is a need. There is none at this point, except in very specific applications, like the high-vibration atmosphere at manufacturing plants.
Shame on Slashdot's editors for continuing to run this hokey marketing BS, and shame on the people who continue to send articles like this. It's quite silly, frankly.
HDDs are the new CRT (Score:1, Insightful)
SSDs are the LCDs of hard drives. In time they will be cheap reliable and fast. Moore's law will win in the end.
It's not a question of switching... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ridiculous story (Score:3, Insightful)
What I am basing my assumptions on is where the manufacturer puts its money where its mouth is. Both SDD and HDD's have 3 year warranties.
The MTBF values could be horseshit, but are equal or better on modern SSD's as well.
Re:Only five times more than magnetic... (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you buy any computer on the market with only 40 gig in it anymore?
Look, the only way tiny hard drives make sense is for Grandma who doesn't use computers for anything but email and web surfing. Apple is intent on pushing these people to the cloud with iPads and diskless notebooks, and you could make a good case that the cloud is exactly where some of these people belong.
But that also imposes a network burden and cost that not everyone can afford. Streaming everything is just wrong on so many levels, and doing it today in spite of current rock bottom storage (spinning) prices is crazy - but I digress.
In a corporate world fast booting SSD machines can latch onto the network for all of their storage needs, thats fine, because the corporate net can probably handle the load.
But for the computer savvy home user or small developer, with a significant music collection, a ton of video, photos, and a couple major projects to work on, SSD is not going to cut it at today's prices when compared to spinning disks. Too small. Too expensive. To fragile.
40 Gig? My phone has 40 Gig.
Price per gigabyte isn't really the issue (Score:3, Insightful)
It's simply absolute price for a reasonable amount of storage, which these days is around 250GB. Sure I can pop in multi-TB drives for less money, and I do on the machines that need that kind of storage. But the vast majority of machines out in the world don't really need terrabytes of storage. If you don't actually need the storage then it doesn't really matter whether the drive you have installed is 250G or 2TB.
The comments regarding a SSD's ability to extend the life of older computer hardware, and even brand spanking new computer hardware, are right on the mark. How meaningful is one or two hundred extra dollars if your laptop is nice and responsive with the latest memory-hogging software for another year or two because you popped in that SSD? Not very meaningful at all.
So if the question is when will SSDs really start to take off in the consumer world as more than just a niche item? It will be when the price point for that 250G SSD drive drops to something reasonable, like $100 or so. That price point is not actually that far off.
In terms of durability I gotta laugh at anyone who thinks a hard drive is more durable than a SSD. Hard drives last maybe 5 years. I don't think any of my HDs have lasted more than 7 or so years without accumulating serious enough errors to warrant replacement. There is one key difference... it is possible to recover critical data off a HD many years later whereas data stored in flash is gone once it goes bad (and even that might not be true any more with HD densities getting so high). But those sorts of recovery services (where the HD cannot even be powered up any more without destroying it) cost a lot of $$ and I don't think your average consumer would ever use something like that.
Even a little Intel 40G SSD has a 35TB vendor-specified durability. When configured properly along with the OS that durability rises in excess of 200TB, and that's for the cheaper MLC flash. I have around 10 of the 40G SSDs installed and their durability is riding the 200TB mark based on the wear values returned from SMART over the last 8 months or so. The higher capacity SSDs have higher durabilities. With nominal use (which is 99% of the use cases) we are still talking 10 years plus for a small SSD.
I'm not sure who these people are complaining about SSDs failing on them... maybe they should post the vendors they bought them from along with the actual model. I haven't had a single one of my Intels fail and I'm hitting some of them pretty damn hard. I have not seen any performance drop-off with my SSDs either and, besides, a thrashing HD can only do 2MB/sec or so, even a SSD with a moderate performance dropoff is still going to do an order of magnitude better than a HD with a fragmented filesystem. When it comes right down to it if a performance drop-off is a problem for you, just copy the raw storage off the SSD and then back onto it. Poof, problem solved for another year or three.
TRIM is not really needed. In fact, it can be a liability performance-wise since it isn't a NCQ-capable command. All you really need to do is partition a fresh drive a bit smaller than its rated capacity and you get 95% of the benefit of TRIM without having to deal with it. If you have 120G SSD then create a 110G partition. Congratulations, you now have 95% of what TRIM would get you. It's funny how the rabble keeps screaming the TRIM mantra but it isn't that spectacular a feature.
-Matt
Re:SSD's die more than HD's (Score:5, Insightful)
So from a sample size of 1, you can conclusively prove that SSDs are less reliable than hard drives?
