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Data Storage IT

Pure Storage: No More Hard Drives Will Be Sold After 2028 (blocksandfiles.com) 154

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: In the latest blast of the HDD vs SSD culture wars, a Pure Storage exec is predicting that no more hard disk drives will be sold after 2028 because of electricity costs and availability, as well as NAND $/TB declines. Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&F: "The ultimate trigger here is power. It's just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity." Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure's DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part. In his view: "Hard drive technology is 67 years old. We need to herald this technology that went from five megabytes the size of this room to where we are today. And even the latest HAMR technology, putting a laser on the top of the head in order to heat up the platters, is pretty remarkable ... But we're at the end of that era."

HDD vendors sing a different tune, of course. Back in 2021, HDD vendor Seagate said the SSD most certainly would not kill disk drives. There's a VAST vs Infinidat angle to it as well, with the former also stating disk drive IO limitations would cripple the use of larger disk drives in petabyte-scale data stores, with Infidat blasting back that it "must be joking." Gartner has had a look in too, claiming that enterprise SSDs will hit 35 percent of HDD/SSD exabytes shipped by 2026 - though that would make Rosemarin's 2028 cutoff unlikely. Pure recently stated SSDs would kill HDDs in a crossover event that would happen "soon." Rosemarin, meanwhile, continued his argument: "Our CEO in many recent events has quoted that 3 percent of the world's power is in datacenters. Roughly a third of that is storage. Almost all of that is spinning disk.

So if I can eliminate the spinning disk, and I can move to flash, and I can in essence reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90 percent while moving density by orders of magnitude in an environment where NAND pricing continues to fall, it's all becoming evident that hard drives go away." Are high electricity prices set to continue? "I think the UK's power has gone up almost 5x recently. And here's the thing ... when they go up, they very seldom if ever come down ... I've been asked many times do I think the cost of electricity will drop over time. And, frankly, while I wish it would and I do think there are technologies like nuclear that could help us over time. I think it'll take us several years to get there. We're already seeing countries putting quotas on electricity, and this is a really important one -- we've already seen major hyperscalers such as one last summer who tried to enter Ireland [and] was told you can't come here, we don't have enough power for you. The next logical step from that is OK, so now if you're a company and I start to say, well, we only have so much power, so I'm gonna give you X amount of kilowatts per X amount of employees, or I'm gonna give you X amount of kilowatts for X amount of revenue that you contribute to the GDP of the country or whatever metric is acceptable."
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Pure Storage: No More Hard Drives Will Be Sold After 2028 More

Pure Storage: No More Hard Drives Will Be Sold After 2028

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @10:12PM (#63515427)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)

      by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @10:25PM (#63515443)

      Yes n no. Depends on the market. For low end home use and light office servers HDDs still have a place. But in data centers where density counts, space costs money, electrical circuits are expensive to install and power, cooling, replacements, and so on, the cost over time of HDDs is easily higher than SSD these days.

      Plus SSD are insanely faster and dead silent while HDDs need extra fans and other bullshit on top of their other issues.

      • Re:No (Score:5, Informative)

        by buss_error ( 142273 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @10:46PM (#63515459) Homepage Journal

        Two other factors I think are important to add to the TCO for at scale:
        Use case
        Maintenance/Replacement cycles

        In an object store, since it is not random read/write, speed is mostly not impactful for the work load case. Ex. Quite a lot of Object Store is for CCTV footage or backup nodules/grains that are never reviewed/used. Writes are generally (not always) buffered by the proxies/control nodes, or go dual (or even mono) threaded instead of triple/$more threaded.

        Also replacement cost for SSD vs. Spinny disk. SSD fail more frequently and thus require manual intervention. Someone did try to come up with a automatic drive replacement robot, but it pulled all the drives out one night. (Not a joke).

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 )

          HDD more reliable than SSD???

          Uh....?

          • SDDs are guaranteed to fail after a certain number of write cycles. Sometimes the count is baked into the firmware, other times it is just old age.

            HDDs, on the other hand, will either fail soon (manufacturing or quality defect) or last for many years. There is no write count on any HDD.

