12 ms·

Ultra-high-density hard drives made with graphene store ten times more data

158 points by rustoo 5y ago

nippoo 5y ago
I wonder whether (spinning disk) hard drives will still have a market in 10 years' time? I'd always assumed they were a bit of a dying breed and when the per-GB cost of SSDs reaches parity they'd become a museum relic...
- smueller1234 5y ago
  The current forecasts don't predict cost parity for the next few years. I wouldn't speculate as far out as ten. What you'll see is that spinning rust will increasingly become used for cold(er) storage due to still offering cheaper bytes, and (relatively) ever increasing cost of IO (you get one spindle per il unit, but at increasing capacity, with barely a change in sequential throughout and no improvement in random access). This is happening in data centers now, either through explicit product tiring or clever offloading.
  - martyvis 5y ago
    > spinning rust As the storage medium in this new tech is graphene, do we call it "spinning coal"?
    - adrian_b 5y ago
      Graphene is not the storage medium. It protects the storage medium (iron-platinum alloy), which cannot be used without a protective layer, due to corrosion and scratching risk.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Your comment brilliantly illustrates the downsides of the hype.
  - comboy 5y ago
    I would assume they will go away pretty fast because of power usage. SSDs are currently targeting performance because of the cost, but it seems possible to make them even more (and much more) power efficient when used as high latency storage. For enterprise servers (I'm aware they are not relevant for AWS/GOOG etc), more and more often high-end machines are offered as SSD-only - for such price bracket SSDs price is already not an issue.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
  I'd like to see the democratisation of chip fabrication. Imagine a world where a serious enthusast could fab say 32nm at home.
  - bserge 5y ago
    All it would take is for lithography equipment/chmicals/etc to start being sold to anyone at an affordable price... so, maybe in 50 years. On that note, you could technically just buy the chips and spend an inordinate amount of time and money building the PCB and firmware.
    - webreac 5y ago
      chips, pcb and mask (for the soldering pasta) are not so expensive. Soldering remains difficult and time consuming
    - willis936 5y ago
      50 years is optimistic. The equipment needed for vacuum, plasma sputtering, and masking hasn't changed much in the past 50 years. Sure, if you want to make a 1 um process you can do that with a purchased wafer, some chemicals, and a spin plate. If you want to make a nm-scale process you'll need to have a serious budget.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    You already can get your own designs fabbed if you really want and can afford it (several k$): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service
  - sheer_audacity 5y ago
    There are some great services out there for people who want their designs made at that level. Speaking as someone who has worked in fabs - there are so many ways it can go wrong and so many ways you could kill/poison/burn/electrocute yourself if you tried to do it yourself. Your lithography would probably need a lot of tweaking too!
- userbinator 5y ago
  SSDs have extremely finite lifespans since the writing process irreversibly degrades the media, while in HDDs wear theoretically happens only on power cycling and they otherwise have no intrinsic limits on how many write operations they can handle.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    Hard Disk also (usually) give some hints before dying; noises, growing number of bad sectors, slowness, etc, while SSD (also usually) die abruptly without giving any warnings or leaving time for recovering files. That wouldn't be a problem in data centers where redundancy and backups do exist, but in desktop machines virtually nobody keeps backups, so it can make a world of difference.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      > in desktop machines virtually nobody keeps backups Unless you are me, who has had tough lessons at The School of Hard Knocks, with postgraduate degrees from The College of Getting the Shit Kicked out of You.
      - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
        Also, both MS and Apple nowadays make it pretty easy to keep rolling backups to an attached a USB HD. Not to mention that, with Cloud this and that, local hardware is pretty fungible and easily "reincarnated" in a replacement device
        memco 5y ago
