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My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dea

My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don't think mechanical disks are long for this world. For our next storage expansion it's ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash/SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don't have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.

qyv 10y ago
Perhaps this is old information, but do SSD's from the same batch/model not tend to fail all within the same timeframe? A steady stream of failures is probably preferable to a single mass failure.
- Bombthecat 10y ago
  The benefit of ssd is that you can almost exactly predict when a ssd will fail. You know the read and write IPOs. You know when they fail.
  - PaulKeeble 10y ago
    I dont know about that. Every SSD that has failed for me did so quite unexpectedly and prematurely, I haven't yet taken an SSD to its write limit and none of them have survived more than a few years except the very first Intel 80GB gen 1.
    - ReverseCold 10y ago
      I've never had any storage medium fail on me, and I feel like I do a lot of read/writes. Exception is a flash drive I snapped in half once. Oops.
      - ams6110 10y ago
        Never had a failure on any of my personal laptops or PCs. I see it all the time though at work on our servers. I think what an individual considers a lot of read/writes is a drop in the bucket compared to what servers do.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      I had my first Intel 32/40gb fail just outside warranty (originally 1 year iirc). But I was so addicted to the speed difference I kept with them... The price difference isn't bad for laptop/desktop use now. But man, can't even consider it for my nas.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Unless its the controller or firmware that goes bad... I once had three SSDs from the same batch (in different RAID sets, thankfully - we mix and match) go within a week and all had completely garbled SMART data. But overall I prefer SSDs - just mix and match different models/manufacturers/batches in different RAID sets as for HDDs.
- jzwinck 10y ago
  They can. I had a set of Crucial SSDs which all contained the same firmware defect which took them offline after X hours of power-on time. I also had a RAID 1 array where both SSDs failed within a couple days of each other (due to wear). That was a rude surprise. They were only six months old.
  - pkaye 10y ago
    I used to write SSD firmware (not Crucial though!) and new code can always be buggy despite our best effort to test it thoroughly. However many of the SSD companies have carried their firmware through multiple generations now and the code has matured during that time so I expect this to be less of an issue. The bigger issue now will be a process shrink resulting in NAND issue that has not been identified before to be properly mitigated by the controller/firmware so I personally when a year for a product to mature before buying it.
  - Namidairo 10y ago
    Ah yes, the 5200 hours bug. That was fun to read about only a few days after plugging in my Crucial M4.
    - jmiserez 10y ago
      I went through 3 different Crucial M4s, all replaced under warranty due to unrecoverable read errors and subsequent data loss. That model really had some serious issues at the time.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Always mix batches almost regardless of what you buy. HDDs can and do fail like that too. I learned that the almost-hard way back in the day of the IBM Death Star [1], where we had a RAID that started failing, one drive at a time, roughly a week apart. We had reasonably up to date backups, but couldn't afford to take everything offline, so we were biting nails for weeks of continous RAID rebuilds and reduced performance and thankfully everything stayed up and we didn't get any additional failures during any of the rebuilds. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar
  - leonroy 10y ago
    Finding different batches can be difficult, especially if like most companies you buy your kit from one or two approved vendors. You often hear the trope 'don't mix different disk brands in RAID' wondering if anyone knows if that's true?
Taek 10y ago
You can buy HDDs for $20 / TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.
- mathgeek 10y ago
  I think back to when HDD's were "getting cheaper" at $1/MB (and every power of 10 since at that same price point) and shrug. While they'll certainly still have their place (similar to tape drives and other storage technology that used to be much more commonplace), there's every reason to expect the PPU of SSD's to continue trending downward.
  - magila 10y ago
    > there's every reason to expect the PPU of SSD's to continue trending downward Not really. The big driver for cost reduction in SSDs was process shrinks, but the latest processes are actually more expensive per-transistor than older ones so that ship has more-or-less sailed. You've got 3D NAND but that's even more expensive to manufacture so the cost savings are marginal at best. It remains to be seen if XPoint will lead to big savings. In the short term SSD prices have actually been trending up due to a shortage of NAND flash.
    - mathgeek 10y ago
      To my point, this is still the same argument that has been made time and time again with regards to storage. Short term upticks are easy to see in historical SSD pricing, even when looking at the longterm trend. Source: http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm
      - magila 10y ago
        If you think this is the same you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the industry. Moore's Law as we know it is dead, shrinking the node size isn't cutting costs like it used to. A lot of people are still in denial over this, but it's going to have major repercussions in the IC industry.
phire 10y ago
All the high end and mid-range laptops have already dropped the spinning drive (unless they have a secondary drive for bulk storage), the user experience is just so much better. It's only the low-end laptops that still use spinning drives, because even a 1tb is technically cheaper than a reasonably sized SSD. I took a look and the NAND chip trend lines, and I predict that by mid 2018, 256gb of NAND (which is enough space for an average consumer) will cost less than a 1tb drive. At that point, all the cheap laptops will drop spinning drives too.
- mcintyre1994 10y ago
  Actually the very low end is all 32gb emmc now, I assume those are super cheap and Windows 10 is okayish with that space so the manufacturers went for it. But then you jump to mechanical disks to get above 32 until like you said mid-range where it's all proper SSDs.
  - Numberwang 10y ago
    I bought one of those for Christmas that only had 16gb. 14 of those were taken up by win10! Win10 ran reasonably well actually, but I switched to lubuntu for the storage.
    - derekp7 10y ago
      This sounds like we could go back to the workflow of pre hard drive systems. Windows on the internal drive, and all user file storage on SD cards.
tscs37 10y ago
I think until SSDs can hit the price point of a HDD at same capacity they will probably stay around atleast in consumer space. A 2TB harddrive is just way to cheap compared to a 2TB SSD, even if they fail and need more power, atleast for archiving or large storage in consumer terms. Primary storage may switch to SSD though.
- marcofloriano 10y ago
  I'm with you, but i believe we will see more and more huge user data sets being stored on clouds. So maybe the future will be a hybrid model between SSD local drives (for day to day files) and cloud for mass user storage (like photos, videos, backups, and so on).
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    People keep suggesting that the cloud will take over, but for most people the time required to upload all their 4k christmas videos to the cloud will be the limiting factor. If everyone had fiber, sure...
ams6110 10y ago
Recently had a small cluster (12 nodes) where close to half the SSDs used for the root filesystems failed in a span of a few months. Turned out to be a defective batch from manufacturer. SSDs are normally reliable but in my experience are not immune to problems.
- jjoonathan 10y ago
  Is correlated risk an area where HDDs have a fundamental advantage over SSDs? Un-diversified RAID arrays were notorious even when spinning rust was the only contender.