He described his personal experience ("I have had the opposite experience"). He made no claim that it was a representative sample. He did not claim to have proven anything.
... sheesh. Trigger-happy much?
I know that some people make claims they have no ability to back up and pretend they are universal truths. But the GP didn't do that. So
Occasionally manufacturers do make defective products. It's just not possible to have quality control that is 100% perfect on all counts. Assuming his personal experience was not a quality-control issue, it's not possible to ensure that no damage occurred during shipping after the drive left the factory. In other words, shit happens and what he's saying is not some terribly unbelievable story. I would hope that such a product which fails after only 2 months would be covered by warranty. That's the only relevant information the GP did not share with us.
If the manufacturer of his failing SSD offers no reasonable warranty because they are unwilling to stand behind the quality of its products, I'd like to know what company it is so I can avoid buying from them.
Re:I tend to hold on to my tech for years... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet more perpetuation of what has become a myth.
Do the math, flash cell wear limit vs capacity/write speed.
Modern drive has to be written to for about 50 years continuously for it to 'wear out' like that.
Even taking manufacturer's MTBF... lets use a Crucial RealSSD 2.5" 64gb (good entry level consumer laptop SSD)... 1.2 million hours. That is like 140 years.
I'd trust an SSD to last longer than a spinny disc (it has moving parts ffs) any day.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:1, Insightful)
No.
In reality, and I wish I wasn't making this up, Apple became the #1 provider of end-user computers in the US *if* you count the iPad.
Why do I wish i wasn't making it up? It means that all of the other ones, despite their best efforts, couldn't do better. Subtract the iPad, and it's still an ugly marketplace out there.
The reason there's resistance to SSDs is that they're JUST TOO EXPENSIVE.
Ok. Enough karma whoring for today. My work is done here.
Re:ridiculous story (Score:3, Insightful)
3 years? Is that much? My 80GB IDE disk is still chugging along just fine after 8 years.
Hopelessly Biased Anecdotal Comment... (Score:3, Insightful)
I recently bought an SSD for my laptop, from Corsair. Many people seem to have had a problem with the drive, from it disappearing from the BIOS through to massive data corruption (me, yay).
Yes, it's a sample of 1. But I won't be going near SSD for a hell of a long time - Corsair refuse to admit to a problem, despite them having phased out the model very quickly. SSD has potential, but not at current prices, with their current life-span and failure / fault rates.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish I wasn't making this up
Then stop making stuff up! ;-)
I think you would feel better about it if you were in a more subjunctive mood.
Re:ridiculous story (Score:3, Insightful)
We, collectively speaking, long ago decided that storage should be cheap, and anybody who wanted reliability could just buy more and play with redundancy.
We heard that about CD-Rs, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when CD-Rs were new, we were hearing how they'd last for well over 50 years. Now we're finding that CD-Rs last only 3 to 5 years, and that's when they're stored in conditions that are near-perfect.
It's pointless to take media lifespans measured in decades as anything other than marketing bullshit, especially given that the computer industry itself has only been around for about 65 years.
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not only the bigger size and lower price that makes HDDs attractive. The worst case random write time, for example, is generally far worse for SSDs, and if you absolutely need to commit within a guaranteed time frame, SSDs might not be an option even if they're much faster on average, and orders of magnitudes faster for random reads.
Don't underestimate the power of a rack of short-stroked 15k rpm drives.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:1, Insightful)
I know Slashdot is full of Apple-haters, but these old trolling figures aren't even correct. Aside from the fact that Macs are up to 20% in the U.S., Apple is doing very well in the market with the iPhone and iPad. The notion that Apple is some marginal player hasn't been true for almost a decade.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:3, Insightful)
Then how come Safari (the default browser on a Mac) only has 4-5% share according to web usage statistics?
NPD is a reputable source, but I'd like to see the actual study myself, rather than hearsay.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:2, Insightful)
If it didn't have an apple on the back of the screen, I would buy it. If they're good at something, that is being focused on a goal and calling trade-offs.
And maybe some years from now we will be holding a tablet and thinking of netbooks just like we now think of floppy disks.
Re:This is silly. (Score:2, Insightful)
Because they're orders of magnitude faster than spinning disks? Because they use less power?
But that's irrelevant in most typical home uses, since performance only affects boot time and application startup (and the write power usage on some SSDs is worse than my 2TB HDD). If you're starting up the system and a few applications and using them for hours then you won't notice much difference from an SSD other than that it costs 50x as much as a hard drive.
