4 ms·

This is cool. But I assume SSD is going to get better too.

by ape4 9y ago

wyldfire 9y ago
If SSDs were forecast to overtake magnetic drives, then WD would be unwise to invest here. But the graph from the article shows a 10x cost/GB continuing into 2028. So, yes, SSDs will improve. But they exist in a different tier/market segment until they can close that cost gap.
- mark-r 9y ago
  Not just cost but density. I'm pulling these numbers out of the air, but suppose you could have a $100 4TB SSD or a $600 24TB HDD some years from now. Many datacenters will still prefer the HDD just for the rack space considerations.
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    I'd expect SSDs to be significantly more expensive but higher density actually. My perception of the future is maybe a 20TB SSD for $2000 vs 15TB HDDs for $500.
  - loeg 9y ago
    SSDs are already more dense than HDDs and will likely remain that way. The only remaining barrier is $/GB.
    - mark-r 9y ago
      I was all set to doubt you, but then I found this: https://www.micron.com/products/solid-state-storage/product-lines/5100#/ https://www.micron.com/products/solid-state-storage/product-.... My ignorance is showing again.
      - loeg 9y ago
        There's even 15 TB available for sale today in the 2.5" form factor: https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Samsung-PM1633a-MZILS15THMLS-solid-state-drive-15.36-TB-SAS-12Gb-s/4586754.aspx?pfm=srh https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Samsung-PM1633a-MZILS15THM... And 60 TB in 3.5": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-unveils-60tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-unveils-60tb... No spinning rust drive comes close.
  - wang_li 9y ago
    Of the currently shipping products SSD has the highest density. Samsung has a 2.5" 15 TB SSD. The closest magnetic storage is 12TB 3.5". Another important factor to remember is that your HDD will give you 200 MB/s of sequential data. If you have a random pattern it's going to drop to 10 MB/s or less. (15K RPM SAS drives can do around 150-170 random IOPS, assume 32 KB per operation and you're looking at 6 MB/s.) SSD will push out 10x+ that rate for random IOPS. A 100 TB HDD sitting behind 200 MB/s is painful but sitting behind 5 MB/s is insane. There's a place for such devices, but it's not serving your OLTP databases or kafka message queues.
- freedomben 9y ago
  Exactly. HDDs really can't be compared to SSDs directly without considering the goals of the system. They are both storage devices, but the pros/cons make them like comparing a car to a truck. They both transport people and things, but the car gets better gas mileage than the truck but has a lot less towing capacity. The job you need done is a huge factor in which solution is the most optimal.
- otakucode 9y ago
  That 'cost gap' is completely artificial and supported solely by price-fixing. Remember when LCD panels only dropped in price a few cents a year despite being in tons and tons of products? That was price fixing. The same thing had occurred with RAM in the years before LCD. And it was the same manufacturers involved. This time around, the story is the same. A commodity product that costs almost nothing to produce yet somehow magically never drops in price by anything but the most marginal of amounts. When those manufacturers got busted for price-fixing it only took a couple years before the price of an LCD panel dropped to a quarter of what it was previously, and SSDs will drop even