            The fact that many data centers replace their disks after 3 years is an accounting issue. Most of those disks are perfectly usable afterwards. This is no different than companies replacing vehicles every three years. How many

            • SSD write cycle death numbers are so high only heavy write database and other extreme cases will kill the SSD before the rest of the server would be deprecated out anyway. My home machine still has an SSD from 12 years ago in it. I checked for bad blocks a few months ago. I've lost about 2% of the drive, which doesn't make me happy but if it was an HDD it would most likely be dead years ago.

              HDD: I spent a good chunk of my career handling HDD based storage. Not at backblaze levels but up there nearby. M

              • HDD are simply better at $/GB than SSD right now and likely forever.

                As the market for HDD continues to shrink, the $/GB compared to SSDs will increase due to reduced incentives for manufacturers to spend money on R&D. HDD manufacturers will not improve their products at the same rate they have in the past. It requires too great an investment to be fighting for an ever decreasing market segment. So forget about forever - the value proposition of SSDs is only going to be accelerating.

                • Yes eventually but in the same way vacuum tubes went out of style. Mainstream won't be buying HDD once SDD is the only reasonably available option. That will be because home pc makers will stop offering HDD not because home users made that decision.

                  You can still buy a vacuum tube but they're super expensive.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

                | HDD are simply better at $/GB than SSD right now and likely forever.

                Eventually the complexity of mechanical manufacturing will surpass essentially printing SSD storage devices. WAG this will happen before 2030.

            • Modern storage arrays are very careful about how they handle writes. Some, like VAST, give a 10 year guarantee on consumer-level SSDs.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

              SDDs are guaranteed to fail after a certain number of write cycles. Sometimes the count is baked into the firmware, other times it is just old age.

              HDDs, on the other hand, will either fail soon (manufacturing or quality defect) or last for many years. There is no write count on any HDD.

              The fact that many data centers replace their disks after 3 years is an accounting issue. Most of those disks are perfectly usable afterwards. This is no different than companies replacing vehicles every three years. How many

          • When a HDD fails with valuable data on it, the disk itself is frequently still readable. It's a fiddly job for the recovery centre, sure, but it can be done.

            I'm not aware of an SSD capable of that. It fails, that data is guaranteed gone forever.

            TL;DR: Fragility.

            • Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)

              by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @09:11AM (#63516223)

              That's what backups are for.

              I've done HDD data recovery on semi-dead drives. It's brutally hard work, very time consuming, and the odds of full recovery are zero. If you bring the drive to a pro shop it's frightfully expensive and again, not going to recover everything.

              Have good backups because shit happens no matter what your physical layer is. Dead drives aren't the only data loss scenario, as I'm certain you're aware. Shit happens. Own a shovel.

              • That's what backups are for.

                I've done HDD data recovery on semi-dead drives. It's brutally hard work, very time consuming, and the odds of full recovery are zero. If you bring the drive to a pro shop it's frightfully expensive and again, not going to recover everything.

                Have good backups because shit happens no matter what your physical layer is. Dead drives aren't the only data loss scenario, as I'm certain you're aware. Shit happens. Own a shovel.

                100 percent right, But gawd, it is hard to get people to back up. I set up a Time Machine backup for a woman's laptop once. She didn't like it. Then I set up a system that would record to an external drive. It was similar to Time machine but didn't backup the programs.

                Then she lost a bunch of important stuff and called me. But she had unplugged the drive we were backing up to, and had waited weeks before calling me. None of her lost stuff was recoverable. And she was really pissed it couldn't be retrieve

      • I'd actually say the opposite; for homes and small offices there is no real value in having a few spinning drives. I have about 16TB of storage at home (and maybe 20TB primary storage for a 50-person office), and that can easily be done with SSDs (especially at current costs).

        The only thing really missing is an inexpensive board that supports 8-10 m.2 SSDs.

        Where spinning drives make sense still is when you have over 100 of them.

        • Re:No (Score:5, Informative)

          by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @03:20AM (#63515745) Homepage

          that can easily be done with SSDs (especially at current costs).