qyv 10y ago

Perhaps this is old information, but do SSD's from the same batch/model not tend to fail all within the same timeframe? A steady stream of failures is probably preferable to a single mass failure.

Bombthecat 10y ago
The benefit of ssd is that you can almost exactly predict when a ssd will fail. You know the read and write IPOs. You know when they fail.
- PaulKeeble 10y ago
  I dont know about that. Every SSD that has failed for me did so quite unexpectedly and prematurely, I haven't yet taken an SSD to its write limit and none of them have survived more than a few years except the very first Intel 80GB gen 1.
  - ReverseCold 10y ago
    I've never had any storage medium fail on me, and I feel like I do a lot of read/writes. Exception is a flash drive I snapped in half once. Oops.
    - ams6110 10y ago
      Never had a failure on any of my personal laptops or PCs. I see it all the time though at work on our servers. I think what an individual considers a lot of read/writes is a drop in the bucket compared to what servers do.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I had my first Intel 32/40gb fail just outside warranty (originally 1 year iirc). But I was so addicted to the speed difference I kept with them... The price difference isn't bad for laptop/desktop use now. But man, can't even consider it for my nas.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Unless its the controller or firmware that goes bad... I once had three SSDs from the same batch (in different RAID sets, thankfully - we mix and match) go within a week and all had completely garbled SMART data. But overall I prefer SSDs - just mix and match different models/manufacturers/batches in different RAID sets as for HDDs.
jzwinck 10y ago
They can. I had a set of Crucial SSDs which all contained the same firmware defect which took them offline after X hours of power-on time. I also had a RAID 1 array where both SSDs failed within a couple days of each other (due to wear). That was a rude surprise. They were only six months old.
- pkaye 10y ago
  I used to write SSD firmware (not Crucial though!) and new code can always be buggy despite our best effort to test it thoroughly. However many of the SSD companies have carried their firmware through multiple generations now and the code has matured during that time so I expect this to be less of an issue. The bigger issue now will be a process shrink resulting in NAND issue that has not been identified before to be properly mitigated by the controller/firmware so I personally when a year for a product to mature before buying it.
- Namidairo 10y ago
  Ah yes, the 5200 hours bug. That was fun to read about only a few days after plugging in my Crucial M4.
  - jmiserez 10y ago
    I went through 3 different Crucial M4s, all replaced under warranty due to unrecoverable read errors and subsequent data loss. That model really had some serious issues at the time.
vidarh 10y ago
Always mix batches almost regardless of what you buy. HDDs can and do fail like that too. I learned that the almost-hard way back in the day of the IBM Death Star [1], where we had a RAID that started failing, one drive at a time, roughly a week apart. We had reasonably up to date backups, but couldn't afford to take everything offline, so we were biting nails for weeks of continous RAID rebuilds and reduced performance and thankfully everything stayed up and we didn't get any additional failures during any of the rebuilds. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar
- leonroy 10y ago
  Finding different batches can be difficult, especially if like most companies you buy your kit from one or two approved vendors. You often hear the trope 'don't mix different disk brands in RAID' wondering if anyone knows if that's true?

