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)
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, Informative)
PCIe SSDs are even faster. The one in the Mac Pro can hit 1gig read/write, for example.
You'd need a lot of disks to come even close to that. :)
Re:RAID? (Score:5, Informative)
I was shocked when we got one of the MacPro6 units in, and I ran a disk benchmark on it. It was sustaining 950MB/sec, which is good enough to write 10-bit YUV 4:2:2 2k video at 117fps.
That is a realm you could only really get to with fiber channel previously, or a ridiculously expensive PCI-E card with SLC flash.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:RAID? (Score:5, Informative)
PCI-E SSDs were available on PCs long before debuting on macs. They often run much faster as well, as they can use RAID0 striping. I've seen drives that use a quad RAID0 pushing utterly insane numbers for long term storage at the cost of not letting TRIM commands through.
Re: (Score:3)
TRIM on PCI raids works on Windows ... if you use Windows 8.1 :-(
Re:RAID? (Score:4, Funny)
Hilariously, that is the first actually valid reason to switch from 7 that I've ever heard.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for posting real benchmarks. I can't afford/don't need a Mac Pro but if PCIe SSD become available on other systems, it's nice to know how fast it really operates.
You mean like this one...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/... [newegg.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Why SATA SDDs @ all? (Score:3)
Having followed this for some time now, one thing I don't get - why do people go for SATA SDDs instead of all the way for PCIe ones? Cost can't be the reason, b'cos the only reason to prefer flash memory to the usual hard disk media is performance. It wouldn't make sense to put a PCIe interface on an HDD, since there is no way the HDD could provide the data at that speed. But flash is different, and can. So it only makes sense to go w/ SATA/PATA HDDs if cost is the issue, and PCIe SDDs if performance is
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed, and even then for many usage patterns, latency will be much worse for the HDD RAID array, because certain operations will be the greatest latency of all the drives(i.e. if you read something striped across all the drives, and one of the drives has a longer latency in seeking to that data). So in many cases the average latency is skewed for the worst.
That doesn't even go into power/cooling savings. SSD's use 10th of the power, which is great for a laptop.
Risk of damage from bumping/moving the drive
Re: (Score:2)
RAID 0 really only buys you throughput, and I don't think SSD really has any advantage over HD for throughput (I'm open to correction there).
The big difference is in seek time. RAID 1 is what buys you seek time for reads, and of course it has no safety issues. There is nothing that limits RAID 1 to only one mirror either beyond the implementation (mdadm supports any number of mirrors and will divide reads across them). Of course, if you have a RAID1 with 8 drives in it, and write is going to block across
Re: (Score:2)
I imagine raid 10 would be an option (0+1). But that's going to be pretty hilarious in costs.
Re:RAID? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Admittedly I had a misconception that they were the same thing, and now that you mention it, it's obvious that they are not.
Thanks for clarifying.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:RAID? (Score:5, Informative)
For most applications, the performance bottleneck with a hard disk is seek latency, not raw streaming bandwidth. There is basically no way for a mechanical hard disk to match the seek performance of a SSD.
Re: (Score:2)
Multiple read heads! Cut seek time in half! (or quarter, or eighth depending on how crazy you want to go).
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:RAID? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
The intent of the (mostly) joke was in fact to put read heads under multiple sectors, cutting the rotation time in half (or more if you were to add more heads).
Re: (Score:2)
That's basically what RAID1 gets you, though at a cost to write performance. You'll never beat SSD random write performance via RAID, though writes on SSDs can leave a bit to be desired as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but with SSD, you can hit whatever cell you want instantly. No waiting for the spindle to rotate to where it needs to be.
Re: (Score:3)
From a review of the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD [storagereview.com] I just stuck in my MacBook Pro:
From the same site reviewing a WD Black 4TB HDD [storagereview.com]:
Performance from the WD Black scaled from 66 IOPS at 2T/2Q to 86 IOPS at 16T/16Q, versus the 7K4000 which scaled from 82 IOPS to 102 IOPS.
So assuming IOPS scales linearly with heads (they don't), you'd need about 1,000 heads to get similar random access performance out of HDDs as one SSD.
There's a reason everyone's migrating to SSDs for anything remotely IO related.