        > Also, both MS and Apple nowadays make it pretty easy to keep rolling backups to an attached a USB HD. Re Apple: this is true only for desktops or laptops. If you want to back up your iPhone you need a Mac to work with a local storage solution. And you cannot configure the Mac to use the HD to store the phone backups directly: the folder the Mac uses cannot be a symlink nor can it be configured. You have to sync all of your phone's data to the Mac, then sync the mac with time machine, which means your Mac needs to be large enough to store all of its data, plus the iPhone's.
- mpweiher 5y ago
  Disk is the new tape. And RAM is the new disk. https://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/ram-is-disk/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/ram-is-disk/
  - mirker 5y ago
    (For sufficiently small data, because the $/GB difference is still there).
- whereistimbo 5y ago
  SSD needs to be periodically turned on to avoid losing data. Spinning disk doesn't have that limitation.
  - Bilal_io 5y ago
    In another comment someone said HDDs have to be spun up every 6 months to avoid the motors from getting stuck.
    - ahofmann 5y ago
      The magnetized material on the platter can slowly lose its direction (and thus the data) while laying around. So you should read all your data every 3 years or so to "refresh" the data.
      - rasz 5y ago
        Where did you learn that? Its incorrect.
        adrian_b 5y ago
        There is a temperature-dependent probability for the magnetization of a magnetic domain to rotate spontaneously, causing one erroneous data bit. For materials with high coercitivity and at temperatures much lower than their Curie temperature, the probability is low but it is not null. A few years ago, I went back to archiving my data on magnetic tapes (LTO). However, before that and after optical discs became to small to be usable as an archival medium, I have used HDDs for backup and archival, for more than a decade. After returning to tapes, I have gradually transferred the old HDDs to tapes. I had a case with one HDD that would no longer spin after a few years of offline storage, but most functioned, at least enough to be able to transfer them on tapes. All the archival HDDs were duplicated, for redundance, and all the files were stored with checksums to detect data corruption. The checksums have been absolutely essential, because after several years of storage there were a lot of corrupted files, but for none of them the HDD reported any error. The HDDs were about half WD and half Seagate, all of them Raid Edition or equivalent. I had a HDD archive with about 200 TB of data, and on average, after 5 years of storage, there was a corrupted file about every couple of TB. However, because each HDD was duplicated and the errors did not affect the same file in both copies, I have recovered all files. All the corrupted files were almost certainly caused by spontaneous magnetization rotation affecting a few bits, so what the previous poster said is not only theoretically correct, but proved in practice by at least one example. Most people do not realize how frequent data corruption is on HDDs, because they do not use file checksums or extra file copies, to detect corrupted data. Bit errors are frequent on HDDs, but most are corrected by the HDD firmware. However, from time to time the correction capabilities of the codes used in HDDs are exceeded and silent data corruption happens. After a lot of experience, I never trust the firmware of any storage media, so I store checksums, in extended attributes, for all the files that I will keep for more than a day.
- 6nf 5y ago
  We haven't even stopped using tape drives yet
- nonsince 5y ago
  Unless someone with more experience can chime in and add some more info, I’ll say that my understanding is that HDDs are better for archival since they last longer when not in use. Certainly the price of SDDs, while within reach for most nowadays, is still significantly higher than for HDDs. I still use HDDs for backup even though I haven’t used them for daily hard drive purposes in years.
  - jktytgytrf 5y ago
    I've read the opposite, that you should spin up a drive at least once every six months, otherwise the motor can get stuck.
    - ahofmann 5y ago
      6 months is a very short time. I have disks that are without power for a few years and none of them broke after I connected them to a power source.
      - znpy 5y ago
        i'd say that it depends on how you stock them once they're powered off.
    - kijin 5y ago
      As long as the platters are intact, a stuck motor will not prevent someone with the right tools from reading data off of the drive. There's an entire industry dedicated to recovering data from hard drives in various states of disrepair. A bricked NAND chip, on the other hand, is an entirely different kind of problem.
    - hakfoo 5y ago