          I don't agree, at least for home users. To get your 16 TB storage, one can buy four 4TB SSDs for $259 each (for a Samsung 2.5" SATA format), or one 16 TB HDD for $269 (for a Seagate Exos). The performance will be ridiculously different, but so will the price, and having four SSDs leads to much closer power consumption numbers. Most Americans cannot afford a $1000 emergency expense, so why would they spend $765 more for faster storage?

      • Plus SSD are insanely faster and dead silent while HDDs need extra fans and other bullshit on top of their other issues.

        I take it you have not seen the latest PCIE Gen5 SSDs.

        Pretty much every single one of them comes with a huge heat sink or a fan.

        I think it's somewhat the reverse of what you are saying - home user systems comes with SSDs generally nowadays. SMEs just get whatever is cheaper at that point of time - they don't necessarily care whats inside the system / server as long as it stores their files or whatever other functions they need. Most of them don't even know what CPU they have inside (AMD, Intel, something AR

      • Yes, it costs more. But everything just loads faster. When you're multitasking and you max out the RAM cache, that means a huge performance improvement.

        It bugs me that doing a cp of large files wipes out my RAM caching. Should maybe be a kernel API to get past that. Some operations just don't need to be cached.
    • You didn't address the cost of power which is central to the argument.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by rahmrh ( 939610 )

        The power usage of a spinning HD over 5 years is around $50 (10w/50cents/kwh). The spinning 20TB disk costs $300, the 20TB ssd costs $2000. If the power costs 10x the SSD still loses. And that is assuming the SSD power consumption is 0.

        • The article is presuming the cost of SSD vs. HDD will decline and power will go up (it mentions the UK) - but then it doesn't even provide back-of-the-envelope calculations like you did? Yeah, those numbers would have to change a LOT. I think you're right and the article is silly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Duds ( 100634 )

      Yeah it's literally this simple. I have about 64tb in NAS drives, not the biggest user. But when I replace an 8tb drive I will use whichever is cheapest per tb because for what is being stored, hard drives are already well above the minimum speed requirements.

      Very happy for that to be SSDs and I won't say no to the reduced noise and heat but that's on them not me to make happen.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The gap between HDD and SSD price per gigabyte has been falling for years. SSDs are currently around 2x the price of HDDs per gigabyte (2TB HDD around GBP 35, 2TB SSD around 65 GBP, at their lowest).

      By 2028 it's entirely possible that SSDs will have caught up with or even overtaken HDDs on price.

    • If the climatists get their way, electricity will become so expensive that indeed HDDs will be more expensive in TCO than SDDs.

  • for him to say this. not really believable unless you've been drinking koolaid, or by saying it you somehow are making money. oh, wait.

  • That is not the whole equation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stikves ( 127823 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @10:27PM (#63515447) Homepage

    For a single drive, yes TBs/watt is much better on the SSD side.

    Let's assume both SSDs and HDDs cost zero for a minute, just for a mental exercise.

    The largest HDD today 22TB. In a 4U server I can place 90 of them:
    https://www.broadberry.com/sto... [broadberry.com]

    Getting me a nice ~2PB in 4U space.

    Densest NVMe datacenter storage I could find is 32 disks in 1U space:
    https://www.supermicro.com/en/... [supermicro.com]

    And it supports up to 4TB per slot, giving us 128TB in 1U, or 0.5PB in 4U.

    Not too bad in terms of density.

    However that 2PB system is 2600watts, while 4x1U nvme is 6400watts. A significant portion comes from the system itself, meaning the motherboards, controllers, CPUs, RAMs, which have to be duplicated. (Denser NVMe is limited by PCIe bandwidth. It would still require more nodes and/or more CPUs per node).

    So if you are looking for pure storage area, even ignoring costs, NVMe would cost more during operation.

    (Please fix the math if I missed something).

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jsonn ( 792303 )
      Comparing power like that doesn't make sense, as the NVME system has a significant higher throughput. In fact, when you throttle them to the performance of the HDDs, they should be no worse.