faster. WD might expect the price-fixing will continue for several more years, though. The corrupt South Korean administration dropped their investigation into price-fixing in the NAND market several months back. I don't know what impact that will have on the general international effort to prove the collusion that seems so obvious. I just want a 20TB SSD for $500. It's 2017 and no, that's not too much to ask. They're friggin parallel grids of NAND gates with a bunch of multiplexor/demultiplexors bolted on. All photolithography. I don't need them to be those tiny little M.2 sticks, go ahead and give me one in a friggin 5.25" case. At this point they've gone about a mile past where I got fed up with this crap.
  - davrosthedalek 9y ago
    I'm not sure what you are on about, the prices of SSD dropped by a factor of 3 or so from 2013 to 2016. That's more than HDD. At the same time, SSDs got faster and faster, while HDD speed is essentially constant.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  > If SSDs were forecast to overtake magnetic drives, then WD would be unwise to invest here. Why not both? WD bought SansDisk for a reason. WD is likely going to be investing in both Hard Drives AND NAND Flash in the near future.
  - loeg 9y ago
    WD has limited R&D money. If your investment isn't going to pay out because SSDs surpass HDDs in GB/$, then you've just wasted a big up front investment (and opportunity you could have been investing in for SSD). The grandparent comment is hypothesizing that SSDs may surpass HDDs on GB/$ before the HDD R&D pays off.
eumoria 9y ago
Datacenters still are relying on spinning storage and pretty much everywhere I read will continue to for the foreseeable future. I'm curious what the other factors are beyond just the cost per TB/PB in each rack. Like reliability over very long time scales... beyond the cost factor and into archival territory. Or in an emergency or destructive scenario (i.e. do platter drives fair better in a fire than SSDs)
- loeg 9y ago
  The only reason they're using spinning storage is it's cheaper. I work for a big storage vendor. We would switch to all flash tomorrow if it were equal or lower $/GB (already has better performance and density).
  - rasz 9y ago
    no you wouldnt, Flash is useless for cold and very hot storage, anything that is not touched for more than 6 months, or will be rewritten more than ~2000 times in under a year is either impossible or uneconomical with solid state.
    - loeg 9y ago
      I'm not talking about the market segments where tape or RAM dominate (and would continue to dominate). I think the use cases you are imagining for spinning rust are a tiny portion of the market for storage, or simply do not exist. For example: It's hard to actually rewrite spinning rust 2000 times a year. That's exceeding 100% utilization with completely optimal sequential write pattern on 7200 RPM drives. Say you can write 200 MB/s continuously[0]. That's about 6 PB/year. With a 6 TB harddrive, that's only 1000 full overwrites a year. Maybe 10k or 15k RPM drives can overwrite 2000 times a year, but those have vastly higher cost than 7200 RPM drives. At some point, you just overprovision the flash enough to bring the number of required overwrites down, and it's still cheaper than 10-15k RPM drives. [0]: Approximately average for enterprise drives: http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/enterprise-hdd-testing,2-896.html http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/enterprise-hdd-testing,2-8...