      This cries out for a missing product: A modern version of the old disk pack drives. You could pull out a cartridge containing the platters and store it in a hollowed out mountain for a century, but just drop it into a freshly built/rebuilt/exercised mechanism when you need to read it.
- znpy 5y ago
  > when the per-GB cost of SSDs reaches parity That's the point. SSDs keep achieving lower US$/GB, but so do spinning hard drives. This means that the point in time when parity is reached is continually postponed.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jl2718 5y ago
  Spinning disks under GMR heads are fundamentally a 2D technology. You might eke out a few more layers with a GMR array (like radar for magnetism), but there will be a noise limit. Flash technology will become stackable. Not just multi-bit per cell. The major limitation to NAND flash going to multiple layers is the inability to do epitaxy on deposited layers. The other approach is to use new materials that offer some form of hysteresis in amorphous or polycrystalline form, like 3D X-point. This product line was abandoned for business reasons, but I’m fairly confident that it will make a comeback in a big way, either by [insert big Asian company] buying the IP, or a well-funded startup. There’s also more exotic data storage like optical holography. That’s also 3D data storage, but with very little heat accumulation, which is the problem with anything based on 3D electronics. It is technically a spinning disk though.
- ksec 5y ago
  HDD, in terms of Revenue and TB Shipped are still growing in Datacenter segment. And people have been saying this for a long time. I remember a few vocal members in certain popular Internet forum keeps bagging on about it in 17/18. ( And we are half way 2021 already ) There are currently no roadmap from both HDD and SSDs they will reach per-GB cost parity. Not in the next 5, and nothing that shows this will happen in next 10 years. As a matter of fact there are plenty in the pipeline and R&D that could drive cost /GB on HDD cheaper. I dont see anything substantial with NAND. Other than the usual multiple layers and die shrinking. Both of them have fundamental issues with cost.
flemhans 5y ago
... in mice?
- DesiLurker 5y ago
  I lol-ed, at this rate we'll have fusion before graphene products.
bullen 5y ago
I said it before and I'll say it all again: I bought 30x X25-E SSDs from 2011 because: - Spinning disks consume 5-10W when idling (as in ready to read/write idle). - Spinning disks have 2 motors (spin and head driver) that inevitably fail. That said the SLC(1) -> MLC(2) -> TLC(3) -> QLC(4) layers is a race to the bottom with increased complexity and failures over time! These are the reasons big actors still use tape as storage medium!!! There is no great solution, but 64GB 50nm SLC SSDs from 2011 have the best write per bit that will ever be seen (100.000), they only use 0.07W on idle and ~2W when writing/reading. So if your motherboard has alot of SATA ports it might be the best solution until some real innovation happens! Edit: Maybe I'm the only person in the world that can have 5 million customers on 512GB? Atleast I can have them for 250 years if they all write to the database every day now no matter how expensive electricity becomes!
- nullifidian 5y ago
  >and failures over time! Are there any studies that show that TLC/QLC SSDs are less reliable at the SSD level? I'm pretty sure TLC is already used by enterprise SSDs.
  - PixelOfDeath 5y ago
    Enterprise SSDs use capacitor backed dram to buffer writes. Some consumer SSDs do that, too. But with significant smaller amounts of dram. This can intercept all the small writes that you e.g. do for metadata of the filesystem and via mapping can combine them into very few big writes. Or writes to the same position over and over again only need to touch the flash when the devices is powering down. Are there any QLC enterprise SSDs? All the cheaper used enterprise SSDs I looked up where using TLC so far.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure the only real factor in reliability is the SSD controller. The NAND will affect the lifespan of the SSD but when you have TBs of data a lot of it is written once.
- throw737858 5y ago
Simon_says 5y ago
Y
userbinator 5y ago
...and lose ten times more data when they fail? I found it a bit ironic that the stock photo of a HDD appears to be a Seagate 7200.12, which was one of the more infamous ones with dismal reliability. (Most people reading the article probably wouldn't notice, but as someone who had to deal with a ton of bad ones, the tiny actuator magnet and only 3 screws securing the platters are a distinctive feature.)
- foobar33333 5y ago