Now, I am in the process of replacing the hard drive in my netbook with an SSD because we _do_ regularly boot it up, run Firefox for five minutes to check something and then shut it down, so there certainly is a market for that. But the idea that an SSD will magically make everything much faster is just silly; it will dramatically speed up things that are heavily dependent on disk seek performance, and that's it.
Similarly, if you're buying enterprise SSDs and using them for database storage, you'd probably never go back to HDD. But that's also a relatively small market.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:4, Insightful)
No.
In reality, and I wish I wasn't making this up, Apple became the #1 provider of end-user computers in the US *if* you count the iPad.
And McDonald's is the #1 provider of fine cuisine in the US, if you count the Big Mac...
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be pretty pointless putting all your torrented movies/music onto SSD. Leave those on a HD or put them on DVD. SSDs are an advantage where the superior speed is useful. Boot disks etc.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:3, Insightful)
Then how come Safari (the default browser on a Mac) only has 4-5% share according to web usage statistics?
NPD is a reputable source, but I'd like to see the actual study myself, rather than hearsay.
Firefox and Chrome. It's the same reason that Internet Explorer browser share is dropping far more rapidly than Windows market share.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Insightful)
How come IE doesn't have 90%+ share? 90%+ of the PCs of the world run Windows ...
See what I did there?
Consumers are also easily wowed by buzzwords... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's invent a buzzword for SSDs like "PowerStream Boost w/ Turbo AI", makes no fucking sense but people will gobble it up even if they have no clue what it really means. Ultimately SSDs just need to be marketed correctly to educate customers that there is a performance improvement and that you do not need the larger hard drive. A lot of consumers could probably even get by with a 64 or 128GB SSD. So just market it as "20,000 Operations Per Second!!!! Thanks to PowerStream Turbo. Stores up to 20,000+ music files." People might ask "hmm how many Operations can that hard disk do" and if they find out it's only a few hundred, that might swing their purchasing decision.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not hating. We're just tired of getting a story every time Jobs farts.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, wait a second. No, just no. USB came out in 1996, and the iMac in 1998. PCs didn't have USB "for a few years". USB stuff just happened to start coming out because there were enough computers with USB. I remember 1998, pal. I bought a SCSI scanner then, USB scanners were still unheard of, where I live (Argentina) anyway. And even today, it's still hard to find an USB keyboard here. I was surprised that a local computer store had about 10 different PS/2 keyboards and just one USB. Most motherboards still come with PS2 and serial anyway.
Motherboards DON'T have "that damn space" bullshit you said. For the last 15 years it's been built into a single chip (the super IO), and the ATX connector space has lots of space for the legacy ports. And manufacturers. And here's one you might like: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121388&Tpk=dp55wb [newegg.com]
What's next? Ditching Java apps just because Apple deprecated their JVM? EWWWW legacy? deprecated? Sounds to me like OLD. Who wants old stuff in their shiny new computer? Not me, I have a Mac. It's not a computer, it's a lifestyle, a fashion statement.
Try to stay away out of the RDF, buddy.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:3, Insightful)
The percentage, even being at %20, is still largely irrelevant.
He does not have anything near the clout to do this. Sure Apple is a walled garden, and can even be considered a little bit dickish when it comes to the decision to not include popular-still-needed-hardware on it's products, but it does not have the clout to direct the entire hard drive market. Not to mention, we are still only talking about %20.
It's not just a disparity in price here. SSDs still have some drawbacks, most notably storage capacity.
The author here is rather ignorant to conclude that this market clout exists since he completely disregards the business and industrial sector of the HDD market. SSDs are in datacenters now, but for specific applications requiring high performance. Even those applications don't always use SSD drives either. There are more than a couple of companies out there offering high performance storage like Fusion-IO which means there is competition in that space. SSDs have not even begun to replace large storage capacity needs either. Apple's own servers still allow for traditional hard drives to make up the bulk of the storage. A 128-gig SSD is included, but in a dedicated space, and not designed to fully service data storage needs.
Apple, at least with respect to business, is not going to pull their signature dick move and declare that spinning hard drives are no longer allowed in their business offerings. They would lose market share rather quickly since most other vendors are not going to dictate how you put the server together.
I'll believe that the market is truly shifting when Dell, HP, IBM, SuperMicro, Intel, etc. all start delivering business products to market with only SSD, or the SSD based products come down in price significantly.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:3, Insightful)
Then how come Safari (the default browser on a Mac) only has 4-5% share according to web usage statistics?
Aside from some using other browsers on Macs, it is also important to recognize that web usage is more a reflection of the installed base than of current sales. (The situation for smartphones was a bit different since there had been an installed base with browsers that saw little use because the experience/functionality was so poor) One has to be pretty careful when drawing conclusions from browser data. For example the share of XP users seen browsing doesn't accurately reflect the percentage of new systems running XP. Browser stats also don't reveal whether machines were retail or corporate purchases.
