7 ms·

Pure: No more hard drives will be sold after 2028

vlovich123 3y ago
I just can’t see this. HDDs hit a Pareto frontier in their niche not matched by tapes (slower access times, no real random access so expensive to fetch) and SSD (it will retain $/gb for the foreseeable future). Maybe electricity costs are significant but if you’re a hyperscaler storing exabytes, what else are you going to use to store the vast majority of infrequently accessed content? Am I missing something?
- wtallis 3y ago
  Fitting in between two other technologies on the Pareto frontier doesn't guarantee the niche will stay wide enough to be economically viable. Optane failed because it couldn't carve out enough of a market in between flash and DRAM. But I don't expect hard drives to die out entirely within the foreseeable future. Their niche will get smaller, but they're able to steal some market share from tape and can sacrifice performance to save power, while probably staying cheaper on an up-front $/TB basis than flash.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    TLDR: I think electricity costs of HDDs will come down rather than HDDs go away because the gap between flash and tape is so large on both performance and $/gb. Optane is a different story. I can see drives switching to 5400RPM or even more complex stuff being developed like variable rate (like write out at one rate RPM but only go up to 15k RPM for reads when there’s sufficient traffic and park when idle) to conserve energy. Additionally, by looking at what data is cold and “defragging” in a distributed fashion, you could arrange for entire host machines attached to the disks to shut down. I would imagine that the electricity hog is the machine itself rather than HDDs idling with their heads parked and thus you’d see more savings that way. Re Optane I agree not all Pareto frontier niches survive just because they exist but Optane is different here because it’s not a strict Pareto frontier. It’s more expensive, used more electricity, and has less capacity than SSDs. The introduction of NVMe made flash performance competitive enough with Optane that there wasn’t much to maneuver (https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-980-Pro-NVMe-PCIe-M2-2TB-vs-Intel-905P-Optane-NVMe-PCIe-960GB/m1454302vsm498903 https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-980-Pro-NVMe-P... - granted 3 year gap but I think Intel wasn’t necessarily able to sustain continued performance improvements and could only really improve $/GB). Intel also failed to invest SW to take advantage of its byte addressability by reducing RAM usage through XIP although not sure how big of a difference that would end up being.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Can we step back and appreciate both how impressive and how bizarre it is that, in the year 2023, tape media is still somehow the cheapest per byte?
  - eimrine 3y ago
    Nothing impressive for me, tape has the longest ping (especially in the worst-case scenario) and the least number of interactions (I mean it can not survive just one million reads).
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      It's usage scenario is completely different though. Generally, LTO is best-suited for backups and appending changes to the tape rather than reading it back. It's the backup method you hope you never need to use, but you'll be glad it's there if the shit hits the fan that badly.
      - eimrine 3y ago
        I have a prediction/belief that in Blockchain era a lot of people are going to use those huge LTO for the sake of mining which is going to be something as important to us as smartphones in 2023.
PotatoPancakes 3y ago
Actual summary: > Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&F: “The ultimate trigger here is power. It’s just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity.” Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure’s DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part. > HDD vendors sing a different tune, of course. Back in 2021, HDD vendor Seagate said the SSD most certainly would not kill disk drives. So the claim being made here is that SSDs will "soon" achieve a lower lifetime cost than HDDs per unit of storage, due to high electricity prices.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Except that for infrequently accessed archival storage, you can power off the drives. (Which is--presumably--what AWS Glacier is.)
wtallis 3y ago
The headline seems a bit sensationalized, but there certainly are major forces pushing hard drives toward being a niche storage technology rather than a mainstream or default choice. Hard drive prices ($/TB) haven't been improving as quickly as SSD prices. SSDs have already overtaken hard drives for low capacities. For datacenters, SSDs provide more TB per rack unit. As drives get bigger, hard drive performance characteristics become more tape-like; some workloads will be unable to benefit from better $/TB of larger drives because they cannot tolerate the performance hit of consolidating more data behind a single actuator. At scale, whether to use hard drives or SSDs is not so much a question or how much capacity or performance you need, but the ratio of capacity to performance. Hard drives are best for cold data, SSDs have been the choice for hot data and are taking over for warm data.
- Shorel 3y ago
  I prefer my data medium-rare.