  >and lose ten times more data when they fail? You don't lose any data when a hdd fails because you just restore from a backup.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Or more realistically since these are targeting enterprise: your storage layer is fault tolerant so you do nothing except replace the drive.
- NextHendrix 5y ago
  Or make them about 3 times smaller
samatman 5y ago
It's been said of graphene that it is excellent for everything except industrial application. I've been making this joke for ten years now, it's truly the gift that keeps on giving. I doubt I have a single graphene-enhanced product in my home. Maybe one of these days...
- mkingston 5y ago
  Whether this is a gimmick or not I cannot tell you. https://www.inov-8.com/g-series https://www.inov-8.com/g-series
  - murphyslab 5y ago
    The "graphene" probably does add some modest mechanical and perhaps thermal properties to the foam of the shoe. There are plenty of papers and I'd suggest that you search Google Scholar and Google Patents for 'graphene rubber composites'; you'll be overwhelmed with examples. However when discussing "graphene" it's helpful to differentiate between different types of two dimensional carbon lattices based on size and mode of manufacture.[0] There are two broad categories when we're talking about manufacturing applications at present: The graphene in those runners is probably an exfoliated graphene micro/nanoplatelets made form graphite microparticles (previously an in-demand commodity for Li-ion battery anodes). The process used, given the industrial scale required, is most likely a chemical oxidation/reduction process (kind of messy), electrochemical means, or intercalation. The end result is more like confetti or the bits of paper left over from the hole-punch. This isn't your high-quality, electronic grade graphene, however most of the mechanical, thermal, optical, and electrical properties of graphene remain, and this graphene confetti can be blended into composites for the sake of those mechanical properties or to provide thermal or electrical conductivity. Any company can blend a bit of graphene into their rubber or plastic and have the product given that sciency sheen. But you really want that graphene to be firmly embedded, since there are potential safety issues _in vivo_ [1]; Health Canada issued a recall alert for graphene-containing face masks in April, due to the possible risk of inhalation. [2] The electronic grade graphene is generally larger in those two dimensions and presenting fewer defects — a full sheet of paper compared to the confetti type. For early experimentalists, the best source was also through exfoliation, albeit using Scotch tape to peel layers off of a large (1 cm or more in lateral dimensions) single crystal of graphite. Nowadays, epitaxial growth (i.e. grow one crystal using a different crystal as the template) is preferred, as it can be mass-produced, even using roll-to-roll techniques. That graphene can also be more readily transferred from one substrate to another, which is necessary since you are going to want your sheet of graphene laying on an insulating surface, rather than the metal on which it was epitaxially grown. There are several other flavours of "graphene" — nanoribbon, oxide, fluorinated, multilayer, ligated, crumpled, charged, patterned, etc... But the two most consequential categories to keep in mind are whether you are dealing with "confetti" or "sheets". The nanoplatelet confetti can get inside you if not thoroughly immobilised. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene_production_techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene_production_techniques [1]: ACS Nano 2018: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.8b04758 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.8b04758 [2]: https://healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/hc-sc/2021/75309a-eng.php https://healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/hc-s...
arcticbull 5y ago
All the better to store Chia bingo cards on. The future is everything I dreamed it would be, to be sure.
- dannyw 5y ago
  The dotcom bubble created lots of useless startups with crazy valuations. Tech survived. The crypto bubble should be expected to create some too.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    True, but the dotcom bubble created at least 1 useful company. Crypto is 14 years in and still at a big ol' 0.
lamontcg 5y ago
Is it ten times as cheap per GB as well?
T-A 5y ago
> The data density of HDDs has quadrupled since 1990 This seems to have been written by somebody who doesn't understand exponential notation. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Areal-density-roadmap-for-hard-disk-drive-HDD-and-flash-based-solid-state-drive-SSD_fig2_310594004 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Areal-density-roadmap-fo...

