4 ms·

1TB SSD

27 points by helwr 17y ago

ShabbyDoo 17y ago
I'm told that older datacenters are maxed out on power consumption, not physical space. It seems that companies with storage-intensive needs could get great deals for colo if they used SSDs along with low wattage processors. Of course, for $4K/TB, it doesn't makes sense. However, when prices drop or someone makes slow-but-cheap solid state storage (for long tail stuff, not OLTP), things will get very interesting.
jacquesm 17y ago
Nov. 2009. These have been for sale for a while now. The more interesting variety is the PCI-Express version, but it's a bit pricey still.
aswanson 17y ago
Not sure of the price/density coefficient multiplier for flash versus hard drives, but if it's near unity then these should be set to disrupt the magnetic drive market in 4-5 years.
- cperciva 17y ago
  This 1 TB SSD is listed on Amazon for $3919.99. 1 TB HDDs are listed on Amazon starting at $84.99. SSDs are already disrupting the high-performance storage market, but I think it will be more than 5 years before they disrupt the bulk storage market.
  - aswanson 17y ago
    My parents, representative, I believe, of the average computer users, have an 80 Gb hard drive that is at less than 15 % used capacity. The point at which, say, twice that level of storage drops to less than $100 in SSD format makes a strong economic case for widespread consumer adoption. We see the beginning of this in netbooks.
    - fnid2 17y ago
      I only use about 40GB on my laptop. I'd buy a 60GB disk for $100, but not a 120GB for $300. They should concentrate on getting the price down rather than the capacity up. They're too expensive.
      - robryan 17y ago
        Maybe there making a play on high end storage requirements knowing they can't compete on price/ speed at the smaller end of the market.
        ErrantX 17y ago
        I'm guessing that's the case. We specced these in feb to replace the disks in one of our clusters; not quite economical yet but getting there. When we deploy the next storage cluster in June I expect it will be with SSDs.
      - drats 17y ago
        It's getting pretty close, with various 32 gigs under $100 and 40gigs and 60gigs in the $100-$200 range. $130 for a 40gig Intel for example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...
        fnid2 17y ago
        That's easily within reach. I remember there being issues with read/writes. You could only write so many times or read so many times. Is this still true? How long will an SSD last?
        drats 17y ago
        Theoretical reliability and lifespan is much higher than that of mechanical drives. There have been bad "batches" of SSD drives from one or two companies, but there are from mechanical drive companies too. "Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact." http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4 http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34... People should have backups anyway, so I guess if the companies are standing behind these drives and all the users so far are pleased it's not really an issue, though it doesn't beat the mech drives really (although in mobile applications shock resistance is higher) but there seems to be no cons. It's just price, size and speed to decide on them now. Still, given the prices, for home applications I imagine people just want a boot drive and storage on a larger mech. On the server side there are probably quite a few databases that could benefit from 1TB with good random access and throughput.
- aswanson 17y ago
  http://www.archivebuilders.com/aba004.html http://www.archivebuilders.com/aba004.html http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-ram-flash%20pricing.html http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-ram-flash%20pricing.html
travisjeffery 17y ago
I don't even want to know how much this would cost.
- sketerpot 17y ago
  Too bad, because I'm going to tell you. It will cost $2,200.
jrockway 17y ago
I am not sure if there is a consumer market for SSDs this big. If you have a high-performance online transaction processing app, then this could be great. But if you just have a terabyte of porn, you are wasting your money. Disks (and even tape) handle this workload just fine. For a boot drive, 30G ought to be enough. I only use 7G on my desktop and about 4G on my laptop: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/ssd-root 28G 6.9G 19G 27% / /dev/mapper/md0_crypt 917G 331G 587G 37% /home No reason to pay $3000 for a 1T SSD when a 30G SSD + 1T hard drive will give you the exact same performance for 1/10th the cost. (I have 3 drives in md0_crypt, and so it ends up being as fast as an SSD too. The bottleneck on both disks is the crypto; apparently i7s don't have hardware-accelerated AES, but the i5s do. Grumble.)
- barrkel 17y ago
  It's awkward to fit Windows 7 Ultimate in 30G, never mind applications. Swap file and hibernation file, which will both be present by default, added up to over half that in my case immediately post-install (12G memory). I'm using an Intel 80G SSD in my desktop as the boot drive, on Windows 7. Rather annoying is the fact that directories like Program Files, ProgramData and some others cannot be moved to another drive and replaced with junctions (the moral equivalent of a mount point), because some MS application installation features rely on hard links for some kind of checkpointing, and these cross-device links fail silently.
  - electromagnetic 17y ago
    My C is devoid of Program Files and all my temporary files and such are also on my second drive. What seriously irks me is that some applications (especially games) install files to 'My Documents', I've admittedly not looked for a resolution to this as I have more than enough room to accommodate this.
    - ryanpetrich 17y ago
      Windows provides a facility to move the My Documents folder. It's even possible to use an NTFS symbolic link to move it to a SMB path.
elblanco 17y ago
Diskspace is basically close to free nowawadays. I've made it known on a number of projects that "I never want to hear we're out of space, ever, eliminating copier paper is more worthwhile to get an extra TB of space for a project." Diskspeed however is worth its weight in gold for some applications.

