SSD-HDD Price Gap Won't Go Away Anytime Soon 256
storagedude (1517243) writes "Flash storage costs have been dropping rapidly for years, but those gains are about to slow, and a number of issues will keep flash from closing the cost gap with HDDs for some time, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. As SSD density increases, reliability and performance decrease, creating a dilemma for manufacturers who must balance density, cost, reliability and performance. '[F]lash technology and SSDs cannot yet replace HDDs as primary storage for enterprise and HPC applications due to continued high prices for capacity, bandwidth and power, as well as issues with reliability that can only be addressed by increasing overall costs. At least for the foreseeable future, the cost of flash compared to hard drive storage is not going to change.'"
not really (Score:5, Insightful)
Fairly sure that increases in capacity usually means increases in performance as well. I have not seen any ssd on the market today that illustrates otherwise. .50$ a gig on ssds. Prices have been plummeting. You can get a 256 gig drive for ~100$ . 1TB drives have been almost hitting the $400 mark.
We're down to less than
When 2TB ssd come on the market, you'll see the rest drop in price as well. I'm not quite sure where the author is getting their information. Check the price drops over the last two years and you can see they haven't hit bottom yet.
Re:RAID? (Score:5, Insightful)
IIRC it would take 5+ high end HDDs to match the read/write speeds of a decent SSD. Add to it that a RAID 0 has no safety so if 1 drive faults, the whole thing is done. A single SSD (like my Corsair Force GT) will r/w at ±500MBs. You just can't beat that right now.
Re:RAID? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RAID? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seek time is the time for r/w head movement (closer or farther from the disk center) PLUS the wait time until the wanted data is rotated under the read/write head. So, unless you go with r/w heads for each sector on the hard drive, you can't reduce part of the seek time. And you could rotate the disks faster (like in SCSI 15k rpm disks), but there's a limit there too.
Will HDDs ever be performance-competitive at the same cost to SSDs? At the current technology level, no. Will SSDs ever be price-competitive at the same capacity? Hardly, considering adding another platter and r/w head to a hard drive is a quite inexpensive way to increase capacity, while adding another set of flash memory chips is an expensive way to increase capacity.
(oh, and a read/write head for each data strip was used in the 50s and 60s - see magnetic drum memory).
Re:We do not need solid state to replace platter d (Score:4, Insightful)
No we don't. Hybrid drives are stupid. The added software complexity alone makes them a non-starter for anyone who wants reliability. The disparate failure modes make it a non-starter. The SSD portion of the hybrid drive is way, WAY too small to be useful.
If you care enough to want the performance benefit you either go with a pure SSD (which is what most people do these days), or you have a separate discrete SSD for booting, performace-oriented data, your swap store, and your HDD caching software.
-Matt