158 points by rustoo 5y ago

I wonder whether (spinning disk) hard drives will still have a market in 10 years' time? I'd always assumed they were a bit of a dying breed and when the per-GB cost of SSDs reaches parity they'd become a museum relic...

smueller1234 5y ago
The current forecasts don't predict cost parity for the next few years. I wouldn't speculate as far out as ten. What you'll see is that spinning rust will increasingly become used for cold(er) storage due to still offering cheaper bytes, and (relatively) ever increasing cost of IO (you get one spindle per il unit, but at increasing capacity, with barely a change in sequential throughout and no improvement in random access). This is happening in data centers now, either through explicit product tiring or clever offloading.
- martyvis 5y ago
  > spinning rust As the storage medium in this new tech is graphene, do we call it "spinning coal"?
  - adrian_b 5y ago
    Graphene is not the storage medium. It protects the storage medium (iron-platinum alloy), which cannot be used without a protective layer, due to corrosion and scratching risk.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Your comment brilliantly illustrates the downsides of the hype.
- comboy 5y ago
  I would assume they will go away pretty fast because of power usage. SSDs are currently targeting performance because of the cost, but it seems possible to make them even more (and much more) power efficient when used as high latency storage. For enterprise servers (I'm aware they are not relevant for AWS/GOOG etc), more and more often high-end machines are offered as SSD-only - for such price bracket SSDs price is already not an issue.
TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
I'd like to see the democratisation of chip fabrication. Imagine a world where a serious enthusast could fab say 32nm at home.
- bserge 5y ago
  All it would take is for lithography equipment/chmicals/etc to start being sold to anyone at an affordable price... so, maybe in 50 years. On that note, you could technically just buy the chips and spend an inordinate amount of time and money building the PCB and firmware.
  - webreac 5y ago
    chips, pcb and mask (for the soldering pasta) are not so expensive. Soldering remains difficult and time consuming
  - willis936 5y ago
    50 years is optimistic. The equipment needed for vacuum, plasma sputtering, and masking hasn't changed much in the past 50 years. Sure, if you want to make a 1 um process you can do that with a purchased wafer, some chemicals, and a spin plate. If you want to make a nm-scale process you'll need to have a serious budget.
- userbinator 5y ago
  You already can get your own designs fabbed if you really want and can afford it (several k$): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service
- sheer_audacity 5y ago
  There are some great services out there for people who want their designs made at that level. Speaking as someone who has worked in fabs - there are so many ways it can go wrong and so many ways you could kill/poison/burn/electrocute yourself if you tried to do it yourself. Your lithography would probably need a lot of tweaking too!
userbinator 5y ago
SSDs have extremely finite lifespans since the writing process irreversibly degrades the media, while in HDDs wear theoretically happens only on power cycling and they otherwise have no intrinsic limits on how many write operations they can handle.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Hard Disk also (usually) give some hints before dying; noises, growing number of bad sectors, slowness, etc, while SSD (also usually) die abruptly without giving any warnings or leaving time for recovering files. That wouldn't be a problem in data centers where redundancy and backups do exist, but in desktop machines virtually nobody keeps backups, so it can make a world of difference.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    > in desktop machines virtually nobody keeps backups Unless you are me, who has had tough lessons at The School of Hard Knocks, with postgraduate degrees from The College of Getting the Shit Kicked out of You.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
      Also, both MS and Apple nowadays make it pretty easy to keep rolling backups to an attached a USB HD. Not to mention that, with Cloud this and that, local hardware is pretty fungible and easily "reincarnated" in a replacement device
      - memco 5y ago
        > Also, both MS and Apple nowadays make it pretty easy to keep rolling backups to an attached a USB HD. Re Apple: this is true only for desktops or laptops. If you want to back up your iPhone you need a Mac to work with a local storage solution. And you cannot configure the Mac to use the HD to store the phone backups directly: the folder the Mac uses cannot be a symlink nor can it be configured. You have to sync all of your phone's data to the Mac, then sync the mac with time machine, which means your Mac needs to be large enough to store all of its data, plus the iPhone's.
mpweiher 5y ago
Disk is the new tape. And RAM is the new disk. https://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/ram-is-disk/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/ram-is-disk/
- mirker 5y ago
  (For sufficiently small data, because the $/GB difference is still there).
whereistimbo 5y ago
SSD needs to be periodically turned on to avoid losing data. Spinning disk doesn't have that limitation.
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  In another comment someone said HDDs have to be spun up every 6 months to avoid the motors from getting stuck.
  - ahofmann 5y ago
    The magnetized material on the platter can slowly lose its direction (and thus the data) while laying around. So you should read all your data every 3 years or so to "refresh" the data.