Re: (Score:3)
Where SSDs really shine are the small, rapid read/writes. If you look at the 4k r/w benchmarks, a good SSD will top 50 MB/s 4k speeds, and over 300 MB/s with NCQ. A good HDD is only about 1.5 MB/s, and maybe 2 MB/s with NCQ because of seek latency - the head needs to be physically moved between each 4k sector. That 100-fold difference is what makes S
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Doesn't creating a striped RAID make up most of the performance issues from using a HDD over a SSD? At that point, it's more the bus or CPU that's a limiting factor?
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.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
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.
RAID doesn't improve first access time, but good RAID improves non-sequential seek times.
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.
Yes, for some workloads it is very important. But for many of those, there's prefetching.
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).
Re: (Score:2)
No.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:RAID? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know how his systems work but my PC works like this. I have a big disk with Linux and virtual machines. I have a SSD and a 2.5 HDD of the same capacity for Windows, and I periodically back up the SSD to the HDD. The backup is bootable and if the SSD fails I just get the HDD. All the data gets backed up to a disk on a pogoplug running Debian which is supposed to be on a separate UPS but isn't right now, at least it's not in the same machine. I don't store any big data on the Windows side, so that's o
Re: (Score:2)
I've seen a couple hard drives in laptops that present themselves to the BIOS as multiple volumes, although I don't know what brand they are (if someone does know the make/model, please enlighten me). One had a 32 GB SSD partition, then a 512 GB HDD partition. Unlike drives that have an 8GB cache, having two volumes allows the OS, swap, perhaps an application to sit on one volume while everything else is on the HDD.
As for the backup hard disk, that is a wise idea as the first level of defense. It can't h
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:RAID? (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely not. Even 100 RAIDed HDDs (in any RAID type) will struggle to match the IOPS achieved with a single SSD.
Typical IOPS for a 7200 RPM HDD: 80
Typical IOPS for a modern consumer level SSD: 20,000-100,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
This. People just don't get this.
Typical smallish RAID array is 16 drives.
RAID 5 IOPS for 7.2k drives - 675
RAID 5 IOPS for 15k drives - 1642
RAID 5 IOPS for SSD drive - 84,211
http://www.thecloudcalculator.... [thecloudcalculator.com]
In an environment running lots of small disk IO, like having a VM or fifty, only one of the above will give you good performance.
Re:RAID? (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't creating a striped RAID make up most of the performance issues from using a HDD over a SSD? At that point, it's more the bus or CPU that's a limiting factor?
No. My raid0 and Raid5 setups don't even come CLOSE to comparing to my SSDs. I've been running 2 SSD Raid0 and OMG the speed diff is absolutly crazy. Yes when one does all data is toast and they DO die. I was dumb and bought 3 OCZ drives and all 3 have died at least once in the last 1.5 years but the replacements have held up pretty well. I totally expect to lose one at any time so I have really good backups of my C: Drive :) everything else goes on my spinny platters.
Re: (Score:2)
What is the point of slicing SSDs? Seems like the law of diminishing returns takes effect. I'd mirror and take the small relative performance hit. I did some research on this when I set up my computer a year ago and it didn't seem worht it for the cost.
I ended up going with an SSD for the OS and 2 mirrored HDDs for reliable storage.
Re: (Score:2)
I ended up going with an SSD for the OS and 2 mirrored HDDs for reliable storage.
I see a lot of people going with SSD for OS + core applications, and HDD's for everything else. I don't quite understand why? Is your usage pattern such that you are frequently rebooting and/or closing all apps and re-opening them (more so than working with documents)?
I completely understand HDD for media such as mp3's and videos - they handle throughput for those just fine and there's hardly any seeking when watching a video. And unless it's a video/music server that services a bunch of clients, a HDD will
Re: (Score:2)
How well does your RAID0 controller do with TRIM commands?
Many are known to cause problems by not letting TRIM through to the drives.
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely not.
The main advantage of a SSD for most users is not the 5x faster sequential performance, it's the >100x faster access times. RAID does improve throughput but it does very little to improve access times and random IOPS.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't creating a striped RAID make up most of the performance issues from using a HDD over a SSD? At that point, it's more the bus or CPU that's a limiting factor?
Don't forget about IOPs. A single modern SSD can do about 80k, while a single HD is about 2k. You would need about 40 HDs to match the IOPs.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean performance issues like power consumption, heat and noise?