      • Re:That is not the whole equation (Score:5, Interesting)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @12:14AM (#63515557) Homepage Journal

        Comparing power like that doesn't make sense, as the NVME system has a significant higher throughput. In fact, when you throttle them to the performance of the HDDs, they should be no worse.

        Comparing throughput doesn't make sense, either, though, because not all storage requires high throughput.

        Think about how much low-access-rate bulk user data (photos, movies, etc.) is stored in "the cloud". Most of it won't get accessed more than once a week. So as long as you optimize your storage so there aren't very many high-throughput users per server, HDDs are potentially fast enough to make the number of simultaneous users per server be bounded by capacity rather than performance, so speeding up the storage won't let you put more users' data on a node.

        Over time, SSDs will replace HDDs for more and more use cases, and at least theoretically that means that the cost of building HDDs with higher and higher density will be borne by fewer and fewer purchasers, which will slowly drive their cost per terabyte up over time, while the cost of increasing SSD density will be borne by more and more purchasers, which will drive their cost per terabyte down.

        However, you can't infinitely stack more silicon, both for heat dissipation reasons and power consumption reasons, so increasing SSD density is bounded in part by increasing semiconductor density, which is getting harder and harder to improve. That has the potential to slow the transition.

        Hard drives hit their sales peak way back in 2011 [statista.com]. In the 12 years since, however, sales have dropped by only a factor of four, and that's with approximately every laptop on the market switching to SSDs. Sales are still at late-1990s levels, despite a huge drop in corporate cloud storage needs in 2022.

        Additionally, there isn't enough manufacturing capacity available to support the sudden replacement of HDDs with SSDs universally right now. So as SSDs become cheaper, the corresponding increase in demand will tend to support their price somewhat, making the crossover point where SSDs become cheaper than HDDs likely to be farther out than simple cost-based extrapolation would suggest.

        At the current rate, 2028 seems rather optimistic to me, with SSDs from companies I've never heard of running ~3x as much per terabyte as large enterprise HDDs, and reputable SSDs running more than 5x the price of HDDs with capacity closer to the price-per-terabyte sweet spot. I could easily be wrong. I'd like to be wrong. But that doesn't seem likely to me.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          If you don't need high throughput then SSDs might be lower power. 6400W is the peak with all drives going flat out to write data.

          If you mostly read data, it will be lower. If you deliberately reduce the PCIe link rate, it will be lower. If you only do occasional reads and most drives are sat idle most of the time, your power consumption over time will probably be a lot lower than what is needed to keep a load of discs physically spinning.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            If you don't need high throughput then SSDs might be lower power. 6400W is the peak with all drives going flat out to write data.

            If you mostly read data, it will be lower. If you deliberately reduce the PCIe link rate, it will be lower. If you only do occasional reads and most drives are sat idle most of the time, your power consumption over time will probably be a lot lower than what is needed to keep a load of discs physically spinning.

            If you keep the disks spinning.

    • Re:That is not the whole equation (Score:5, Informative)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @11:07PM (#63515485) Homepage

      You can't look at the PSU rating. It's way over specced. For one, each EPFF slot on that example server is rated for 70W but the highest draw I can find on real world parts is 7-8W active and less than 1W idle. And most of them would be idle at any given moment.

    • Re:That is not the whole equation (Score:5, Informative)

      by gmack ( 197796 ) <gmack@noSpAM.innerfire.net> on Friday May 12, 2023 @12:27AM (#63515577) Homepage Journal

      I don't know where you got 4 TB per slot. The link on that page points to a list [supermicro.com] which shows the largest NVME as 12800GB

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I looked at newegg and they have several enterprise SSDs that are 15.36 TB, mostly from Micron and Intel.

        • Nimbus sells a 100TB SSD (the EDDCT100). But $40,000 is a little steep even for that capacity. They have 50TB for $12,500. Both are 3.5" form factor. I've always wondered why we didn't have more giant SSDs and why they were so expensive, given the size and dimensions of microSD cards.

