7 ms·

There are quite a few other competitors. They make SSDs. It's a different price/performance curve (lower on the low-end, higher on the high-end), but as I said,

by wegs 7y ago

There are quite a few other competitors. They make SSDs. It's a different price/performance curve (lower on the low-end, higher on the high-end), but as I said, reliability trumps all. In the early days, I waited to adopt SSDs because of horror stories about wear leveling algorithm bugs causing early failures (because SSD makers wanted to eek out a little bit of extra speed). Speed is nice-to-have, but fast, unreliable storage has negative value to me. On the flip side, if I now can't trust HDDs, I won't buy them. 8TB is nice-to-have, but reliability is critical. 8TB of unreliable storage has negative value to me. I mean, I was pretty productive in the days of 133MHz computers, 32MB of RAM, and 1.6GB disk space. I prefer gigahertz of multicore performance, 32GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space, but it's not worth sacrificing reliability for. A computer failure can cost me a week of time. If it all worked, I'd have a 1TB SSD RAID and an 8TB HDD RAID, each with two drives so if one fails, the other goes on. That's not just me. A random computer buyer might now know better, but if you buy a computer and something breaks, whoever makes it devalues their brand. If the HDD makers collude to give untrustworthy storage, they won't have a market left. I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago
> There are quite a few other competitors. They make SSDs. There are some overlaps, but it's a different market. If someone still buys HDDs, certainly it means SSDs are not suitable for the job, at least in term of cost. > I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too. Maybe for cold storage, syncing data and object storage. But still, there is no replacement for a box of spinning hard drives in many applications.
- myself248 7y ago
  > SSDs are not suitable for the job, at least in term of cost I think what just happened is that CMR drives just got more expensive, which may erase some of that cost advantage. Not all of it, not yet. But principle is worth something, too. I expect a few folks who are sortof on the border will be so soured on spinning rust by this whole ordeal, as to swear it off completely.
- p1necone 7y ago
  I think the only difference for most use cases is cost. As soon as the $/byte ratio lines up between SSDs and HDDs the market for HDDs will basically be long term archival storage only I suspect.
fmajid 7y ago
Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off. I realize disk is the new tape, I didn't realize the hard drive makers would take it so literally... As far as I am concerned, SMR are unfit for any purpose other than hyperscale archival storage. If you work for AWS Glacier, good for you, but those drives should never ever be sold to consumers.
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  > Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off. A marginally-related comment: Curiously, HDDs are not totally immune to this problem in the long run. Many types of EEPROMs (basically used by everything that has a CPU/MCU inside) only have an officially data retention duration of 10 years, beyond the date, there's no guarantee by the manufacturers that the firmware won't be lost. Yet surprisingly, most consumer electronics work fine after one or two decades, indeed it's because the EEPROM manufacturers are being conservative, not to mention that most electronics are stored room temperature. There is wild variations of rated lifetime in different microcontrollers, a most common rating is 10 years, but some are 40 years or even 100 years at 25 °C. It indicates that it's related to the semiconductor process, and it also implies EEPROMs have a lot of potential but it's expensive and/or there are too many uncertainties to make any guarantee. How long will today's technology last in the wild is still largely untested in practice. Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good. Conclusion: In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium.
  - interestica 7y ago
    > Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good. The future remake of Indiana Jones seems way less fun.
philjohn 7y ago
I fairly recently went 100% SSD on my home build - the price is still high, but over the last year we had some historic NAND price lows - I've got a 1TB NVMe drive for boot/apps/games, a 1TB SATA drive for user profile and another 1TB SATA drive for large file storage. I used to run 1 SSD + 4 drives in two RAID 1 arrays for this, but with how reliable SSD's have become, and with faster internet allowing for cheap offsite backup, those days are gone.
syshum 7y ago
My workstation is 100% ssd, but I also have 100TB capacity of network storage, and 100TB of backup storage (about 48% used today) it is not economical for me to use SSD for that >I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too. It is, but today for my home system it cost me about $2-3/TB/MO (maybe less that number is about 3 years old, and drives have dropped in price recently) to build and maintain reliable storage, with backups, that include electricity and amortized capital costs along with replacement hardware every 5-7 years The absolute cheapest cloud storage out there right now if $5/TB/MO so it getting close, and if drive manufacturer start playing shading games like this that increase the Cost per TB then that might be the tipping point.
- eisa01 7y ago
  I thought it was $5/TB/month too, but turns out you can get down to $1/TB/month with "Deep Glacier" etc., $2.5/TB for retrieval
  - syshum 7y ago
    That might be useful as backup storage, but archival storage can not be used as a replacement for general use NAS storage
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Glacier is far more complicated than you might think. It only makes sense in case of disaster recovery where you lost everything including your non glacier backups.