There is more to performance than speed. Actually, with all the speed we get today even from mechanical hard drives IMHO these other things are far more interesting than squeezing out a little more speed. Why do I care if a program loads in 1/2 a second vs 1/4 second?
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: (Score:2)
Only to a certain point does capacity increase equate to a performance increase in SSDs, and the gap closes very quickly. SSDs don't have things like spindle speeds and areal density to work with to increase throughput, nor do they need them.
My 60GB Corsair Force GT hits a few MB/s under 500MB/s in write speeds, and near 520MB/s in reads. At those speeds the difference between drives is in a few MB/s only. I'd be surprised to see a significantly larger SSD significantly increase speed over that. My 120GB OC
Re: (Score:2)
.....
Have you heard of IOPS?
I have never seen a smaller version ssd have a better IOPS number than a larger one.
Re: (Score:2)
I have never seen a smaller version ssd have a better IOPS number than a larger one.
I have, plenty of times, SLC has better IOPS/GB than MLC and within MLC eMLC has better IOPS/GB than tMLC. So for a given number of dollars the smaller drive will have better performance.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe i should have more strongly implied: Within the same series. Not across memory/technology types.
Re: (Score:2)
So for a given number of dollars the smaller drive will have better performance.
First, this is a red herring, since the price you pay for an SSD in a given size class won't buy you any significantly larger drive. So, a 60GB dog of an SSD for $60 is still far faster than the zero IOPS you get from a $60 120GB SSD. What you really need to compare is the cost per GB, because then you can compare things like the performance of a pair of 60GB drives in RAID-0 vs. a single 120GB.
That said, the primary factor in SSD speed is the number of controller channels that can be connected to the fla
Re: (Score:2)
SLC is ~10x the IOPS/GB for random writes compared to MLC, reads are generally only 20-30% faster.
Re: (Score:2)
Not in real world use. There are no 1M IOPS SLC SSDs (single drive), but there are plenty of 100K IOPS MLC SSDs.
As a matter of fact, this [wikipedia.org] seems to show that with the exception of the Fusion-io ioDrive2 SLC variant, all the top-performing single drive SSDs are MLC. And, the MLC variants of the ioDrive2 are only about 10% behind [fusionio.com] the SLC variant.
You can see from the Wikipedia article that what truly affects final throughput is the bus width and number of channels of SSD controller, just like I said. The fas
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting, you're right the IODrive 2 brings MLC much closer to SLC, there's only a 2x performance delta on an IOPS/GB basis (270k 4k random writes vs 140k for 400GB vs 365GB), for the first generation (which I own a number of) the gulf was much wider.
Re: (Score:2)
Where are you getting those prices? A quick check of newegg found the cheapest ssd at $160 for 240GB ($0.67/GB). On the other hand, a 10K RPM 1TB disk costs $200 ($0.20/GB). Are you comparing the cheapest consumer ssd to the most expensive enterprise hard disk?
Re: (Score:2)
slickdeals.net
I'd say that still counts.
256GB SanDisk Ultra Plus 2.5" SATA III Solid State Drive $100 after $20 rebate + Free Shipping
Samsung 840 EVO-Series 1TB 2.5-Inch SATA III SSD MZ-7TE1T0BW $455 @ Amazon
historic low on the evo is 420$
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Sure, but neither have hard drives. The 1TB SSD of tomorrow may very well be competitive with the 1TB HD of today, but will it be competitive against the 64TB HD of tomorrow?
Re: (Score:2)
well, the thing is that hdd's keep getting faster and bigger too.
100 bucks buys you 3TB. for 300 bucks you can get 9TB. of course this is not "enterprise grade" but neither are such cheap ssds.
so the gap exists and will continue to exist - both go up in storage space but there's no reason to think why either one would stop growing in size. you can already get 4TB drives.
Re: (Score:2)
The only speed increase you get out of harddrives is when density goes up.
Otherwise platter speeds have been more or less stuck at 5400/7200 rpms. Increased density has slowed down a lot in the past 5 years.
Eventually ssds will beat out harddrives in terms of price/capacity. They've already blown them away in terms of reliability and speed.
We live like kings and queens already (Score:2)
Re:We live like kings and queens already (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:We live like kings and queens already (Score:5, Funny)
Well, 256GB SSD ought to be enough for anybody, and is relatively affordable.
enough is never enough.