  • SSD's need power to keep data intact (Score:3)

    by bubblyceiling ( 7940768 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @10:40PM (#63515451)
    As usual guy in management has no clue how IT works and just pulls out things outta his ass. HDD's can be stored much longer without power. Barring something super rare (with today's tech) like a motor seizure, there is not much that can go wrong with them

    • Building time capsules is a very fringe use case for SSDs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jahta ( 1141213 )

        Building time capsules is a very fringe use case for SSDs.

        But doing backups to external USB drives, for example, is not. SSDs have their place but they are not the answer to every storage requirement. There will still be use cases where a HDD unit is the best option.

        • You are still going to power the drives to make backups even if they are on USB, isn't it? Everything nowadays depends on flash, INCLUDING HARD DRIVES, it isn't like you keep it in a drawer for a few weeks or months and then you plug it into a computer and it's "discharged".

  • Canâ(TM)t beat a floppy. Never change.

  • MFM, RLL, and even DASD drives are still for sale.

    I think 80 column cards and paper tape finally went off the market a few years ago.

    • ...and yet you can still buy ink printer ribbons at staples. There must still be a demand for impact printers....
  • One thing HDD manufacturers can probably leverage is offering long-term storage. If you can't win on size anymore and especially not on speed, perhaps you can create hard drives that will hold the data for 100 years or longer when appropriately stored. Storage needs have outgrown the optical disc offerings for long-term storage.
    • Was looking at some old doc for an imagining system today and saw a diagram with an optical jukebox tied into the network. Wonder how many of those are still around.

      • Sony still has an optical imaging archive format. It isn't cheap, but advertises a very long data life.

        Overall, it would be nice to see some advances in optical storage. Even BDXL is getting long in the tooth. Something like more layers, more ways to write bits, perhaps instead of a bubble for a "1" and nothing for a zero, do vertical or horizontal bubbles which could allow more bit density. No, optical storage isn't fast, but done right, it lasts a long time, and is decently reliable.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

        Sold my Sony jukebox in 2008.

  • Culture War? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @10:55PM (#63515465)
    Calling people switching to ssds because they're getting cheaper a culture war is so stupid at first I thought it was something a slash dot editor did because I couldn't imagine anyone who has a job writing articles saying something so stupid. That's not what a culture war is. A culture war is just a moral panic like the old satanic panic or when a bunch of people freaked out over He-Man action figures.

    This is no different than when we abandoned floppy disks. It's just technology progressing. It has absolutely nothing to do with moral panics. It's just people switching the better tech because it's affordable.

    • Yeah - for the most part nobody is attached to any one for like "Team Red' or "Team Blue" reasons - they're just different use cases. Both my home systems have primary/OS drives that are SSD's. 500GB on one and 2TB on another. However my gaming rig also has an 8TB hard drive and the Linux machine has 4 12TB drives in a RAID array.

      The SSD's are used where speed is important. The hard drives are used where capacity is the issue and access speed isn't really important (ie if I'm watching a movie from stor

  • Shingled Hard Drives seem to be the current evolution of the spinning magnetic platters media.

    Because shingled drives write sequentially, and erase in very large blocks (maybe around 256MB), they are best for a very specific type of usage. You have best results when writing really big files, and not overwriting any parts of those files. They are good for reading big files as well. So they're actually fairly good for Games, which don't involve writing small files, or overwriting small parts of big files.

    • They're pretty terrible in a RAID array though. While they perform well when writing and reading big files, RAID arrays often don't have those characteristics. There was that incident from a few years ago [blocksandfiles.com] where Western Digital and Seagate didn't clearly demarcate SMR drives as such, and people that unknowingly inserted them into RAID arrays were less than thrilled. [topicbox.com]

      • That's because ZFS, unlike traditional RAID, rebuilds the pool in a somewhat random manner which is really bad for SMR drives. Traditional RAID rebuilds the array sequentially and should not have the same problem.

        • ZFS doesn't rebuild a RAID. It does a resilver, only copying the used parts of the drive, which is faster. Because it isn't block level, it can be hell on a drive though.

