4 ms·

HAMR and then HDMR are expected to allow data densities to increase by 5 to 10 times what is currently achievable. HAMR will probably start showing up in a yea

HAMR and then HDMR are expected to allow data densities to increase by 5 to 10 times what is currently achievable. HAMR will probably start showing up in a year or two. Spinning drives are definitely not going away anytime soon unless there is a much more significant drop in the cost of SSDs.

londons_explore 8y ago
Investment in new spinning drive technologies is going away though. Nobody wants to spend R&D money on coming up with patents and ideas which will be worthless in 5 years when SSD's overtake. Science investment requires a new technology to have a prospect of a return for most of the ~20 year patent lifespan for it to look like a good investment, and spinning bits of metal aren't that right now.
- blihp 8y ago
  In the same way that hard drives didn't kill off tape, SSD won't kill off hard drives. The price differential is too great for many applications and they have different operational strengths and weaknesses.
  - johngalt 8y ago
    Tapes have a use case that hard drives do not. Tapes are the lowest cost/GB stored and are more shelf stable than hard drives. SSDs are higher performance than HDDs and have none of the packaging constraints. Flash storage is going to be put into everything and the economies of scale look quite good. Storage is scaling but the r/w speeds of hdds aren't keeping up. Following the trend line and we see huge hdds that are functionally useless due to how long it takes to do disk operations. HDDs only exist above tapes because of their performance. And only exist below SSDs due to cost. Tapes are the floor and SSDs are the quickly lowering ceiling. HDDs are likely to be crushed between.
    - StillBored 8y ago
      You might be right, but keep in mind that flash has been scaling due to the shrinking semiconductor feature sizes (and additional layers/etc). So a large part of flash's core R&D & production costs are being spread over all the logic being produced. That has been hitting a wall, so while the capacity/price curves for flash look nice, they likely won't continue, which leaves open the possibility that if rust actually gets a 4-5x boost in the near future the current market trends will continue. SSDs for perf/power/size and mechanical harddrives for bulk nearline storage, leaving tape where its been for the past 30 years, as an archival technology.
      - wtallis 8y ago
        Horizontal feature sizes for flash memory stopped shrinking years ago. The continued improvements in density and production cost have been the result of R&D that is very specifically focused on 3D NAND flash memory and has little in common with R&D for logic circuit fabrication. That said, on the horizon of multiple years, I agree that the future scalability of NAND flash doesn't look quite as promising as HAMR/MAMR for hard drives. How that translates into actual product demand and adoption will probably depend on the relatively unexplored question of how much performance per TB our applications actually need. 40+ TB hard drives might not be fast enough to actually serve as nearline storage for that volume of data without eg. multi-actuator technology that essentially gives you more than one hard drive sharing a common spindle motor. Meanwhile, there's no question that QLC NAND flash definitely has adequate read latency and throughput.
        londons_explore 8y ago
        Multi-actuator tech sounds interesting, and I wouldn't be surprised to see drives with 5, 10, 50 or 100 read heads per platter at some point. With 100 read heads per platter, typical seek time is cut by a factor of 100. That won't let them overtake SSD's, but at least allow them to close the gap.
        wtallis 8y ago
- gamegoblin 8y ago
  This isn't true, though. Seagate and WD are spending mountains of cash to develop technologies like HAMR and MAMR which they expect to take them up to 40TB drives. These technologies require entirely new fabrication processes, etc. Very capital intensive.
- ksec 8y ago
  Not in the next 10 years. Further than that I don't know. SSD won't be cheaper than HDD per GB in 5 years time, the cost of building Flash and scaling down Flash, Multi Layer Flash, 2.5D / 3D/ 4D Flash ( What ever the manufacture wants to call them ) are also going up. Return of investment is taking longer ( Even with the previous high NAND price ). Moore's Law is dead, and it is not only just CPU. Theoretically speaking there should be a point where the TCO of NAND Flash would cross HDD. But as NAND scales down, it also reduces its write cycle. I was never a believer in HAMR, the technologies parent mentioned which Seagate announced in 2012, the idea just seems too unrealistic. The approach WD taking MAMR is much better using Magnetic Field. BPM is also far off, but BPM has been in research for nearly a decade, and MAMR should be here in 2019. All of these R&D will come to fruition in the next few years, where we expect HDD to scale to 100TB in the next 10 years.
dktoao 8y ago
Multi-actuator drives are also coming in the next few years: https://blog.seagate.com/craftsman-ship/multi-actuator-technology-a-new-performance-breakthrough/ https://blog.seagate.com/craftsman-ship/multi-actuator-techn... That will close the performance gap a bit too I suspect. I have to wonder about power consumption though.
- wtallis 8y ago
  Multi-actuator hard drives will not close any performance gap. They will just help slow the decline in IOPS/TB that higher capacity drives bring. They accomplish this by essentially being multiple hard drives sharing a common spindle and helium-filled enclosure. As Seagate is currently implementing the idea, you still have only one head per platter, and at most one independently moving head per platter (but currently the stack of platters is just divided into two groups). Thus, sequential performance does not improve at all (and actually is reduced by the number of independent actuators), and random I/O increases by a small integer factor when the gap between hard drives and the slowest SSDs is already more than two orders of magnitude. However, power consumption shouldn't be much higher for this kind of multi-actuator hard drive over existing hard drive designs.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  Back when I was an intern at Imprimis (before they got bought by Seagate), I worked with the Manufacturing Engineers for the Wren series of 5.25” drives, including the Wren VII, which was the first consumer SCSI drive with a capacity of 1GB or more. I looked at the drive actuators at the time, and I was incredulous when the guys told me that all operations were serial. I asked why they didn’t do parallel reads and writes, and I was told that technology was already common for mainframes but too expensive for consumer gear. So, fast forward from 1989 to now, and I’m sure that idea will come back — sooner or later.