    - rasz 5y ago
      Where did you learn that? Its incorrect.
      - adrian_b 5y ago
        There is a temperature-dependent probability for the magnetization of a magnetic domain to rotate spontaneously, causing one erroneous data bit. For materials with high coercitivity and at temperatures much lower than their Curie temperature, the probability is low but it is not null. A few years ago, I went back to archiving my data on magnetic tapes (LTO). However, before that and after optical discs became to small to be usable as an archival medium, I have used HDDs for backup and archival, for more than a decade. After returning to tapes, I have gradually transferred the old HDDs to tapes. I had a case with one HDD that would no longer spin after a few years of offline storage, but most functioned, at least enough to be able to transfer them on tapes. All the archival HDDs were duplicated, for redundance, and all the files were stored with checksums to detect data corruption. The checksums have been absolutely essential, because after several years of storage there were a lot of corrupted files, but for none of them the HDD reported any error. The HDDs were about half WD and half Seagate, all of them Raid Edition or equivalent. I had a HDD archive with about 200 TB of data, and on average, after 5 years of storage, there was a corrupted file about every couple of TB. However, because each HDD was duplicated and the errors did not affect the same file in both copies, I have recovered all files. All the corrupted files were almost certainly caused by spontaneous magnetization rotation affecting a few bits, so what the previous poster said is not only theoretically correct, but proved in practice by at least one example. Most people do not realize how frequent data corruption is on HDDs, because they do not use file checksums or extra file copies, to detect corrupted data. Bit errors are frequent on HDDs, but most are corrected by the HDD firmware. However, from time to time the correction capabilities of the codes used in HDDs are exceeded and silent data corruption happens. After a lot of experience, I never trust the firmware of any storage media, so I store checksums, in extended attributes, for all the files that I will keep for more than a day.
6nf 5y ago
We haven't even stopped using tape drives yet
nonsince 5y ago
Unless someone with more experience can chime in and add some more info, I’ll say that my understanding is that HDDs are better for archival since they last longer when not in use. Certainly the price of SDDs, while within reach for most nowadays, is still significantly higher than for HDDs. I still use HDDs for backup even though I haven’t used them for daily hard drive purposes in years.
- jktytgytrf 5y ago
  I've read the opposite, that you should spin up a drive at least once every six months, otherwise the motor can get stuck.
  - ahofmann 5y ago
    6 months is a very short time. I have disks that are without power for a few years and none of them broke after I connected them to a power source.
    - znpy 5y ago
      i'd say that it depends on how you stock them once they're powered off.
  - kijin 5y ago
    As long as the platters are intact, a stuck motor will not prevent someone with the right tools from reading data off of the drive. There's an entire industry dedicated to recovering data from hard drives in various states of disrepair. A bricked NAND chip, on the other hand, is an entirely different kind of problem.
  - hakfoo 5y ago
    This cries out for a missing product: A modern version of the old disk pack drives. You could pull out a cartridge containing the platters and store it in a hollowed out mountain for a century, but just drop it into a freshly built/rebuilt/exercised mechanism when you need to read it.
znpy 5y ago
> when the per-GB cost of SSDs reaches parity That's the point. SSDs keep achieving lower US$/GB, but so do spinning hard drives. This means that the point in time when parity is reached is continually postponed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jl2718 5y ago
Spinning disks under GMR heads are fundamentally a 2D technology. You might eke out a few more layers with a GMR array (like radar for magnetism), but there will be a noise limit. Flash technology will become stackable. Not just multi-bit per cell. The major limitation to NAND flash going to multiple layers is the inability to do epitaxy on deposited layers. The other approach is to use new materials that offer some form of hysteresis in amorphous or polycrystalline form, like 3D X-point. This product line was abandoned for business reasons, but I’m fairly confident that it will make a comeback in a big way, either by [insert big Asian company] buying the IP, or a well-funded startup. There’s also more exotic data storage like optical holography. That’s also 3D data storage, but with very little heat accumulation, which is the problem with anything based on 3D electronics. It is technically a spinning disk though.
ksec 5y ago
HDD, in terms of Revenue and TB Shipped are still growing in Datacenter segment. And people have been saying this for a long time. I remember a few vocal members in certain popular Internet forum keeps bagging on about it in 17/18. ( And we are half way 2021 already ) There are currently no roadmap from both HDD and SSDs they will reach per-GB cost parity. Not in the next 5, and nothing that shows this will happen in next 10 years. As a matter of fact there are plenty in the pipeline and R&D that could drive cost /GB on HDD cheaper. I dont see anything substantial with NAND. Other than the usual multiple layers and die shrinking. Both of them have fundamental issues with cost.