          Another thing that SMR drives do not like is the initial format when using Linux's dm-integrity. On a CMR drive, it can take a few hours. SMR, it can take days to weeks for it to finish. dm-integrity is useful on Red Hat systems that don't have any bit rot protection in the filesystem (ZFS can be added, but not supported by RH, and btr

          • Oh yeah, SMR drives should be avoided for most use cases. Still, if zfs could do the resilver in a sequential manner, it would allow SMR drives to be used for low traffic storage/NAS. Actually, the way zfs normally works (copy on write) should work OK with SMR, since editing a large file would make zfs write new sectors (instead of rewriting old ones) and as long as there is enough free space and fragmentation is not too bad, it should work, probably better than a traditional filesystem, like ext4.

            However,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cstacy ( 534252 )

      Shingled Hard Drives seem to be the current evolution of the spinning magnetic platters media.

      Be careful: If you had chicken pox, the Shingles virus is already inside you!

  • When SSDs are less expensive per bit than HDDs, then most HDDs will disappear. At the moment though that is far from true. There are still a lot of applications where the speed of a SSD isn't nearly as important as the ability to store huge amounts of data.

  • Ain't gunna happen, though I wish it would. Outside of fringe, specific use cases, I wholeheartedly support eliminating HDDs. They are absolutely garbage in comparison.

    "Oh, but the density is still the best in servers!"
    I don't care. Most people aren't running servers in their home. Leave a small enterprise line of HDDs for those types of people.

    "Last longer without power!"
    Not on a time frame that matters. I wouldn't time-capsule on any kind of drive because they're all bad at that. Optical storage is the on

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Xenx ( 2211586 )

      "Oh, but the density is still the best in servers!" I don't care. Most people aren't running servers in their home. Leave a small enterprise line of HDDs for those types of people.

      No, home users generally aren't running servers, but they should be backing up their data. Not saying the average home user IS backing up their data, but it's a reasonable expectation for the average user these days. Higher density HDDs are still better for that purpose.

      "They're cheaper!" Not over time in the long run if you actually use it.

      I'm not sure what interpretation you intend. You're not necessarily wrong on the face of it. However, SSDs are not cheaper than HDD at even reasonable higher density. I've calculated for 8TB at the current cheapest price per GB, using genera

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

        No, home users generally aren't running servers, but they should be backing up their data. Not saying the average home user IS backing up their data, but it's a reasonable expectation for the average user these days. Higher density HDDs are still better for that purpose.

        Most home users who do back up use the cloud to do so, which is a fine choice. If it's extra, mega important to not be lost and too sensitive for cloud storage than optical storage is still the only truly appropriate option. It's just less convenient.

        I'm not sure what interpretation you intend. You're not necessarily wrong on the face of it. However, SSDs are not cheaper than HDD at even reasonable higher density. I've calculated for 8TB at the current cheapest price per GB, using generalized expected lifespans for SSD and HDD, and including power costs assuming they're constantly under load. Assuming the shortest life spans of both, the HDDs would cost about 75% what the SSDs would over 10 years. Looking at the longest expected lifespans they cost about the same, over 10 years, with the HDDs coming out a few dollars ahead.

        Average amount of time before there is *something* wrong with the drive that causes me to throw it away, plus the cost of my time. HHDs are slow. At everything. And they make irritating noises that most people can't hear, but that is admittedly a purely persona

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xenx ( 2211586 )
          HDDs are still the play for even mundane data storage use at home. Unfortunately, a lot of the US has to deal with data caps or speeds too slow to make online backup realistic. I'm in both groups. My download is great, but my upload sucks. It would cost me more per month to remove the cap, and more to upgrade the package, than it would to pay for the cloud storage. As for the desire for SSDs to take over, I agree. They just haven't, and likely won't soon, as you also stated before.

  • ...as to think that their way is the only way.

  • Hmm, let's see... (Score:3)

    by fzammett ( 255288 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @12:33AM (#63515583) Homepage

    ...I have 64Tb of space in my home server currently, spread across 8 8Tb hard drives. Jumping over to Microcenter.com, the cheapest 8Tb spinner I can currently get is $150, while the cheapest 8Tb SSD I can get is $500.

