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."
Steve Jobs has clout (Score:4, Interesting)
Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got an SSD in my laptop, and I couldn't be happier. Its easily lengthened the life of my laptop by about 2 years.
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:3, Interesting)
where's the hybrid? (Score:1, Interesting)
What ever happened to transition technology? Most PCs and laptops have media card readers, PC card slots. Put the OS and Apps on a SSD card and save the spinning disk for personal storage.
Re:Durability? (Score:3, Interesting)
Show me the price of 3 TB of SSD. (Score:1, Interesting)
Spec the street price of 3 TB of SSD to replace the new "old" drives hitting availability this week and get back to me.
Arrogant use-case much? What ever happened to the hybrid drives that were supposed to be the practical solution...
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ridiculous story (Score:3, Interesting)
I was under the impression that with the wear leveling algorithms these drives use, and the higher quality chips used for SSDs, the lifetime under typical laptop usage is expected to far exceed a spinning platter drive.
Makes sense, really. Most disk access is reading (booting the OS, opening applications, loading libraries, viewing images/videos, listening to music), and this doesn't wear out the memory cells. Unless you're doing heavy disk work like video editing or serious photography, or running some sort of highly accessed write intensive database, I'd bet on SSDs to outlast HDDs. After all, an HDD is usually spinning and thus being worn out, even when no files are accessed.
Hybrid SSDs are the Near Term Future (Score:3, Interesting)
meeeh (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree. My Dell Inspiron 1501 is 3 years old and I was ready to replace it because of a failing hard disk.
Looking for a disk replacement I came across a Silicon Power 128GB 2.5" MLC SSD for A$330. Since it is the same size of the disk shipped with my laptop I can still fit all my stuff and my Ubuntu installation boots in 8 seconds.
The speed difference is still brutal, even with an encrypted home directory. I am very happy with the upgrade and don't see myself shopping for a new laptop for the time being.
No kidding (Score:4, Interesting)
In the long term? Yes I'm sure flash, or some other solid state, based storage will replace magnetic disks. It is just plain faster, not to mention other benefits. Our storage subsystem is by far the slowest thing we've got, improvements would be welcome.
In the short term? Hell no. SSDs are useful in special cases, but not for general use and not showing any signs of reaching a crossover soon.
I mean if I wanted to meet my storage needs with SSDs only, I'd have to spend on the order of $10,000. Granted, my needs for storage exceed most users, but still. It costs me all of about $500 to get them met with HDDs. Even if I left backups to magnetic media and just went with SSDs for primary storage I'd still be out about $4000. I could replace every component in my system, including my professional NEC monitor, for less than that.
Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to have SSDs, but they have to come down in price a shitload before they are realistic for the regular desktop. Right now, SSDs have 3 uses:
1) Systems that don't need a lot of storage and space/power are a premium. The Air is a good example. If you can live with 64GB of storage, then flash is ok price wise. Still expensive per GB, but since you have few GBs it isn't bad. If all you are doing is running basic apps then that works fine. You can't hold much media or large games or whatnot, but not all systems need that.
2) Systems where performance beyond what reasonable HDD solutions can offer is needed. Audio production sees this. New virtual instruments are getting extremely complex. Tons and tons of samples played back in heavy layers. You can't load them all in RAM (without amazing amounts of RAM) and they just overload disks when you try to stream it all. SSDs can be useful here. While a $10,000-20,000 fiber channel array would probably do the trick, a $4000 SSD will also do the trick and not only cost less but be easier to deal with.
3) Ultra high end storage solutions that need performance beyond anything HDDs can offer. With databases, you can run in to this. Heck they had SSDs back before they were popular. Expensive, expensive devils, but tons of performance. You need this to reach certain performance levels, no amount of disks can handle the IOPs you need. This is where cost just isn't an issue, performance is.
That's pretty much it. For cheap systems, HDDs reign supreme. They cost less than flash and that is that. For higher end systems, you end up needing more storage than flash can provide at a reasonable cost.
Before we see flash replace HDDs we will probably see augmentation. Intel, Adaptec, LSI, all are supporting SSDs as a cache for HDDs on various RAID controllers. If this comes down to consumer price levels, could be useful. 1TB of storage for $100 and then $100 more for some flash cache would be doable for many people.
It'll be a long time before SSDs are the way most people go, however. It is too bad, I want solid state storage now, but there is a big, BIG price gap that has to be covered.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason there's resistance to SSDs is that they're JUST TOO EXPENSIVE.
I'm still waiting on the long-term failure data. The takes-years-to-collect-real-life data, not the "how many read-write cycles in a laboratory" data.
Re:Disk life and data permanence (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:1, Interesting)
Just like with USB?
Back then Apple wasn't the Sexy Apple it was today. There was no OS X. Just a funny looking AIO Blue iMac. Jobs came out and said, "Oh by they way, No ADB, No Serial, No Parallel".
It didn't happen over night, but it was when I started noticing stuff coming out. PCs had had USB for a few years, but it wasn't until Apple included a USB only computer that USB stuff started coming out. Sure it was 'over priced and expensive' and ~3% of the market bore that. But then the PC users started liking their USB keyboards over the PS/2.
Meanwhile the MacBook Air has NO CD drive, includes a boot USB stick as 'recovery' but 90% of motherboards made today still have that damn space taken up by PS/2, serial and/or parallel. It's only been recent that some motherboards allow you to flash BIOS and stuff other than having a floppy disk. Apple is way ahead of the curve on that. I'd love to see a cheap, legacy free MicroATX motherboard on NewEgg.