Taek 10y ago

You can buy HDDs for $20 / TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.

mathgeek 10y ago
I think back to when HDD's were "getting cheaper" at $1/MB (and every power of 10 since at that same price point) and shrug. While they'll certainly still have their place (similar to tape drives and other storage technology that used to be much more commonplace), there's every reason to expect the PPU of SSD's to continue trending downward.
- magila 10y ago
  > there's every reason to expect the PPU of SSD's to continue trending downward Not really. The big driver for cost reduction in SSDs was process shrinks, but the latest processes are actually more expensive per-transistor than older ones so that ship has more-or-less sailed. You've got 3D NAND but that's even more expensive to manufacture so the cost savings are marginal at best. It remains to be seen if XPoint will lead to big savings. In the short term SSD prices have actually been trending up due to a shortage of NAND flash.
  - mathgeek 10y ago
    To my point, this is still the same argument that has been made time and time again with regards to storage. Short term upticks are easy to see in historical SSD pricing, even when looking at the longterm trend. Source: http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm
    - magila 10y ago
      If you think this is the same you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the industry. Moore's Law as we know it is dead, shrinking the node size isn't cutting costs like it used to. A lot of people are still in denial over this, but it's going to have major repercussions in the IC industry.

phire 10y ago

All the high end and mid-range laptops have already dropped the spinning drive (unless they have a secondary drive for bulk storage), the user experience is just so much better. It's only the low-end laptops that still use spinning drives, because even a 1tb is technically cheaper than a reasonably sized SSD. I took a look and the NAND chip trend lines, and I predict that by mid 2018, 256gb of NAND (which is enough space for an average consumer) will cost less than a 1tb drive. At that point, all the cheap laptops will drop spinning drives too.

mcintyre1994 10y ago
Actually the very low end is all 32gb emmc now, I assume those are super cheap and Windows 10 is okayish with that space so the manufacturers went for it. But then you jump to mechanical disks to get above 32 until like you said mid-range where it's all proper SSDs.
- Numberwang 10y ago
  I bought one of those for Christmas that only had 16gb. 14 of those were taken up by win10! Win10 ran reasonably well actually, but I switched to lubuntu for the storage.
  - derekp7 10y ago
    This sounds like we could go back to the workflow of pre hard drive systems. Windows on the internal drive, and all user file storage on SD cards.

tscs37 10y ago

I think until SSDs can hit the price point of a HDD at same capacity they will probably stay around atleast in consumer space. A 2TB harddrive is just way to cheap compared to a 2TB SSD, even if they fail and need more power, atleast for archiving or large storage in consumer terms. Primary storage may switch to SSD though.

marcofloriano 10y ago
I'm with you, but i believe we will see more and more huge user data sets being stored on clouds. So maybe the future will be a hybrid model between SSD local drives (for day to day files) and cloud for mass user storage (like photos, videos, backups, and so on).
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  People keep suggesting that the cloud will take over, but for most people the time required to upload all their 4k christmas videos to the cloud will be the limiting factor. If everyone had fiber, sure...

ams6110 10y ago

Recently had a small cluster (12 nodes) where close to half the SSDs used for the root filesystems failed in a span of a few months. Turned out to be a defective batch from manufacturer. SSDs are normally reliable but in my experience are not immune to problems.

jjoonathan 10y ago
Is correlated risk an area where HDDs have a fundamental advantage over SSDs? Un-diversified RAID arrays were notorious even when spinning rust was the only contender.