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That would be a death knell for hard drives if they could actually get it that cheap (~$25/TB). In addition to obvious benefits for consumers, More and more in

That would be a death knell for hard drives if they could actually get it that cheap (~$25/TB). In addition to obvious benefits for consumers, More and more in the enterprise space (which is the dominant buyer of HDD unit purchase volume) HDD's are being regulated to write few, read lots if not outright WORM, and focused on Sequential speeds. You can knock an order of magnitude of speed off modern NAND Flash and still compete with spinning disks on sequential speed and have a few more orders of magnitude to shave off of Random I/O. It wouldn't kill HDD's overnight, but it would definitely give them a definitive terminal diagnosis. I would love that. I doubt that's what they're doing, but I would love that.

Dylan16807 4y ago
That depends on how much those supposed 50TB hard drives cost in four years. Though even if hard drive prices stay completely stagnant at $14/TB during sales, I'd still get a hard drive for videos and backups rather than pay $25.
- Zandikar 4y ago
  > I'd still get a hard drive for videos and backups rather than pay $25. So would everyone who's only motivation for buying storage is $/TB and nothing else. The vast majority of those people think 8 or even 80TB is alot and are pefectly happy with subpar drives being packaged in external usb enclosures. And there's nothing wrong with that, but that demographic of consumers is not the driving economic force in what gets developed, invested in, and brought to market. HDD's ~$15/TB bargain values wont be sustainable if Enterprise drops HDD's for WORM/WFRM workloads because their TCO is too high (and many are). Disk shelves chew through Kilowatts like candy while capacious focused flash hosts seem comparatively allergic to electricity, and repairing/rebulding arrays on spinning rust compared to flash arrays alone is impetus enough for a lot of shops to dump rust and embrace solid state. > That depends on how much those supposed 50TB hard drives cost in four years. For sure. I'm highly skeptical they can pull that off in that time frame though. the pace of innovation in the HDD space is woefully lacking. They need a win like that, with competitive pricing, or the industries days are numbered. If they can pull it off though that's great. I'm all for cheaper/better storage options, even if it's mechanical (or optical or whatever).
B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
> wouldn't kill HDD's overnight What's killing HDDs for me - looking at desktop use - is noise. Seems it got weirder lately, with wear-levelling ringing in every five seconds, etc. Today I just "rebuilt" a brand new HP box by adding RAM and swapping the original 512 GB M2 SSD for a 2 TB one (Crucial P5 Plus, nice specs). Thinking of adding a 6 or 8 TB HDD for data landfill, but most any customer review mentions aggravating disk noise. So, holding off the landfill for a while, peering at SATA SSD prices ...
- WithinReason 4y ago
  When I built a quiet computer I was surprised that even at max load it was the HDD that was by far the loudest
gigatexal 4y ago
Not really sure about that. Isn’t the write endurance of hard dives still much higher than that of flash?
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Yes. Flash can’t be stored unused for long periods without losing data.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    isn't tape better here?
  - Zandikar 4y ago
    That's what tape is for and not the usecase in question.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Not really. If I go look at some 20TB hard drives, I see them promising 1.5 to 2.5PB of endurance. On the other hand there are 4TB SSDs promising 5PB of endurance. In full drive writes that's 75-125 vs. 1250. Even if you ignore the hard drive warranty, I'd say the maximum reasonable workload is a constant write at 50% of the minimum transfer speed. At that speed you might get over 1000 writes, depending on drive size. It's a struggle to even beat the worst case of a mainstream SSD chosen for endurance. A QLC SSD will only withstand a couple hundred writes, but even that's moderately competitive.
  - gigatexal 4y ago
    Hmm. Thanks for sharing. Definitely food for thought.
  - Zandikar 4y ago
    Samsung rates their QVO (QLC flash) at about 0.36 DWPD for 5 years which works out to over 600 disk mean writes before failure. Even if we half that that's still easily 3x high end HDD's, with superior drive health monitoring and far superior recovery/rebuild performance. TLC Flash is 2-3 times higher than that, and exact endurance depends on the specific drive in question as there's more to endurance than single/double/triple/quadruple bit layering.
hulitu 4y ago
Taking into account that they don't say anything about data retention and reliability, i wouldn't hold my breath.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Dylan16807 4y ago

That depends on how much those supposed 50TB hard drives cost in four years. Though even if hard drive prices stay completely stagnant at $14/TB during sales, I'd still get a hard drive for videos and backups rather than pay $25.

