3 ms·

Seagate: Our disk drives are safe from SSDs for at least 15 years

3 points by xbmcuser 7y ago

dredmorbius 7y ago
The critical issue with disk is no longer capacity, but seeks. For interactive and high-demand (reads, writes) performance, it's head contention and waiting, often for seconds, sometimes for minutes, swap and read/write capacity to come available, which argues against HDD. There's a space for HDD in archival and warm- and cold-storage formats (increasingly displacing tape). But in consumer and office equipment, the case for HDD is all but dead now. Rather you'll see shared storage in the form of NAS and SAN systems, increasingly in the SOHO space, and increasingly as commodity systems. A key point is at about the 500 MB - 1 TB capacity point. Storage allocations for desktops and laptops has not been increasing over the past several years, but instead the price point at which SDD substitution is viable for 0.5 - 1 TB storage has been falling. As someone who still recalls buying his first, SCSI, 1 GB drives some 20+ years ago, paying a premium for them, and thinking that would be enough storage for anyone, the question of "how much storage is enough" is dangerous ground. Much of what used to be excessive when considering GB storage is accounted for by vast text repositories (I've nearly 30 GB of articles alone on tablet storage), and the amount of information which can be stored in text and video formats. But the need to have multiple TB of that nearline for general work doesn't seem particularly strong. The trend of the past decade has been not predominantly large laptop, desktop, and workstation systems, with larger and faster disk, but in handheld and mobile devices, in which storage allocations remain minuscule (I was surprised earlier today to see that Android devices now ship with 128-256 GB storage, Apple's iPad is available with up to 1 TB), and for which spinning rust is both a power and reliability liability. Seagate may find its prediction optimistic.
- quaquaqua1 7y ago
  HDDs are not, in my opinion, displacing tape. For just about any use case (capacity, cost, latency, reads writes, reliability, electricity, physical space, vendor agnosticism etc etc), I think it is HDD that is being replaced on all fronts. For any sort of performance requirement, SSDs and NVME are quickly replacing disk on account that they are more performant, way more reliable, and nearly the same cost as disk, in exchange for a bit less capacity. Tape, if you are willing to spend on a fancy LTO7 drive and wait a few minutes for your data to arrive , is a way cheaper and reliable solution if you are dealing with hundreds of TBs or more in stored data, especially with media files instead of compressed databases. There may be a very specific sweetspot of say, 40TB of data that you need to access very frequently from a server where you have free electricity and don't mind paying a ton for 24/7 runtime and data replicstion or something where it makes sense to just buy the proper amount of disk..... but that is really the exception to the rule. The most cost efficient solution for me will always be SSDs backed up to tape or CDs.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    What's the space you're typcially seeing these deployments in? In my experience, tape sees virtually no use in SOHO and even fairly large mid-range corporate use. It is used by large enterprises and many institutional organisations, often with tape libraries and bots. And by large tech firms for warm and cold storage, again, where access-within-minutes is a sufficient SLA. Though robot contention is even worse than drive-head contention. (Realising, at a large financial services firm, that I could script data loads via JCL rather than going through whatever alternative TSPF interactive facility there was as a primary interface made afternoon-long batch runs ... slightly less annoying than they usually were. Though I never did hear back if that was or wasn't appreciated by the out-of-area datacentre operators. I barely recall how to spell JCL any more, to which I attribute mostly trauma-induced memory lapse.) A principle problem with tape is that hardware upgrade and media migration is such a persistent pain. And there's some kerfuffle about the latest round of industrial-grade media and patent disputes that's not helping much (I've remained blissfully largely, though not completely, unaware).
    - quaquaqua1 7y ago
      I used to work for StorageTek and I was involved with government/utility/academic workloads where tape was very much still alive until a certain someone decided not to manufacture proprietary drives and cartridges anymore :) I think Lto will continue to be an awesome standard for anyone doing PBs or more with multi decade requirements. I am maybe a little surprised to hear that disk hasn't been completely replaced by SSDs yet but I really do think that SSDs will just continue to drop in price.
- xbmcuser 7y ago
  It will be an interesting race. Ssd's if nothing else have forced hdd's manufacturers to build higher capacity drives.