londons_explore 8y ago

Investment in new spinning drive technologies is going away though. Nobody wants to spend R&D money on coming up with patents and ideas which will be worthless in 5 years when SSD's overtake. Science investment requires a new technology to have a prospect of a return for most of the ~20 year patent lifespan for it to look like a good investment, and spinning bits of metal aren't that right now.

blihp 8y ago
In the same way that hard drives didn't kill off tape, SSD won't kill off hard drives. The price differential is too great for many applications and they have different operational strengths and weaknesses.
- johngalt 8y ago
  Tapes have a use case that hard drives do not. Tapes are the lowest cost/GB stored and are more shelf stable than hard drives. SSDs are higher performance than HDDs and have none of the packaging constraints. Flash storage is going to be put into everything and the economies of scale look quite good. Storage is scaling but the r/w speeds of hdds aren't keeping up. Following the trend line and we see huge hdds that are functionally useless due to how long it takes to do disk operations. HDDs only exist above tapes because of their performance. And only exist below SSDs due to cost. Tapes are the floor and SSDs are the quickly lowering ceiling. HDDs are likely to be crushed between.
  - StillBored 8y ago
    You might be right, but keep in mind that flash has been scaling due to the shrinking semiconductor feature sizes (and additional layers/etc). So a large part of flash's core R&D & production costs are being spread over all the logic being produced. That has been hitting a wall, so while the capacity/price curves for flash look nice, they likely won't continue, which leaves open the possibility that if rust actually gets a 4-5x boost in the near future the current market trends will continue. SSDs for perf/power/size and mechanical harddrives for bulk nearline storage, leaving tape where its been for the past 30 years, as an archival technology.
    - wtallis 8y ago
      Horizontal feature sizes for flash memory stopped shrinking years ago. The continued improvements in density and production cost have been the result of R&D that is very specifically focused on 3D NAND flash memory and has little in common with R&D for logic circuit fabrication. That said, on the horizon of multiple years, I agree that the future scalability of NAND flash doesn't look quite as promising as HAMR/MAMR for hard drives. How that translates into actual product demand and adoption will probably depend on the relatively unexplored question of how much performance per TB our applications actually need. 40+ TB hard drives might not be fast enough to actually serve as nearline storage for that volume of data without eg. multi-actuator technology that essentially gives you more than one hard drive sharing a common spindle motor. Meanwhile, there's no question that QLC NAND flash definitely has adequate read latency and throughput.
      - londons_explore 8y ago
        Multi-actuator tech sounds interesting, and I wouldn't be surprised to see drives with 5, 10, 50 or 100 read heads per platter at some point. With 100 read heads per platter, typical seek time is cut by a factor of 100. That won't let them overtake SSD's, but at least allow them to close the gap.
        wtallis 8y ago
gamegoblin 8y ago
This isn't true, though. Seagate and WD are spending mountains of cash to develop technologies like HAMR and MAMR which they expect to take them up to 40TB drives. These technologies require entirely new fabrication processes, etc. Very capital intensive.
ksec 8y ago
Not in the next 10 years. Further than that I don't know. SSD won't be cheaper than HDD per GB in 5 years time, the cost of building Flash and scaling down Flash, Multi Layer Flash, 2.5D / 3D/ 4D Flash ( What ever the manufacture wants to call them ) are also going up. Return of investment is taking longer ( Even with the previous high NAND price ). Moore's Law is dead, and it is not only just CPU. Theoretically speaking there should be a point where the TCO of NAND Flash would cross HDD. But as NAND scales down, it also reduces its write cycle. I was never a believer in HAMR, the technologies parent mentioned which Seagate announced in 2012, the idea just seems too unrealistic. The approach WD taking MAMR is much better using Magnetic Field. BPM is also far off, but BPM has been in research for nearly a decade, and MAMR should be here in 2019. All of these R&D will come to fruition in the next few years, where we expect HDD to scale to 100TB in the next 10 years.

dktoao 8y ago

Multi-actuator drives are also coming in the next few years: https://blog.seagate.com/craftsman-ship/multi-actuator-technology-a-new-performance-breakthrough/ https://blog.seagate.com/craftsman-ship/multi-actuator-techn... That will close the performance gap a bit too I suspect. I have to wonder about power consumption though.

wtallis 8y ago
Multi-actuator hard drives will not close any performance gap. They will just help slow the decline in IOPS/TB that higher capacity drives bring. They accomplish this by essentially being multiple hard drives sharing a common spindle and helium-filled enclosure. As Seagate is currently implementing the idea, you still have only one head per platter, and at most one independently moving head per platter (but currently the stack of platters is just divided into two groups). Thus, sequential performance does not improve at all (and actually is reduced by the number of independent actuators), and random I/O increases by a small integer factor when the gap between hard drives and the slowest SSDs is already more than two orders of magnitude. However, power consumption shouldn't be much higher for this kind of multi-actuator hard drive over existing hard drive designs.
bradknowles 8y ago
Back when I was an intern at Imprimis (before they got bought by Seagate), I worked with the Manufacturing Engineers for the Wren series of 5.25” drives, including the Wren VII, which was the first consumer SCSI drive with a capacity of 1GB or more. I looked at the drive actuators at the time, and I was incredulous when the guys told me that all operations were serial. I asked why they didn’t do parallel reads and writes, and I was told that technology was already common for mainframes but too expensive for consumer gear. So, fast forward from 1989 to now, and I’m sure that idea will come back — sooner or later.