flemhans 5y ago

... in mice?

DesiLurker 5y ago
I lol-ed, at this rate we'll have fusion before graphene products.

bullen 5y ago

I said it before and I'll say it all again: I bought 30x X25-E SSDs from 2011 because: - Spinning disks consume 5-10W when idling (as in ready to read/write idle). - Spinning disks have 2 motors (spin and head driver) that inevitably fail. That said the SLC(1) -> MLC(2) -> TLC(3) -> QLC(4) layers is a race to the bottom with increased complexity and failures over time! These are the reasons big actors still use tape as storage medium!!! There is no great solution, but 64GB 50nm SLC SSDs from 2011 have the best write per bit that will ever be seen (100.000), they only use 0.07W on idle and ~2W when writing/reading. So if your motherboard has alot of SATA ports it might be the best solution until some real innovation happens! Edit: Maybe I'm the only person in the world that can have 5 million customers on 512GB? Atleast I can have them for 250 years if they all write to the database every day now no matter how expensive electricity becomes!

nullifidian 5y ago
>and failures over time! Are there any studies that show that TLC/QLC SSDs are less reliable at the SSD level? I'm pretty sure TLC is already used by enterprise SSDs.
- PixelOfDeath 5y ago
  Enterprise SSDs use capacitor backed dram to buffer writes. Some consumer SSDs do that, too. But with significant smaller amounts of dram. This can intercept all the small writes that you e.g. do for metadata of the filesystem and via mapping can combine them into very few big writes. Or writes to the same position over and over again only need to touch the flash when the devices is powering down. Are there any QLC enterprise SSDs? All the cheaper used enterprise SSDs I looked up where using TLC so far.
- imtringued 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure the only real factor in reliability is the SSD controller. The NAND will affect the lifespan of the SSD but when you have TBs of data a lot of it is written once.
throw737858 5y ago

Simon_says 5y ago

userbinator 5y ago

...and lose ten times more data when they fail? I found it a bit ironic that the stock photo of a HDD appears to be a Seagate 7200.12, which was one of the more infamous ones with dismal reliability. (Most people reading the article probably wouldn't notice, but as someone who had to deal with a ton of bad ones, the tiny actuator magnet and only 3 screws securing the platters are a distinctive feature.)

