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You state that with an unwarranted degree of certainty. You're making the same argument, and mistake, that proponents of 'X is going to kill hard drives' have

by blihp 8y ago

You state that with an unwarranted degree of certainty. You're making the same argument, and mistake, that proponents of 'X is going to kill hard drives' have made for decades. There have been many 'this will be the death of hard drives' technologies over the decades: zip drives, optical drives, tape drives (there was a time when they were predicted to be everywhere... never happened), CD (then DVD) writers, etc. Not to mention MRAM which has been the hottest tech that hasn't really happened yet for 3 decades. These were all going to be some combination of more durable and/or cheaper per Xb. But they all lacked the one critical advantage that hard drives had: massive economies of scale. Here's my prediction: spinning rust isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

p1necone 8y ago
I don't know, SSDs have already replaced HDDs in consumer systems to a far greater extent than any of the things you've listed.
- soundwave106 8y ago
  Aren't most cloud computing currently almost completely HDDs at this point? At least, this is the impression that I get from looking at the case of Backblaze (which is probably the cloud storage center with the most public statistics on what they use). So far, the usage of SSDs is fairly minimal on the storage side, although I believe they are used at Backblaze some for operations such as bootup and caching. (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q1-2018/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q1-2018/) I would agree on consumer systems (that often have one single boot drive), SSDs make a lot of sense. These days you tend to only see HDDs at the very low end. From a personal perspective, most of my PCs are completely SSD. But I also have a media server (the largest storage space being reserved for MKV copies of my personal DVDs and Blu Rays). This is composed of RAID arrays of 6TB HDDs. Right now, cost wise, the highest "common" SSD is 4TB SSDs are roughly in the $800-$1200 range. 4TB HDDs by comparison are quite cheap, as low as $89 for a certain Seagate model (I used the Western Digital Reds which for 4TB at the moment are a little higher, $115... for the 6TB model it is $178). While I definitely wouldn't say "HDDs will always be around", the price difference is very high right now to justify the superior properties of SSD. Backblaze seems to be in agreement here (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-vs-hdd-future-of-storage/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-vs-hdd-future-of-storage/). I guess the question is how long it will take for large capacity SSDs to scale down in price for them to be competitive. Until that happens, I imagine HDDs have a decent future left, if not on consumer devices then at least as drives for cloud / data center storage.
  - magicalhippo 8y ago
    Blackblaze is primarily a backup storage company. Their main bread and butter is relatively cold data storage. Lots of VPS and similar services offer SSD storage now, and I expect it to grow. The one I use didn't even a non-SSD option, and it was a pretty cheap provider. SSDs offer orders of magnitude better random IO, I imagine that allows the hosting company to have more clients per storage unit, lowering the effective cost of SSDs.

by blihp 8y ago

p1necone 8y ago

I don't know, SSDs have already replaced HDDs in consumer systems to a far greater extent than any of the things you've listed.

soundwave106 8y ago
Aren't most cloud computing currently almost completely HDDs at this point? At least, this is the impression that I get from looking at the case of Backblaze (which is probably the cloud storage center with the most public statistics on what they use). So far, the usage of SSDs is fairly minimal on the storage side, although I believe they are used at Backblaze some for operations such as bootup and caching. (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q1-2018/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q1-2018/) I would agree on consumer systems (that often have one single boot drive), SSDs make a lot of sense. These days you tend to only see HDDs at the very low end. From a personal perspective, most of my PCs are completely SSD. But I also have a media server (the largest storage space being reserved for MKV copies of my personal DVDs and Blu Rays). This is composed of RAID arrays of 6TB HDDs. Right now, cost wise, the highest "common" SSD is 4TB SSDs are roughly in the $800-$1200 range. 4TB HDDs by comparison are quite cheap, as low as $89 for a certain Seagate model (I used the Western Digital Reds which for 4TB at the moment are a little higher, $115... for the 6TB model it is $178). While I definitely wouldn't say "HDDs will always be around", the price difference is very high right now to justify the superior properties of SSD. Backblaze seems to be in agreement here (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-vs-hdd-future-of-storage/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-vs-hdd-future-of-storage/). I guess the question is how long it will take for large capacity SSDs to scale down in price for them to be competitive. Until that happens, I imagine HDDs have a decent future left, if not on consumer devices then at least as drives for cloud / data center storage.
- magicalhippo 8y ago
  Blackblaze is primarily a backup storage company. Their main bread and butter is relatively cold data storage. Lots of VPS and similar services offer SSD storage now, and I expect it to grow. The one I use didn't even a non-SSD option, and it was a pretty cheap provider. SSDs offer orders of magnitude better random IO, I imagine that allows the hosting company to have more clients per storage unit, lowering the effective cost of SSDs.