3 ms·

Capacity is not the major problem. It is the $/TB price points. SSDs are still 5x more expensive than HDD for bulk storage. It doesn't matter if you can buy a 2

Capacity is not the major problem. It is the $/TB price points. SSDs are still 5x more expensive than HDD for bulk storage. It doesn't matter if you can buy a 200TB SSD if it is 200x more expensive than a 1TB SSD. HAMR technology is going to give us much bigger HDD. If I can buy a 50TB HDD or a 50TB SSD in a couple years, which one will I buy if the SSD is 5x more expensive? SSDs make total sense for storing the files you need on a regular basis (e.g. your operating system and most used applications). They are just too expensive right now to store your massive video collection on them.

justsomehnguy 4y ago
> Capacity is not the major problem. It is the $/TB price points Only if you don't care about access time or transfer speed. If sitting there waiting 15 minutes costs you real money then having a bunch of fast but smaller SSDs quickly starts to makes sense. Napkin math: If 15 min/day costs you $15 then in a month $15*5d*4w=$300, or north of $3000 a year. And usually if something costs money per time it's more than a $15.
layer8 4y ago
> which one will I buy if the SSD is 5x more expensive SSD, because silence and random-access performance.
- didgetmaster 4y ago
  You could say the same thing about CPUs. Do you buy the $400 CPU that has good performance? Or do you splurge for the top of the line Threadripper that costs a few thousand? It is always a trade-off between price and performance. If the situation is right and your job justifies saving a few minutes for lots of money, then go for it. If I needed a ton of disk space and I could buy a 50TB HDD for $1000 or a 50TB SSD for $5000 right now, I would opt for the HDD. But that is just me.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  resilience too, especially if you're just mostly storing the data and not overwriting it constantly which is the actual death of SSDs whereas it's is mechanical wear with HDDs
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  For 50Tb? I'm not one to question anyone's data hoarding, but I just can't imagine needing silence or random access on 50Tb, at least not enough to justify 5x prices. By all means, give me 5Tb in my laptop at lightning speed, I'll pay through the nose for it. But in bulk? I can't imagine wanting to spend thousands when hundreds will do.
  - Beached 4y ago
    price isn't the only thing to consider. speed and density matter too. if I have 1pb of storage across 10 servers on hdds, the networking cost will be much higher than 1pb across 2 servers on ssds, and will the retrieval times. when speed and density are considering factors, ssds make sense. when I needed 1.2pb of data fully searchable with retrieval times under 3s (across the entire data set, or huge portions.like half or quarter of the data), hdd wasn't even on the table. but we did use hdd for off-site backups of the data in case we hit a huge shtf scenario.
- bedast 4y ago
  If I'm buying for my home 6 bay NAS, I'll take the savings and buy the HDDs. As it stands now, network performance is my bottleneck, not the hard drives. I'll only consider SSD for that system when the price is competitive. And I do spend extra on NAS HDDs.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

> Capacity is not the major problem. It is the $/TB price points Only if you don't care about access time or transfer speed. If sitting there waiting 15 minutes costs you real money then having a bunch of fast but smaller SSDs quickly starts to makes sense. Napkin math: If 15 min/day costs you $15 then in a month $15*5d*4w=$300, or north of $3000 a year. And usually if something costs money per time it's more than a $15.

layer8 4y ago

> which one will I buy if the SSD is 5x more expensive SSD, because silence and random-access performance.

didgetmaster 4y ago
You could say the same thing about CPUs. Do you buy the $400 CPU that has good performance? Or do you splurge for the top of the line Threadripper that costs a few thousand? It is always a trade-off between price and performance. If the situation is right and your job justifies saving a few minutes for lots of money, then go for it. If I needed a ton of disk space and I could buy a 50TB HDD for $1000 or a 50TB SSD for $5000 right now, I would opt for the HDD. But that is just me.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
resilience too, especially if you're just mostly storing the data and not overwriting it constantly which is the actual death of SSDs whereas it's is mechanical wear with HDDs
ravi-delia 4y ago
For 50Tb? I'm not one to question anyone's data hoarding, but I just can't imagine needing silence or random access on 50Tb, at least not enough to justify 5x prices. By all means, give me 5Tb in my laptop at lightning speed, I'll pay through the nose for it. But in bulk? I can't imagine wanting to spend thousands when hundreds will do.
- Beached 4y ago
  price isn't the only thing to consider. speed and density matter too. if I have 1pb of storage across 10 servers on hdds, the networking cost will be much higher than 1pb across 2 servers on ssds, and will the retrieval times. when speed and density are considering factors, ssds make sense. when I needed 1.2pb of data fully searchable with retrieval times under 3s (across the entire data set, or huge portions.like half or quarter of the data), hdd wasn't even on the table. but we did use hdd for off-site backups of the data in case we hit a huge shtf scenario.
bedast 4y ago
If I'm buying for my home 6 bay NAS, I'll take the savings and buy the HDDs. As it stands now, network performance is my bottleneck, not the hard drives. I'll only consider SSD for that system when the price is competitive. And I do spend extra on NAS HDDs.