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It will. SSDs counter intuitively scale down in price much better than hard drives at small sizes; there's no cost advantage to making a HDD with less storage t

It will. SSDs counter intuitively scale down in price much better than hard drives at small sizes; there's no cost advantage to making a HDD with less storage than a single platter, or about 1/5 to 1/8 (in the case of helium drives) of the largest on the market. Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD). At that point, HDDs will essentially only be found in external drives and data centers. The writing will be on the wall, and R&D will slow down, starting a cycle that will lead to collapse.

pmoriarty 8y ago
"Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD)." Reliability and mean time between failures figure in to the equation as well -- at both the low end and the high end. Data centers don't want to be swapping out bad drives all the time, and low-end consumers can't afford to buy new drives all the time. Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did. I personally do like to buy laptops with mechanical drives in them, because I can get a lot of storage without paying insane prices, and because I want the drive to last as long as possible. And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me.
- wtallis 8y ago
  > Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did. > And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me. I'm pretty sure you're cherry-picking the data you're willing to look at. It's definitely not true that any datacenter ever avoids SSDs due to worries about drive failure rates. These days, high-end consumer or enterprise SSDs are warrantied to survive more writes than it is physically possible to send to a hard drive during the same 5-year span. Flash memory write endurance stopped being a serious concern by the time consumer SSDs reached capacities that made them sufficient for use as the sole storage device in a mainstream laptop. Controller/firmware bugs are the only source of SSD failure that you have a non-negligible chance of encountering in the wild, but the rate of such failures is very small, especially if you stick to the major reputable SSD brands. And that's in the consumer market where the vendors aren't specifically validating each SSD model with your specific servers before you put anything into production.
- nine_k 8y ago
  Maybe an SSD under a heavy datacenter I/O load is indeed less reliable than an HDD. But in a laptop, a device that you lug around, move around while working, and sometimes even drop, a precise mechanical device has a much larger chance to misbehave, to my mind. Its I/O load is way lower than in the datacenter, too.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Used to be that whole series of SSDs had data corruption problems (which in one case ultimately lead to the demise of the manufacturer). Still happens. Recent example: Apple. Power failure behavior of most consumer oriented SSDs is also data corrupting.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Used to be that entire series of HDDs had data corruption problems, too.
wtallis 8y ago
This is already playing out. SSDs are cheaper than hard drives at 120GB, and that crossover point is moving upward. Sub-500GB hard drives will probably disappear from the market next year, now that 240GB SSDs are dropping below $30. SSD controllers are cheaper than the fixed costs of hard drive motors, actuators and clean-room assembly. Adding an extra platter gets you more incremental GB per dollar, but getting that first platter working is much more expensive than the minimum viable SSD.
jtl999 8y ago
A 1TB SSD this past Black Friday was at the lowest about $115/1TB. That's about the price a 1TB HDD was back in 2010.
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  I'm not sure if this was meant to refute my point somehow, but hard drives haven't come down that much in price since 2010... Sorting by price on Newegg, if you're looking for a cheap laptop drive you can choose right now between a 320gb HDD for $28.55, a 60gb SSD for $19.99, or a 240gb SSD for $31.99. For a 1TB drive, you're looking at $38.50 HDD vs $109.99 SSD. Large SSDs remain fairly expensive for now, but the low end is being eaten.
  - jtl999 8y ago
    Agreed.
paulmd 8y ago
Interestingly enough SSDs have already outpaced the density of HDDs in the 2.5" form factor, presumably due to exactly the effect you describe. You literally can't buy a 2.5" hard drive bigger than 2 TB last time I checked. All of the thin-and-light stuff like ultrabooks is SSD only too, HDDs can't even match the dimensions you can do with NVMe (maybe something like Microdrive could) let alone capacity. Cost is still up there but only about 2.5x as expensive as 2.5" HDDs... a 2 TB HDD is about $80 while a 1 TB SSD is ~$100-120. And there are (kinda shitty) 2 TB SSDs that are hitting $250 these days (eg Micron 1100).
- PuffinBlue 8y ago
  > You literally can't buy a 2.5" hard drive bigger than 2 TB last time I checked. You can get them for sure[0] and they're not really that expensive at all. That particular one gave me about 95MB/s write speed on large files. https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/B0713WPGLL/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/...
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    Those are 15mm drives though - unlikely to fit inside a laptop (7mm is thin, 9.5mm is standard).