- tharkun__ 3y ago
  As a regular joe that wants to store some TBs of data it does not matter to me whether the $/TB has been improving faster or slower. I just care that I can still read my data after X years and what the lower $/TB is. SSD improved price by 60% and HDD by 2%? I don't care if HDD is still half as expensive per TB as SSD per unit of space taken in my enclosure...
cperciva 3y ago
They might be right that spinning rust isn't going to be used for online storage due to the energy cost, but that doesn't mean it can't still be useful for offline storage. I'm not buying this.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Well, at that point, why not LTO? Much better price-per-TB, despite initially comparatively expensive buy-in price for the drive/library.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    If you're not an enterprise user, LTO makes no financial sense whatsoever. In addition, it just isn't very convenient; it's not a random-access media. With a HDD, you can just plug it in, use rsync to update only things that have changed, unplug it, and set it on a shelf. The use case is entirely different.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  SSDs are useless for offline storage: if they aren't powered on and accessed often enough, the data just disappears. They're totally unsuitable for archiving.
  - 112233 3y ago
    On a tangent: are there any data about nand data retention in low temperatures? Such as putting microsd in a freezer at -15°C ?
  - abvaw 3y ago
    Whaaa? How much time? Does this also apply to SD cards and such?
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      Here's a link I found with a quick google search: https://www.minitool.com/partition-disk/what-happens-to-data-on-ssd-when-power-is-lost.html https://www.minitool.com/partition-disk/what-happens-to-data... According to this, JEDEC Solid State Technology Association's standard is that SSDs should be able to retain data for 1 year at 30C. Not great for an archival medium. Here's a Quora discussion about it: https://www.quora.com/How-long-can-SSD-store-data-without-power-Can-data-be-recovered-from-SSD https://www.quora.com/How-long-can-SSD-store-data-without-po... Vendors will claim much better numbers than this, but the standard isn't very good.
AraceliHarker 3y ago
It is important to note that Pure Storage is a vendor of all-flash storage solutions, so there may be some exaggeration in their claims.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Yes, I would take it with a very large can of salt.
- candiodari 3y ago
  For one they totally neglect that NAND loses data over time. Granted, not fast. But a 10 year old flash drive is more likely than not to be unreadable. This problem has not been resolved. Hard drives, while they do have a finite lifespan, can probably survive 100 years or more. Furthermore, the components likely to fail can be replaced. Surprisingly CD-ROM (and DVD-ROM and ...) are going to last for centuries or millennia. Even writable CD-ROM will do. They also have the advantage that if necessary you can read them through a microscope. So failing components don't matter that much. With enough patience you could read them with a microscope, pen and paper.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    The more limited life span, lack of warning about impending failure, and greater cost (at the drive sizes I want) are why I haven't moved to SSDs yet. The speed advantage over platters is nice and all, but isn't really a factor for me.
  - stevefan1999 3y ago
    > NAND loses data over time All kinds of data medium loses their information over time. Even the novel you wrote in highschool 10 years ago (as an example) with pen & paper would lose ink overtime due to evaporation. There is a reason books are lost in time. There is one and probably only one exception to this: flowing data. Only data that is constantly refreshed would stay on forever.
    - candiodari 3y ago
Euphorbium 3y ago
Whats preventing datacenters from using free solar energy? Once you produce your own clean power, electricity price becomes irrelevant.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Has anyone done the maths on the square footage of the average data centre roof against the average power consumption of a modern-day data centre? It's either going to be disappointing relative to the cost of the panels, or very cool. I tend to be very conservative over these things, but in the right climate, probably starts to make sense for some data centres, but depends on what you're running in them. If it's mining crypto or running Xbox cloud gaming then lol, probably not. Cooling is probably the biggest pain; the sunnier the climate, the more demanding cooling is going to be.
  - wtallis 3y ago
    Solar irradiance is 1361 W/m^2 before accounting for losses due to the atmosphere, the sun not being directly overhead, solar panels not converting all wavelengths to electricity, etc. But none of those inefficiencies matter, because 1.3kW in a square meter means that we have an upper bound of solar power generation for a footprint roughly equal to that of a server rack, and the power is roughly that of one server (for compute; storage servers can have lower power density). Since servers are in fact operated in racks, we immediately know that solar power on the roof of a datacenter will fall short by at about two orders of magnitude at a minimum.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Solar does make lot of sense with data centres. But they are also run continuously so you need also other supply. Running servers only when you get decent output is not exactly very sellable idea. So at other times you still need to buy power.
  - Euphorbium 3y ago
    You can heat bricks and use the heat at night.
sebazzz 3y ago
One thing that HDDs seem to have and SSDs seem to lack is that they fail _reliably_. Some SMART values get higher, warning, then error. Sometimes directly in error. Tick tick tick tick. But you often can still recover some data. SSDs on the other hand: from one day to the next they are dead, don't do NVME or SATA handshakes anymore, and you're done. I wonder if SSD firmware still needs to mature to the point of still allowing some connectivity and data recovery.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Yes, I have suffered data loss from both HDDs and SSDs, paid for the recovery services available, and HDDs have always been the ones to see any degree of success. SSDs? You're probably screwed.