27 points by helwr 17y ago

I'm told that older datacenters are maxed out on power consumption, not physical space. It seems that companies with storage-intensive needs could get great deals for colo if they used SSDs along with low wattage processors. Of course, for $4K/TB, it doesn't makes sense. However, when prices drop or someone makes slow-but-cheap solid state storage (for long tail stuff, not OLTP), things will get very interesting.

jacquesm 17y ago

Nov. 2009. These have been for sale for a while now. The more interesting variety is the PCI-Express version, but it's a bit pricey still.

aswanson 17y ago

Not sure of the price/density coefficient multiplier for flash versus hard drives, but if it's near unity then these should be set to disrupt the magnetic drive market in 4-5 years.

cperciva 17y ago
This 1 TB SSD is listed on Amazon for $3919.99. 1 TB HDDs are listed on Amazon starting at $84.99. SSDs are already disrupting the high-performance storage market, but I think it will be more than 5 years before they disrupt the bulk storage market.
- aswanson 17y ago
  My parents, representative, I believe, of the average computer users, have an 80 Gb hard drive that is at less than 15 % used capacity. The point at which, say, twice that level of storage drops to less than $100 in SSD format makes a strong economic case for widespread consumer adoption. We see the beginning of this in netbooks.
  - fnid2 17y ago
    I only use about 40GB on my laptop. I'd buy a 60GB disk for $100, but not a 120GB for $300. They should concentrate on getting the price down rather than the capacity up. They're too expensive.
    - robryan 17y ago
      Maybe there making a play on high end storage requirements knowing they can't compete on price/ speed at the smaller end of the market.
      - ErrantX 17y ago
        I'm guessing that's the case. We specced these in feb to replace the disks in one of our clusters; not quite economical yet but getting there. When we deploy the next storage cluster in June I expect it will be with SSDs.
    - drats 17y ago
      It's getting pretty close, with various 32 gigs under $100 and 40gigs and 60gigs in the $100-$200 range. $130 for a 40gig Intel for example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...
      - fnid2 17y ago
        That's easily within reach. I remember there being issues with read/writes. You could only write so many times or read so many times. Is this still true? How long will an SSD last?
        drats 17y ago
        Theoretical reliability and lifespan is much higher than that of mechanical drives. There have been bad "batches" of SSD drives from one or two companies, but there are from mechanical drive companies too. "Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact." http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4 http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34... People should have backups anyway, so I guess if the companies are standing behind these drives and all the users so far are pleased it's not really an issue, though it doesn't beat the mech drives really (although in mobile applications shock resistance is higher) but there seems to be no cons. It's just price, size and speed to decide on them now. Still, given the prices, for home applications I imagine people just want a boot drive and storage on a larger mech. On the server side there are probably quite a few databases that could benefit from 1TB with good random access and throughput.
aswanson 17y ago
http://www.archivebuilders.com/aba004.html http://www.archivebuilders.com/aba004.html http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-ram-flash%20pricing.html http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-ram-flash%20pricing.html

travisjeffery 17y ago

I don't even want to know how much this would cost.

sketerpot 17y ago
Too bad, because I'm going to tell you. It will cost $2,200.

jrockway 17y ago

I am not sure if there is a consumer market for SSDs this big. If you have a high-performance online transaction processing app, then this could be great. But if you just have a terabyte of porn, you are wasting your money. Disks (and even tape) handle this workload just fine. For a boot drive, 30G ought to be enough. I only use 7G on my desktop and about 4G on my laptop: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/ssd-root 28G 6.9G 19G 27% / /dev/mapper/md0_crypt 917G 331G 587G 37% /home No reason to pay $3000 for a 1T SSD when a 30G SSD + 1T hard drive will give you the exact same performance for 1/10th the cost. (I have 3 drives in md0_crypt, and so it ends up being as fast as an SSD too. The bottleneck on both disks is the crypto; apparently i7s don't have hardware-accelerated AES, but the i5s do. Grumble.)

barrkel 17y ago
It's awkward to fit Windows 7 Ultimate in 30G, never mind applications. Swap file and hibernation file, which will both be present by default, added up to over half that in my case immediately post-install (12G memory). I'm using an Intel 80G SSD in my desktop as the boot drive, on Windows 7. Rather annoying is the fact that directories like Program Files, ProgramData and some others cannot be moved to another drive and replaced with junctions (the moral equivalent of a mount point), because some MS application installation features rely on hard links for some kind of checkpointing, and these cross-device links fail silently.
- electromagnetic 17y ago
  My C is devoid of Program Files and all my temporary files and such are also on my second drive. What seriously irks me is that some applications (especially games) install files to 'My Documents', I've admittedly not looked for a resolution to this as I have more than enough room to accommodate this.
  - ryanpetrich 17y ago
    Windows provides a facility to move the My Documents folder. It's even possible to use an NTFS symbolic link to move it to a SMB path.

elblanco 17y ago

Diskspace is basically close to free nowawadays. I've made it known on a number of projects that "I never want to hear we're out of space, ever, eliminating copier paper is more worthwhile to get an extra TB of space for a project." Diskspeed however is worth its weight in gold for some applications.