So if Jobs can 'trick' 8% of the market into over priced NAND on the iPod, iPhone and iPad or into the SSD, good for him.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:2, Interesting)
What about the long term failure rate on your rotating platter hard disks? Every time they move up in capacity, or down in size, they are moving to something that hasn't had long term testing.
Sure HDs as a category have had long term testing. But then flash memory has also been on the market for 22 years.
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok and how many random 4K write/read IOPs could you get even if you did RAID-1? A few hundred. How many can you get with an SSD? 10,000+. Even if you took all 12 hard drives in your scenario and put them in a RAID configuration you'd still not match the performance of a single SSD. Also no one is saying go out and get a 512GB SSD which is on the bleeding edge of consumer SSD. You can easily find a 64GB SSD for around $125. Also no one needs to buy an Apple notebook.
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not disagreeing that SSD offers an unattractive price/performance tradeoff for the consumer, but where are you coming up with these price figures?
640GB laptop hard drives seem to be going for about $85 [newegg.com].
$85*6=510
So we have $3118 left over. Call it $3120 for easy computation... Where are you getting a Core i5 laptop with a 17" display and 1-TB hard drive for $520? The closest I can find is Dell's Inspiron 17 for $820, and that one only has 500MB storage in it, not the terabyte you'd need to build up your LAN-in-a-shopping-bag (it averages out to 1.6 TB per machine).
Manufacturers get nice bulk-ordering discounts, of course, but given that a (marginally slower) Core i5 is selling for ~$260 [eio.com] and a 1 TB Scorpio Blue is selling for ~$120 [newegg.com]... something tells me you're not quite comparing apples to the Apple.
Re:No kidding (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:2, Interesting)
I also am waiting on that data. I want to know in the real world how long a SSD sitting on a shelf with data will last in general. How long will it last before enough electrons escape and goes beneath the threshold for discerning a one or a zero (or in the case of MLC, a 0,1,2, or 3.) Two years? Three years? 10-20 years? Because of the way SSDs are, if they can reliably last "X" amount of time, one can keep adding redundancy in the form of ECC and even RAID to bump that factor up to tolerable levels.
The archival life of SSDs (and flash in general) is important -- especially for people like Aunt Tillie with the photos on the SD card in her camera that are not backed up anywhere else.
Re:Disk life and data permanence (Score:1, Interesting)
The big problem with that remark is that while they might have a better write endurance on paper, the actual LIFESPAN of the drives are very similar- the mechanical parts will wear out on a disk before you hit the write endurance and the reality of the write endurance for SSDs is that if you were to jam out 10G per day to the disk they would last approximately 5-10 years before they ran out of endurance- and then they'd be read-only. The HD would catastrophically fail (and likely before that 5-10 year window...) and you'd have no chance in Hell of getting the data back. While one should make backups against that inevitability, it rarely gets done and if you're within the price/size window for an SSD, it'll survive things that would simply KILL the HD. Vibration that would actually shake your house down. Accelerations that would actually render your bones to goo.
Price is the reason that HD's are still around, not much of anything else.
Re:I tend to hold on to my tech for years... (Score:2, Interesting)
I admit I have never owned an SSD and therefore I might be ignorant. Having said that, to the best of my knowledge SSDs use the same standard connectors (SATA) as spinning hard drives. If/when an SSD fails you should be able to buy either another SSD or a spinning hard drive as a drop-in replacement. This situation is no different and no more proprietary than mechanical drives.
This may be true in general. But the new MacBook Air solders the Flash modules directly to the logic board.
Re:Disk life and data permanence (Score:2, Interesting)
No, when SSDs fail, they are not readable. The electrons, (ie. your data), literally leak out of the device over time. With each new generation of flash, the longevity of stored data decreases dramatically. Currently it is measured in years, but it won't be long before it is measured in months.
What you are referring to is the write endurance, and that is a separate issue entirely. (Though quickly receding as well.) In any case, magnetic domains are a hell of a lot more stable over time.
I will wait for PRAM or MRAM before trusting data to an SSD, thanks.
Re:No kidding (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157-9.html [tomshardware.com]
Yes it does show that 4 short stroked SAS 15K RPM drives are beating out a single SSD by getting 2500 IOPs in the DB test. But those are older SSDs. Compare to newer SSDs in similar/same benchmark:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/corsair-ssd-roundup_6.html#sect0 [xbitlabs.com]
You will see they are bottoming out @ 4K IOPS in worst case scenarios.
Also contrary to what was suggested earlier, short stroking does not make HDD seek time negligible:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157-5.html [tomshardware.com]
3.8ms for HDD vs 0.1ms for SSD. That's still a big difference.
You are correct about the low level nature of flash memory, but there are many ways to mitigate this. SSD controllers use multiple channels to read/write banks of flash memory. They have large internal buffers & they also have "waste space", meaning they have extra flash memory that the device can read/write to so as to not hold up the drive. SandForce controllers also use compression and other methods to enhance performance. With proper trim support you do not need to run garbage collection, thus it's really not much different in operation than how a HDD will act, just faster. No modern SSD will make you wait one second while it erases a block of data, they just don't work that way now.
Even worst case random write speeds outpace standard HDDs. Yes if you short stroke your 15k RPM and buy 6 of them then yipee maybe you can exceed the performance of a single SSD, but then any arguments about saving money buying 6x $400 drives + controller so you can use 5% of their capacity go out the window.
lying with statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
"US consumer retail market" means people walking into a store and buying a piece of hardware, and it's expressed in terms of money, not units, and people spend a lot more for their Macs than for their PCs. It probably also includes iPhone, iPad, and iPod, and accessories sales, since it refers to Apple share, not Mac share. In terms of units, their share is still around 4-5% at most.