Re:We live like kings and queens already (Score:5, Informative)
For most people 256GB is more then enough, depending on how they are using it. Though it is no where near enough for other uses.
Personally for my use case, I have both. a 128GB drive for OS and applications, and 1TB HDD for data. If I kept my data on the SSD it would fill up rapidly, so it is not enough for this 'anybody' at least, and I know people who burn through space a lot faster then I do.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think it is a matter of 'throwing in capacity'- it's just that increasing data density on the platter directly corresponds to increases in speed.
Re: (Score:3)
How is this an advantage?
Re: (Score:2)
I have a 1st year MBPr. 256g SSD has been constraining. I wish I had gone for the 512g option even at close to $2/g at the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, 256GB SSD ought to be enough for anybody, and is relatively affordable.
Well, that depends on what you are doing on your machine. If you are a gamer, with game installs running from 20 to 50 GB (I'm looking at you Titanfall!) a 256GB system drive won't go far.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Today we can have an SSD for the price of $0.50 / GB. It is already good enough.
I can get a 1TB SATA hdd for $69 at Best Buy. How much would a 1TB SSD cost?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes but for my laptop I don't need a 1TB SSD. 0.5 TB os available for about $250, and that's low enough a price for me to be able to afford it.
Desktops are another story. That's where I want multi TB of capacity.
Re: (Score:3)
More importantly, you need new things to sell. Even if what we've got was good enough, there's an entire industry (well, several) focused on coming up with better and then convincing us that we want it. Personally I see this as a good thing.
Depends (Score:3)
Likewise, worker bee machines that are pretty much dumb terminals are not going to use SSD. But other machines that people actually do and store work on, that may be something different.
Look, tape is on the order of penny per gigabyte. Hard disks are somewhere between 5-10 cents a gigabyte. SSD is about 50 cents a gigabyte. Many people still back up onto hard disk even though tape is more reliable. We are going to use SSD because there are benefits that justify the order of magnitude increase.
Re: (Score:2)
worker bees can use ssd.
because they don't need to store weeks worth of video.
duh (Score:2)
with spinning rust, you might re-engineer the bulk process that coats your disks, but the boost in recording density depends on changing the parameters of the head. bulk process and one device. compare to flash, where to boost density, you have to tweak each storage cell, controlling for defects and manufacturing flaws, where the yield of each cell multiplies, so defects are exponentially likely.
disks (and to some extent tape) will always have scaling advantages over litho-fabed storage.
you can certainly
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: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
article is a bit weird (Score:2)
The article is a bit weird. It keeps saying to ignore consumer: low price, cheap parts, focus on mobility as inapplicable to enterprise. But then it focus on enterprises disks that aren't far removed from consumer models rather than enterprise models like IBM's flash solutions (ex 840: 33T per U so more than 1P per rack). If we are going to look at enterprise flash I don't understand why you would focus on smaller solutions. Obviously the $8-14g price is even higher but it is at those price points that f
Worth it if you can afford it. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Why is "power" supposedly an issue? (Score:3)
due to continued high prices for capacity, bandwidth and power
How the hell is power an issue? SSD's consume something around 1/100th of the power that a hard drive does.
Re: (Score:3)
Not necessarily. From the article:
The Seagate Enterprise 15K 2.5” form factor HDD and Terascale HDD have power consumption needs of 1 W and 6.5 W per drive, respectively. However, SSDs are far more varied. Consumer SSDs, designed for laptops or tablets, often have power consumptions of between 0.1 and 1.5 W per drive, however enterprise SSDs can range from 3 W to 30 W depending on make and model with most falling between 3 W and 10 W.
A spinning HDD might require more power than an idle SSD but it is not necessarily true that a HDD requires more power all the time. Also if you look at wattage per GB, HDDs are more efficient as you need more SSDs right now to match the same capacity as a HDD. For consumers, it's a small difference but enterprises requiring lots of drives look at efficiency more closely.
Thai floods and Sumitomo explosions (Score:2)
Platter drives have been artificially held high for the past few years... and it will burn them unless they start budging on capacity and price, as SSDs will continue to drop.
