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.'"
RAID? (Score:2, Interesting)
We do not need solid state to replace platter driv (Score:5, Interesting)
A hybrid with a 1:30 or 1:20 ratio of flash to platter (200 GB for 4 TB for instance) would pretty much be perfect for anyone, even enterprise applications if RAID controllers cooperated with the hybrid caching properly.
We do not need 100% flash, just give us a practical median.
In fact, I guarantee if someone made a hard drive with a controller with an mSATA slot for adding a SSD and offered the controller to be setup as pass-through (act as two drives) or caching (SSD keeps a cache of platter), it would sell like crazy.
An mSATA would fit easily beneath a standard 3.5 inch platter hard drive.
http://www.notebookreview.com/... [notebookreview.com]
Re:RAID? (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if this were true, you're creating an artificial advantage. How will a RAID array of HDDs compare to a RAID array of SSDs?
Re:There are other techs waiting in doorway... (Score:4, Interesting)
10 times ago I heard about IBM and others working on new technologies to replace memory. Holographic cubes, MRAM, ... Are they still 10 years away?
Re:RAID? (Score:5, Interesting)
No RAID does not allow HDD to perform as SSDs. RAID increases throughput but it does not decrease access time, which in many cases is fare more important than throughput.
Having a seek time of 8ms when you are working with many small files is a huge hit on performance. The seek time of SSDs is well under a millisecond. RAID does not help this no matter how many disks you stripe.
RAID does not always mean stripe. Mirroring does improve seek performance. It increases the chance that a drive has a head closer to the data you want already (if the implementation is smart enough to be aware of this), and it also allows seeks to occur in parallel (which isn't exactly the same as latency reduction, but is fairly equivalent in practice since drives are almost always busy).
HDD is fine for .. 98%? (Score:2, Interesting)
Lets be honest here - outside of a small percentage of users doing raw uncompressed video operations HDD are more than fast enough. Drives and OS both offer large caching of high use objects which reduces seek/startup time differences to a very small amount. The biggest difference is on start up and even there.. do those 5, 10, 15 secons extra really matter that much? How often are you booting? Or even resuming from hibernation if thats your thing?
As to power, idle is now around 5 or 6 watts and standby around 1. Even in a laptop the difference in power use between hdd/sdd is not going to make or break the deal. Your screen, however, another story.