3 points by xbmcuser 7y ago

The critical issue with disk is no longer capacity, but seeks. For interactive and high-demand (reads, writes) performance, it's head contention and waiting, often for seconds, sometimes for minutes, swap and read/write capacity to come available, which argues against HDD. There's a space for HDD in archival and warm- and cold-storage formats (increasingly displacing tape). But in consumer and office equipment, the case for HDD is all but dead now. Rather you'll see shared storage in the form of NAS and SAN systems, increasingly in the SOHO space, and increasingly as commodity systems. A key point is at about the 500 MB - 1 TB capacity point. Storage allocations for desktops and laptops has not been increasing over the past several years, but instead the price point at which SDD substitution is viable for 0.5 - 1 TB storage has been falling. As someone who still recalls buying his first, SCSI, 1 GB drives some 20+ years ago, paying a premium for them, and thinking that would be enough storage for anyone, the question of "how much storage is enough" is dangerous ground. Much of what used to be excessive when considering GB storage is accounted for by vast text repositories (I've nearly 30 GB of articles alone on tablet storage), and the amount of information which can be stored in text and video formats. But the need to have multiple TB of that nearline for general work doesn't seem particularly strong. The trend of the past decade has been not predominantly large laptop, desktop, and workstation systems, with larger and faster disk, but in handheld and mobile devices, in which storage allocations remain minuscule (I was surprised earlier today to see that Android devices now ship with 128-256 GB storage, Apple's iPad is available with up to 1 TB), and for which spinning rust is both a power and reliability liability. Seagate may find its prediction optimistic.

quaquaqua1 7y ago
HDDs are not, in my opinion, displacing tape. For just about any use case (capacity, cost, latency, reads writes, reliability, electricity, physical space, vendor agnosticism etc etc), I think it is HDD that is being replaced on all fronts. For any sort of performance requirement, SSDs and NVME are quickly replacing disk on account that they are more performant, way more reliable, and nearly the same cost as disk, in exchange for a bit less capacity. Tape, if you are willing to spend on a fancy LTO7 drive and wait a few minutes for your data to arrive , is a way cheaper and reliable solution if you are dealing with hundreds of TBs or more in stored data, especially with media files instead of compressed databases. There may be a very specific sweetspot of say, 40TB of data that you need to access very frequently from a server where you have free electricity and don't mind paying a ton for 24/7 runtime and data replicstion or something where it makes sense to just buy the proper amount of disk..... but that is really the exception to the rule. The most cost efficient solution for me will always be SSDs backed up to tape or CDs.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  What's the space you're typcially seeing these deployments in? In my experience, tape sees virtually no use in SOHO and even fairly large mid-range corporate use. It is used by large enterprises and many institutional organisations, often with tape libraries and bots. And by large tech firms for warm and cold storage, again, where access-within-minutes is a sufficient SLA. Though robot contention is even worse than drive-head contention. (Realising, at a large financial services firm, that I could script data loads via JCL rather than going through whatever alternative TSPF interactive facility there was as a primary interface made afternoon-long batch runs ... slightly less annoying than they usually were. Though I never did hear back if that was or wasn't appreciated by the out-of-area datacentre operators. I barely recall how to spell JCL any more, to which I attribute mostly trauma-induced memory lapse.) A principle problem with tape is that hardware upgrade and media migration is such a persistent pain. And there's some kerfuffle about the latest round of industrial-grade media and patent disputes that's not helping much (I've remained blissfully largely, though not completely, unaware).
  - quaquaqua1 7y ago
    I used to work for StorageTek and I was involved with government/utility/academic workloads where tape was very much still alive until a certain someone decided not to manufacture proprietary drives and cartridges anymore :) I think Lto will continue to be an awesome standard for anyone doing PBs or more with multi decade requirements. I am maybe a little surprised to hear that disk hasn't been completely replaced by SSDs yet but I really do think that SSDs will just continue to drop in price.
xbmcuser 7y ago
It will be an interesting race. Ssd's if nothing else have forced hdd's manufacturers to build higher capacity drives.