This is cool. But I assume SSD is going to get better too.

by ape4 9y ago

This is cool. But I assume SSD is going to get better too.

If SSDs were forecast to overtake magnetic drives, then WD would be unwise to invest here. But the graph from the article shows a 10x cost/GB continuing into 2028. So, yes, SSDs will improve. But they exist in a different tier/market segment until they can close that cost gap.

mark-r 9y ago
Not just cost but density. I'm pulling these numbers out of the air, but suppose you could have a $100 4TB SSD or a $600 24TB HDD some years from now. Many datacenters will still prefer the HDD just for the rack space considerations.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  I'd expect SSDs to be significantly more expensive but higher density actually. My perception of the future is maybe a 20TB SSD for $2000 vs 15TB HDDs for $500.
- loeg 9y ago
  SSDs are already more dense than HDDs and will likely remain that way. The only remaining barrier is $/GB.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    I was all set to doubt you, but then I found this: https://www.micron.com/products/solid-state-storage/product-lines/5100#/ https://www.micron.com/products/solid-state-storage/product-.... My ignorance is showing again.
    - loeg 9y ago
      There's even 15 TB available for sale today in the 2.5" form factor: https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Samsung-PM1633a-MZILS15THMLS-solid-state-drive-15.36-TB-SAS-12Gb-s/4586754.aspx?pfm=srh https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Samsung-PM1633a-MZILS15THM... And 60 TB in 3.5": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-unveils-60tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-unveils-60tb... No spinning rust drive comes close.
- wang_li 9y ago
  Of the currently shipping products SSD has the highest density. Samsung has a 2.5" 15 TB SSD. The closest magnetic storage is 12TB 3.5". Another important factor to remember is that your HDD will give you 200 MB/s of sequential data. If you have a random pattern it's going to drop to 10 MB/s or less. (15K RPM SAS drives can do around 150-170 random IOPS, assume 32 KB per operation and you're looking at 6 MB/s.) SSD will push out 10x+ that rate for random IOPS. A 100 TB HDD sitting behind 200 MB/s is painful but sitting behind 5 MB/s is insane. There's a place for such devices, but it's not serving your OLTP databases or kafka message queues.
freedomben 9y ago
Exactly. HDDs really can't be compared to SSDs directly without considering the goals of the system. They are both storage devices, but the pros/cons make them like comparing a car to a truck. They both transport people and things, but the car gets better gas mileage than the truck but has a lot less towing capacity. The job you need done is a huge factor in which solution is the most optimal.
otakucode 9y ago
That 'cost gap' is completely artificial and supported solely by price-fixing. Remember when LCD panels only dropped in price a few cents a year despite being in tons and tons of products? That was price fixing. The same thing had occurred with RAM in the years before LCD. And it was the same manufacturers involved. This time around, the story is the same. A commodity product that costs almost nothing to produce yet somehow magically never drops in price by anything but the most marginal of amounts. When those manufacturers got busted for price-fixing it only took a couple years before the price of an LCD panel dropped to a quarter of what it was previously, and SSDs will drop even faster. WD might expect the price-fixing will continue for several more years, though. The corrupt South Korean administration dropped their investigation into price-fixing in the NAND market several months back. I don't know what impact that will have on the general international effort to prove the collusion that seems so obvious. I just want a 20TB SSD for $500. It's 2017 and no, that's not too much to ask. They're friggin parallel grids of NAND gates with a bunch of multiplexor/demultiplexors bolted on. All photolithography. I don't need them to be those tiny little M.2 sticks, go ahead and give me one in a friggin 5.25" case. At this point they've gone about a mile past where I got fed up with this crap.
- davrosthedalek 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you are on about, the prices of SSD dropped by a factor of 3 or so from 2013 to 2016. That's more than HDD. At the same time, SSDs got faster and faster, while HDD speed is essentially constant.
dragontamer 9y ago
> If SSDs were forecast to overtake magnetic drives, then WD would be unwise to invest here. Why not both? WD bought SansDisk for a reason. WD is likely going to be investing in both Hard Drives AND NAND Flash in the near future.
- loeg 9y ago
  WD has limited R&D money. If your investment isn't going to pay out because SSDs surpass HDDs in GB/$, then you've just wasted a big up front investment (and opportunity you could have been investing in for SSD). The grandparent comment is hypothesizing that SSDs may surpass HDDs on GB/$ before the HDD R&D pays off.

eumoria 9y ago

Datacenters still are relying on spinning storage and pretty much everywhere I read will continue to for the foreseeable future. I'm curious what the other factors are beyond just the cost per TB/PB in each rack. Like reliability over very long time scales... beyond the cost factor and into archival territory. Or in an emergency or destructive scenario (i.e. do platter drives fair better in a fire than SSDs)

loeg 9y ago
The only reason they're using spinning storage is it's cheaper. I work for a big storage vendor. We would switch to all flash tomorrow if it were equal or lower $/GB (already has better performance and density).
- rasz 9y ago
  no you wouldnt, Flash is useless for cold and very hot storage, anything that is not touched for more than 6 months, or will be rewritten more than ~2000 times in under a year is either impossible or uneconomical with solid state.
  - loeg 9y ago
    I'm not talking about the market segments where tape or RAM dominate (and would continue to dominate). I think the use cases you are imagining for spinning rust are a tiny portion of the market for storage, or simply do not exist. For example: It's hard to actually rewrite spinning rust 2000 times a year. That's exceeding 100% utilization with completely optimal sequential write pattern on 7200 RPM drives. Say you can write 200 MB/s continuously[0]. That's about 6 PB/year. With a 6 TB harddrive, that's only 1000 full overwrites a year. Maybe 10k or 15k RPM drives can overwrite 2000 times a year, but those have vastly higher cost than 7200 RPM drives. At some point, you just overprovision the flash enough to bring the number of required overwrites down, and it's still cheaper than 10-15k RPM drives. [0]: Approximately average for enterprise drives: http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/enterprise-hdd-testing,2-896.html http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/enterprise-hdd-testing,2-8...