by wegs 7y ago

segfaultbuserr 7y ago

> There are quite a few other competitors. They make SSDs. There are some overlaps, but it's a different market. If someone still buys HDDs, certainly it means SSDs are not suitable for the job, at least in term of cost. > I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too. Maybe for cold storage, syncing data and object storage. But still, there is no replacement for a box of spinning hard drives in many applications.

myself248 7y ago
> SSDs are not suitable for the job, at least in term of cost I think what just happened is that CMR drives just got more expensive, which may erase some of that cost advantage. Not all of it, not yet. But principle is worth something, too. I expect a few folks who are sortof on the border will be so soured on spinning rust by this whole ordeal, as to swear it off completely.
p1necone 7y ago
I think the only difference for most use cases is cost. As soon as the $/byte ratio lines up between SSDs and HDDs the market for HDDs will basically be long term archival storage only I suspect.

fmajid 7y ago

Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off. I realize disk is the new tape, I didn't realize the hard drive makers would take it so literally... As far as I am concerned, SMR are unfit for any purpose other than hyperscale archival storage. If you work for AWS Glacier, good for you, but those drives should never ever be sold to consumers.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago
> Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off. A marginally-related comment: Curiously, HDDs are not totally immune to this problem in the long run. Many types of EEPROMs (basically used by everything that has a CPU/MCU inside) only have an officially data retention duration of 10 years, beyond the date, there's no guarantee by the manufacturers that the firmware won't be lost. Yet surprisingly, most consumer electronics work fine after one or two decades, indeed it's because the EEPROM manufacturers are being conservative, not to mention that most electronics are stored room temperature. There is wild variations of rated lifetime in different microcontrollers, a most common rating is 10 years, but some are 40 years or even 100 years at 25 °C. It indicates that it's related to the semiconductor process, and it also implies EEPROMs have a lot of potential but it's expensive and/or there are too many uncertainties to make any guarantee. How long will today's technology last in the wild is still largely untested in practice. Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good. Conclusion: In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium.
- interestica 7y ago
  > Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good. The future remake of Indiana Jones seems way less fun.

philjohn 7y ago

I fairly recently went 100% SSD on my home build - the price is still high, but over the last year we had some historic NAND price lows - I've got a 1TB NVMe drive for boot/apps/games, a 1TB SATA drive for user profile and another 1TB SATA drive for large file storage. I used to run 1 SSD + 4 drives in two RAID 1 arrays for this, but with how reliable SSD's have become, and with faster internet allowing for cheap offsite backup, those days are gone.

syshum 7y ago

My workstation is 100% ssd, but I also have 100TB capacity of network storage, and 100TB of backup storage (about 48% used today) it is not economical for me to use SSD for that >I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too. It is, but today for my home system it cost me about $2-3/TB/MO (maybe less that number is about 3 years old, and drives have dropped in price recently) to build and maintain reliable storage, with backups, that include electricity and amortized capital costs along with replacement hardware every 5-7 years The absolute cheapest cloud storage out there right now if $5/TB/MO so it getting close, and if drive manufacturer start playing shading games like this that increase the Cost per TB then that might be the tipping point.

eisa01 7y ago
I thought it was $5/TB/month too, but turns out you can get down to $1/TB/month with "Deep Glacier" etc., $2.5/TB for retrieval
- syshum 7y ago
  That might be useful as backup storage, but archival storage can not be used as a replacement for general use NAS storage
- imtringued 7y ago
  Glacier is far more complicated than you might think. It only makes sense in case of disaster recovery where you lost everything including your non glacier backups.