pmoriarty 8y ago

"Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD)." Reliability and mean time between failures figure in to the equation as well -- at both the low end and the high end. Data centers don't want to be swapping out bad drives all the time, and low-end consumers can't afford to buy new drives all the time. Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did. I personally do like to buy laptops with mechanical drives in them, because I can get a lot of storage without paying insane prices, and because I want the drive to last as long as possible. And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me.

wtallis 8y ago
> Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did. > And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me. I'm pretty sure you're cherry-picking the data you're willing to look at. It's definitely not true that any datacenter ever avoids SSDs due to worries about drive failure rates. These days, high-end consumer or enterprise SSDs are warrantied to survive more writes than it is physically possible to send to a hard drive during the same 5-year span. Flash memory write endurance stopped being a serious concern by the time consumer SSDs reached capacities that made them sufficient for use as the sole storage device in a mainstream laptop. Controller/firmware bugs are the only source of SSD failure that you have a non-negligible chance of encountering in the wild, but the rate of such failures is very small, especially if you stick to the major reputable SSD brands. And that's in the consumer market where the vendors aren't specifically validating each SSD model with your specific servers before you put anything into production.
nine_k 8y ago
Maybe an SSD under a heavy datacenter I/O load is indeed less reliable than an HDD. But in a laptop, a device that you lug around, move around while working, and sometimes even drop, a precise mechanical device has a much larger chance to misbehave, to my mind. Its I/O load is way lower than in the datacenter, too.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  Used to be that whole series of SSDs had data corruption problems (which in one case ultimately lead to the demise of the manufacturer). Still happens. Recent example: Apple. Power failure behavior of most consumer oriented SSDs is also data corrupting.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Used to be that entire series of HDDs had data corruption problems, too.

wtallis 8y ago

This is already playing out. SSDs are cheaper than hard drives at 120GB, and that crossover point is moving upward. Sub-500GB hard drives will probably disappear from the market next year, now that 240GB SSDs are dropping below $30. SSD controllers are cheaper than the fixed costs of hard drive motors, actuators and clean-room assembly. Adding an extra platter gets you more incremental GB per dollar, but getting that first platter working is much more expensive than the minimum viable SSD.

jtl999 8y ago

A 1TB SSD this past Black Friday was at the lowest about $115/1TB. That's about the price a 1TB HDD was back in 2010.

reitzensteinm 8y ago
I'm not sure if this was meant to refute my point somehow, but hard drives haven't come down that much in price since 2010... Sorting by price on Newegg, if you're looking for a cheap laptop drive you can choose right now between a 320gb HDD for $28.55, a 60gb SSD for $19.99, or a 240gb SSD for $31.99. For a 1TB drive, you're looking at $38.50 HDD vs $109.99 SSD. Large SSDs remain fairly expensive for now, but the low end is being eaten.
- jtl999 8y ago
  Agreed.

paulmd 8y ago

Interestingly enough SSDs have already outpaced the density of HDDs in the 2.5" form factor, presumably due to exactly the effect you describe. You literally can't buy a 2.5" hard drive bigger than 2 TB last time I checked. All of the thin-and-light stuff like ultrabooks is SSD only too, HDDs can't even match the dimensions you can do with NVMe (maybe something like Microdrive could) let alone capacity. Cost is still up there but only about 2.5x as expensive as 2.5" HDDs... a 2 TB HDD is about $80 while a 1 TB SSD is ~$100-120. And there are (kinda shitty) 2 TB SSDs that are hitting $250 these days (eg Micron 1100).

PuffinBlue 8y ago
> You literally can't buy a 2.5" hard drive bigger than 2 TB last time I checked. You can get them for sure[0] and they're not really that expensive at all. That particular one gave me about 95MB/s write speed on large files. https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/B0713WPGLL/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/...
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  Those are 15mm drives though - unlikely to fit inside a laptop (7mm is thin, 9.5mm is standard).