foobar33333 5y ago
>and lose ten times more data when they fail? You don't lose any data when a hdd fails because you just restore from a backup.
- qeternity 5y ago
  Or more realistically since these are targeting enterprise: your storage layer is fault tolerant so you do nothing except replace the drive.
NextHendrix 5y ago
Or make them about 3 times smaller

samatman 5y ago

It's been said of graphene that it is excellent for everything except industrial application. I've been making this joke for ten years now, it's truly the gift that keeps on giving. I doubt I have a single graphene-enhanced product in my home. Maybe one of these days...

mkingston 5y ago
Whether this is a gimmick or not I cannot tell you. https://www.inov-8.com/g-series https://www.inov-8.com/g-series
- murphyslab 5y ago
  The "graphene" probably does add some modest mechanical and perhaps thermal properties to the foam of the shoe. There are plenty of papers and I'd suggest that you search Google Scholar and Google Patents for 'graphene rubber composites'; you'll be overwhelmed with examples. However when discussing "graphene" it's helpful to differentiate between different types of two dimensional carbon lattices based on size and mode of manufacture.[0] There are two broad categories when we're talking about manufacturing applications at present: The graphene in those runners is probably an exfoliated graphene micro/nanoplatelets made form graphite microparticles (previously an in-demand commodity for Li-ion battery anodes). The process used, given the industrial scale required, is most likely a chemical oxidation/reduction process (kind of messy), electrochemical means, or intercalation. The end result is more like confetti or the bits of paper left over from the hole-punch. This isn't your high-quality, electronic grade graphene, however most of the mechanical, thermal, optical, and electrical properties of graphene remain, and this graphene confetti can be blended into composites for the sake of those mechanical properties or to provide thermal or electrical conductivity. Any company can blend a bit of graphene into their rubber or plastic and have the product given that sciency sheen. But you really want that graphene to be firmly embedded, since there are potential safety issues _in vivo_ [1]; Health Canada issued a recall alert for graphene-containing face masks in April, due to the possible risk of inhalation. [2] The electronic grade graphene is generally larger in those two dimensions and presenting fewer defects — a full sheet of paper compared to the confetti type. For early experimentalists, the best source was also through exfoliation, albeit using Scotch tape to peel layers off of a large (1 cm or more in lateral dimensions) single crystal of graphite. Nowadays, epitaxial growth (i.e. grow one crystal using a different crystal as the template) is preferred, as it can be mass-produced, even using roll-to-roll techniques. That graphene can also be more readily transferred from one substrate to another, which is necessary since you are going to want your sheet of graphene laying on an insulating surface, rather than the metal on which it was epitaxially grown. There are several other flavours of "graphene" — nanoribbon, oxide, fluorinated, multilayer, ligated, crumpled, charged, patterned, etc... But the two most consequential categories to keep in mind are whether you are dealing with "confetti" or "sheets". The nanoplatelet confetti can get inside you if not thoroughly immobilised. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene_production_techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene_production_techniques [1]: ACS Nano 2018: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.8b04758 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.8b04758 [2]: https://healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/hc-sc/2021/75309a-eng.php https://healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/hc-s...

arcticbull 5y ago

All the better to store Chia bingo cards on. The future is everything I dreamed it would be, to be sure.

dannyw 5y ago
The dotcom bubble created lots of useless startups with crazy valuations. Tech survived. The crypto bubble should be expected to create some too.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  True, but the dotcom bubble created at least 1 useful company. Crypto is 14 years in and still at a big ol' 0.

lamontcg 5y ago

Is it ten times as cheap per GB as well?

T-A 5y ago

> The data density of HDDs has quadrupled since 1990 This seems to have been written by somebody who doesn't understand exponential notation. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Areal-density-roadmap-for-hard-disk-drive-HDD-and-flash-based-solid-state-drive-SSD_fig2_310594004 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Areal-density-roadmap-fo...