With 5TB and 6TB drives finally making it out into the consumer space, platter drive pricing may finally start dropping, but will it be too little too late? Will there be enough of a market now in the consumer space to support the larger drives? I suspect the average user has plenty of storage already - perhaps to the point of full por
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 a
Re:Comments Being Truncated (Score:4, Funny)
No, it's not asinine, but a nod to the intellect of the reader. It demonstrates that the writer has confidence that the reader understands what they're saying. It demonstrates humour and it ...
Re:oh how wrong this is (Score:4, Informative)
Say what?!?
Crucial M500 480GB = $240 or $.50/GB
WD BLACK SERIES WD4003FZEX 4TB = $260 or $.065/GB
Seagate NAS HDD ST3000VN000 3TB = $139 or $.046/GB
prices are current at newegg
The HDD's are around 10x as cheap per GB.
Re: (Score:2)
A 480GB Crucial M500 is slightly cheaper per GB than a 4TB spinning drive right now. I think the 960GB SSD is as well.
That comparison is meaningless because a 4TB is at a premium price. If you think you need 500GB, use should compare a 500GB HDD with an SSD (480GB being close enough). I can get a 500GB 7200RPM SATA drive for about $50. A Crucial M500 is about $120. The SSD is 140% more costly or 2.4 times the price per GB.
Re: (Score:2)
A 480GB Crucial M500 is slightly cheaper per GB than a 4TB spinning drive right now. I think the 960GB SSD is as well.
That comparison is meaningless because a 4TB is at a premium price. If you think you need 500GB, use should compare a 500GB HDD with an SSD (480GB being close enough). I can get a 500GB 7200RPM SATA drive for about $50. A Crucial M500 is about $120. The SSD is 140% more costly or 2.4 times the price per GB.
Even that comparison is a poor one. Really this all depends on your mission.
If all you want is an OS drive for your Chromebook/etc, then you want to look at the cost of 16-32GB of SSD and that is as cheap as any hard drive you could get in that size configuration. The SSD is an obvious choice here.
If you want to store your video collection and your options are RAID HD or SSD, then you don't care how big the individual drives are so you look at price per GB. That usually will end up costing $80-110 for th
Re: (Score:2)
That comparison is meaningless because a 4TB is at a premium price. If you think you need 500GB, use should compare a 500GB HDD with an SSD (480GB being close enough).
Although 4TB drives are still at a premium, I don't think it's unreasonable to compare a much larger spinning disk, as you can get a 3TB drive for around $110.
I can get a 500GB 7200RPM SATA drive for about $50. A Crucial M500 is about $120.
And the problem here is that you're comparing a 500GB spinning drive to a 240GB SSD. If you truly want to compare space to space, then you'd need to spend around $240 for a 480-500GB SSD. That makes the SSD 4.8x as much money, and around 10x more per GB. And, it's even worse with a 3TB disk, as it's still half the price of the ~500GB SSD, but has 6
Re: (Score:3)
Damn, why didn't I think of this?
People, is it true? Would the market bear a "Republican Technology News" site?
Re: (Score:2)
The article is mainly talking about from now will 2020. I'd have to agree I don't think it will happen by 2020. I suspect even by 2030 mass storage solutions on HDD will still be around. It took a very long time for HDD to kill off tape entirely.
Re: (Score:2)
HDD killed tape?
I thought it just pushed it into long term storage.
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: (Score:2)
"10 years away" == "not in the foreseeable future". If we had all the technology that should be here after a "10 years away" deadline from some lab, our world would look like a Star Trek episode. I mean more than just the flip phones.
Re: (Score:2)
Forfty percent of people know that.
Re: (Score:2)
SSDs are built off silicon chip manufacturing processes, and thus the pricing reflects that. If you look at chips such as RAM with similar feature size (e.g. 28nm) and how many chips go into an SSD, I speculate that you'd see the pricing is not that far off if comparing chips of similar feature density and size as they'd reflect the same manufacturing costs. Maybe higher for SSD, as it is a newer technology than RAM which has been around for a very long time and perhaps benefits from some efficiency of sc
Re: (Score:3)
HDD prices are high? Not from any sort of historical perspective. ALL the storage solutions these days are cheap, cheap, cheap!
Bring it on! Toss another SSD onto the cart!
Anybody remember $1000 10 MEGABYTE drives?
Cheap cheap cheap!