8 ms·

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

by 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.

by nippoo 5y ago

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.