Zandikar 4y ago
> I'd still get a hard drive for videos and backups rather than pay $25. So would everyone who's only motivation for buying storage is $/TB and nothing else. The vast majority of those people think 8 or even 80TB is alot and are pefectly happy with subpar drives being packaged in external usb enclosures. And there's nothing wrong with that, but that demographic of consumers is not the driving economic force in what gets developed, invested in, and brought to market. HDD's ~$15/TB bargain values wont be sustainable if Enterprise drops HDD's for WORM/WFRM workloads because their TCO is too high (and many are). Disk shelves chew through Kilowatts like candy while capacious focused flash hosts seem comparatively allergic to electricity, and repairing/rebulding arrays on spinning rust compared to flash arrays alone is impetus enough for a lot of shops to dump rust and embrace solid state. > That depends on how much those supposed 50TB hard drives cost in four years. For sure. I'm highly skeptical they can pull that off in that time frame though. the pace of innovation in the HDD space is woefully lacking. They need a win like that, with competitive pricing, or the industries days are numbered. If they can pull it off though that's great. I'm all for cheaper/better storage options, even if it's mechanical (or optical or whatever).

B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago

> wouldn't kill HDD's overnight What's killing HDDs for me - looking at desktop use - is noise. Seems it got weirder lately, with wear-levelling ringing in every five seconds, etc. Today I just "rebuilt" a brand new HP box by adding RAM and swapping the original 512 GB M2 SSD for a 2 TB one (Crucial P5 Plus, nice specs). Thinking of adding a 6 or 8 TB HDD for data landfill, but most any customer review mentions aggravating disk noise. So, holding off the landfill for a while, peering at SATA SSD prices ...

WithinReason 4y ago
When I built a quiet computer I was surprised that even at max load it was the HDD that was by far the loudest

gigatexal 4y ago

Not really sure about that. Isn’t the write endurance of hard dives still much higher than that of flash?

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
Yes. Flash can’t be stored unused for long periods without losing data.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  isn't tape better here?
- Zandikar 4y ago
  That's what tape is for and not the usecase in question.
Dylan16807 4y ago
Not really. If I go look at some 20TB hard drives, I see them promising 1.5 to 2.5PB of endurance. On the other hand there are 4TB SSDs promising 5PB of endurance. In full drive writes that's 75-125 vs. 1250. Even if you ignore the hard drive warranty, I'd say the maximum reasonable workload is a constant write at 50% of the minimum transfer speed. At that speed you might get over 1000 writes, depending on drive size. It's a struggle to even beat the worst case of a mainstream SSD chosen for endurance. A QLC SSD will only withstand a couple hundred writes, but even that's moderately competitive.
- gigatexal 4y ago
  Hmm. Thanks for sharing. Definitely food for thought.
- Zandikar 4y ago
  Samsung rates their QVO (QLC flash) at about 0.36 DWPD for 5 years which works out to over 600 disk mean writes before failure. Even if we half that that's still easily 3x high end HDD's, with superior drive health monitoring and far superior recovery/rebuild performance. TLC Flash is 2-3 times higher than that, and exact endurance depends on the specific drive in question as there's more to endurance than single/double/triple/quadruple bit layering.

hulitu 4y ago

Taking into account that they don't say anything about data retention and reliability, i wouldn't hold my breath.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]