    So, $1,200 versus $4,000.

    I'd LOVE to switch to all SSDs, but not with that price disparity... and especially in today's economic climate, I don't think businesses are going to want to do it either (setting aside those that NEED SSDs for speed reasons).

    I know this guy is talking about 5 years from now, and the price disparity IS shrinking over time, but I just can't believe it's going to shrink THAT much in just 5 years. I don't doubt that he's right with the basic point about no more hard drives, but I think his time horizon is off by probably 5 years.

  • Who is the messenger (Score:5, Insightful)

    by felixrising ( 1135205 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @01:13AM (#63515637)
    Pure Storage specialises in 100% FLASH storage. Are you surprised to see them heralding the death of spinning rust? Sounds like marketing to me.
  • Data loss and SSD bit rot is just as bad as being hacked. HDD's can store information a very long time. SSD's like cheap USB sticks have been corrupted unusable in as little as 2 years. SSD's have many levels of error correcting reliability and many price points. You pay a lot more for decent SSD's. Going forward, smaller tighter memory size means decreased and unproven reliability, and couple this with 40-50 layer memory, even 5 years does not cut it. Samsung premium SSD's do seem better. LTO tape drives s
  • unless SSD's suddenly and massively accelerate in size while maintaining the low cost this just isn't feasible in 5 years

  • Where I worked we used HDDs for backup and archive because they were less than double the price of tapes (per TB) and you didn't need expensive tape drives and robots and software to use them, just lots of SATA ports which are cheap, and rsync which is free. While I guess HDDs might not be as long-lasting as tapes for archiving, I'd trust SSDs even less offline after a few years. Power consumption isn't an issue for archive because all the old drives were offline in storage. Even the online drives were s

  • And it's not going away anytime soon. So much for the death of the HDD.
    • I wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to get a Quantum LTFS solution to work for data archival. Oh it was soooooo terrible...
  • Most regular home computer users will NEVER notice the difference in electric power consumption between SSD vs. HDD. Pricing is key - get double or more storage in HDD for same price than SSD. That's the bottom line for most of us ! Availability - wait and see in 2028 ! SDD dies, there is no recovery is another consideration.

  • Because the world is going to end in Jan 2029.

    Or maybe just civilisation

    (asteroid impact or supervolcano or aliens etc)

  • I wont's deny that SSDs are compelling in a great number of situations. If they had merely said "SSDs will continue to grow in popularity and HDDs will decline" that wouldn't be very controversial.

    But at least today, SSDs are nowhere in the ballpark of completely obsoleting HDDs. The "sweet spot" in TB/$ right now is 18TB, for about $250-$300. You can't get anywhere near that amount of SSD storage for less than a few thousand dollars.

    Then there's power and cooling. A couple months ago I got a NUC to be my n

  • SSDs will begin to lose data after as soon as a couple years if left unpowered, so datacenters offering a 'cold storage' tier will need to be able to guarantee occasional power ups, and prove it.
  • While one can argue that subsystems never spin down, reasonable enterprise systems spin down HDDs. And AFAIK, the power consumption there is far less than SSD at that point. So perhaps the power angle isn't nearly as big a differentiator as one might think. But it does depend. SSDs still have a lot to prove (sadly)... the focus has been on performance, but there are other considerations as well. The biggest being price... which has gotten "better", but let me know where there's a reasonably affordable
  • ...they still sell *TAPE* drives & media, right?

  • There are different markets for storage. Twenty years ago, flash wiped out the mobile device storage market for HDDs. Ten years ago, SSDs wiped out the high-speed, low capacity enterprise HDD market. Five years ago, SSDs wiped out the laptop market for HDDs.

    The total addressable market for HDDs is obviously shrinking, but it's not clear that it will go all the way to zero. The big remaining HDD market is cold/warm storage, like for the huge amounts of storage for something like Facebook that is accessed

  • I wish people who say silly things like these would put some money on it. I'd like to wager $1k worth of storage that hard drives will definitely not only still be around, but will still be the preferred storage medium for high endurance.

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