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you lie about HDD vs SSD random read/writes:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2968/intel-s-x25-v-kingston-s-30gb-ssdnow-v-series-battle-of-the-125-ssds/6 [anandtech.com]
Even the 10K high-end pricey WD Velociraptor has a pathetic 0.8MB/throughput for random writes. Meanwhile a value level Intel SSD gets 35MB/sec throughput for random writes? How do you think putting 4 of those high end HDD together will make then faster than an SSD? The fact is they won't.
Plus if you think an SSD is a waste, why would you even entertain the suggestion of capping a 1TB HDD to 32GB? Do you have an benchmarks proving this is faster and really drops seeks to near zero?
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Insightful)
NPD is a reputable source, but I'd like to see the actual study myself, rather than hearsay.
Note that it's 20% of the "consumer retail" market share. That is to say, individual people buying boxed computers from a shop. A rather large percentage of computers on the internet are purchased by companies and either (1) installed at their offices and then used by employees for personal purposes during their breaks or (2) loaned to employees to take home. This happens very rarely with Macs; in my 15 years as an IT consultant I've worked with precisely one company that installed Macs. A smaller, but still nontrivial, percentage of the sales of computers is in markets that aren't typically classified as retail: all those people who either buy components and self build, or buy from local "we sell to trade only, honest" shops, or from computer fairs are probably not included in these stats.
Also, market share != installed base. Note that if the average Mac user changes their machine every 3 years, while the average PC user only bothers upgrading every 6, that will double the market share of Macs relative to their installed base.
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:3, Insightful)
64 gb SSD won't even hold my operating system
WTF OS do you have? I have Win7 Ultimate here installed and (reaosnably) happy on a 10GB partition. In retrospect, 20GB would have been more appropriate.
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:3, Insightful)
So now, instead of IOPS, your primary goal is sustained throughput. A 4-drive setup gives you the same read/write throughput as an Intel X25 SSD (which claims 4x the throughput of a regular hd, and 2x the throughput of a fast hd, so the math is really simple), but much more bang for the buck.
Copying a large file in home no longer affects /srv or /var - and remember, each of the drives has a 32meg hdd cache. Combine that with look-ahead, elevator algorithm head movement, NOATIME, and you have a system where, unlike the single SSD, copying a file in /home to another directory has ZERO effect on the performance of the other drives.
This is great for web servers, because writes to the log file no longer generate much head movement, and reads to serve up data no longer move the heads away from the log file. Throw in that now, each drive is also much more likely to score a cache hit on it's particular data than would happen with one big 128meg hd cache, and it's not just a serious competitor to SSDs - if you need faster performance, you can beat that single SSD by a factor of two (Intel's numbers) by switching to 15k rpm HDs.
My point isn't that SSDs are bad - who wouldn't want one - IF ...? They have their advantages - but real-life performance on a dollar-for-dollar basis (or even 10-to-one basis) isn't there when you get near a terabyte, and even those $498 laptops and desktops in this weekends flier have 640gig hds and 6 gigs of ram.
IF they were comparable in price.
IF they were comparable in capacity.
THEN I'd use them. They're neither, so I don't, and I don't see anyone around me making the switch either. Not when each new machine is already so much faster than our previous one. "Good Enough Computing" - I'll spend the savings elsewhere.
-- Barbie
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess you aren't a developer, if you can get by with only one box.
Compatibility testing, running my own svn/ftp/http/ssh servers (separate from the ones I run on my main machine), keeping personal stuff (email, etc) isolated on one machine, business email on another, these are all valid reasons to have a second computer
Tom, I'd like to introduce you to something that could radically change the way you work:
Virtualization: VMware, VirtualBox...
Mac Minis and web browsing (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, maybe for a very limited set of values of "choke."
I think you'd find the speed increase of my 8-core, 8GB, 3GHz Mac Pro doing web browsing, or one of the new 6- or 12-cores, quite noticeable. Especially when the webmaster of the site being browsed has decided that they're going to dump the processing load on the client.
How do I know? I've got three Mac Minis. One in the music studio, one in the ham shack, and one in the media center. They're ok for what they are, but fast... well, that's not what they are. Even the latest versions are just sort of middle of the road computers WRT speed. The cool things about Minis are the footprint, power consumption, and lack of noise.
Re:HDDs are the new CRT (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:3, Insightful)
Then those people should learn the meaning of words and use them correctly so that others know what they are talking about.