3 ms·

In the long run anything that moves in DC is way less reliable than systems without moving parts. On the top of that, these systems also need more energy to mai

In the long run anything that moves in DC is way less reliable than systems without moving parts. On the top of that, these systems also need more energy to maintain the movement. If you increase the size than you need better materials to keep up with the increased mechanical load. I bet by 2020 we are going to have better ways of storing large amount of data than a spinning disk. The new optical drive would be a good candidate for some use cases, mostly for archiving though: http://www.sciencealert.com/this-new-5d-data-storage-disc-can-store-360tb-of-data-for-14-billion-years http://www.sciencealert.com/this-new-5d-data-storage-disc-ca... For continuous read/write workloads SSDs are the best for many reasons (energy efficiency, latency, IO bandwidth) and I think the world is moving that direction to replace spinning disks with these. I am hoping to see a bump in the SSD capacity as well. We are here now: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/221303-the-worlds-biggest-ssd-has-arrived-at-13tb http://www.extremetech.com/computing/221303-the-worlds-bigge...

ucaetano 11y ago
From the article: "An obvious question is why are we talking about spinning disks at all, rather than SSDs, which have higher IOPS and are the “future” of storage." "The root reason is that the cost per GB remains too high, and more importantly that the growth rates in capacity/$ between disks and SSDs are relatively close (at least for SSDs that have sufficient numbers of program-erase cycles to use in data centers), so that cost will not change enough in the coming decade."
- zaroth 11y ago
  Well at least for YouTube video storage, I imagine the P/E cycles are not a problem. There have been issues with longevity like on the Samsung 840 EVO drives, but if you can avoid that then you can build some incredibly dense, fast, reliable and power efficient storage on top of V-NAND. Cost per GB for SSDs is definitely catching up to HDD [1] and I think is expected to match or beat HDD within the decade. Power efficiency should be better on SSD and MTBF will be much better than HDD, so I would have thought TCO for SSD would have HDDs basically beat already. [1] https://cms-images.idgesg.net/images/article/2015/12/ssd-vs-hdd-chart-retry-100631270-orig.png https://cms-images.idgesg.net/images/article/2015/12/ssd-vs-...

ucaetano 11y ago

From the article: "An obvious question is why are we talking about spinning disks at all, rather than SSDs, which have higher IOPS and are the “future” of storage." "The root reason is that the cost per GB remains too high, and more importantly that the growth rates in capacity/$ between disks and SSDs are relatively close (at least for SSDs that have sufficient numbers of program-erase cycles to use in data centers), so that cost will not change enough in the coming decade."

zaroth 11y ago
Well at least for YouTube video storage, I imagine the P/E cycles are not a problem. There have been issues with longevity like on the Samsung 840 EVO drives, but if you can avoid that then you can build some incredibly dense, fast, reliable and power efficient storage on top of V-NAND. Cost per GB for SSDs is definitely catching up to HDD [1] and I think is expected to match or beat HDD within the decade. Power efficiency should be better on SSD and MTBF will be much better than HDD, so I would have thought TCO for SSD would have HDDs basically beat already. [1] https://cms-images.idgesg.net/images/article/2015/12/ssd-vs-hdd-chart-retry-100631270-orig.png https://cms-images.idgesg.net/images/article/2015/12/ssd-vs-...