  - quags 3y ago
    I’ve done three recoveries to a remote service for clients - the first failed and two which were ssd had a full success.m but all were ssds. Hdds I never sent to recovery because generally they were not complete failures (ie some bad blocks and a copy around was possible ) or the board could be replaced to fix it with the same model and firmware.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Meaningful data recovery from a failed SSD could need tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment, depending on how it failed.
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      Can you give a source for why you think that?
- hilbert42 3y ago
  "I wonder if SSD firmware still needs to mature to the point..." This is a major issue, I've had almost brand new SSDs fail catastrophically without warning. In one instance I'd gone to great trouble to create an organized data disk for archiving and it failed just as I was about to back it up, and nothing I did could get it to even recognize the SATA interface let alone give me access to the data. This is most annoying, first, why does the interface have to also die when something goes wrong with the memory? Second, can't the firmware at least tell us what's wrong with the memory? (Given the interface is essentially the smallest part of the drive's real estate it's unlikely the bit that fails, similarly the firmware would be second smallest—even then, why isn't redundancy built into drives for these two vital components (two of each)?) So what's going on? To maintain the integrity of our data we not only need these issues solved but also we need to know much more about the architecture of SSD drives. As users, we ought to pay much more attention to the fact that much of this problem stems from the inordinate amount of secrecy SSD manufacturers adopt. We really do need some new manufacturer to come to market with a drive based on data integrity, its selling point would be 'it's open, here's what we do and here are our tools to help you recover your data'. There's also the longevity problem that needs resolution, I've put SSD as backups into storage only to come back several years later to find the data missing. As it is, the data on HDDs is ephemeral enough, but relying on a 'well' of electrons trapped in 'glass' is not only risky but almost foolhardy. If it had not been for the speed and convenience of SSDs we'd never have contemplated using them in the first instance. Before we scrap HDDs we really do need much more reliable data storage than SSDs, especially so for archival data. It remains to be seen what eventuates, but whatever it is it should be based on a technology (physics) that's inherently reliable and stable, crystals for instance.
radicality 3y ago
Could someone help me understand something I noticed recently when shopping around for SSDs - the pretty large difference in power usage between the more consumer-targeted models vs datacenter models. How much of it is attributed to larger memory sizes vs other factors? Examples: - Intel 660p 2TB: 100mW active. Older and slower, but only 100mW! - Samsung 990 Pro 2TB: 5-6 watts - Micron 9400 >=8TB: 15-25 watts ! Intel: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/consumer-ssds/660p-series-brief.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/memory... Samsung: https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sheet/Samsung_NVMe_SSD_990_PRO_Datasheet_Rev.1.0.pdf https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sh... Micron link: https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/documents/products/product-flyer/9400_nvme_ssd_product_brief.pdf https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/documents...
- rektide 3y ago
  1.6/0.6M read/write iops the Micron. There's probably still some difference, but iops/watt is probably a more reasonable way to look at these.
- wtallis 3y ago
  The 100mW active power rating for the 660p is almost certainly measured while running MobileMark, a general system performance benchmark that is very lightweight and leaves the storage completely idle for the bulk of the test duration. So that power rating is really more of an indicator about idle power in a machine sitting at the desktop doing nothing (but not in a suspend/sleep state at the system level). The 990 Pro power rating and the enterprise SSD power rating are both for a drive that's actually busy. The Micron 9400 has a controller with twice as many channels and none of the performance-sacrificing optimizations that consumer SSD firmware comes with.
nubinetwork 3y ago
Most of my computers use ssd or nvme, except for my 16tb file server, which is a mixture of 12 hard drives and 6 ssds. I would upgrade it to a system of 4/8 nvme drives, but I'm still on the fence as to whether they could survive 5 years before needing replacement again.
wkat4242 3y ago
I don't think so. Eventually maybe but €220 for 14TB is not in the realm of SSDs yet and it won't be by 2028.
jeegsy 3y ago
And just like that, I now know "Pure Storage" is a company that exists!
diggernet 3y ago
When HDDs fade away, what can we use for reliable storage? The endurance of SSDs has dropped from 100K cycles for SLC to 1K cycles for QLC. That makes an SSD essentially a consumable. Some say you should replace them every couple years. Meanwhile, I've got HDDs that are 10 years old and still going strong. Is there anything out there, or even on the horizon, that would be reliable long-term like HDD?

I just can’t see this. HDDs hit a Pareto frontier in their niche not matched by tapes (slower access times, no real random access so expensive to fetch) and SSD (it will retain $/gb for the foreseeable future). Maybe electricity costs are significant but if you’re a hyperscaler storing exabytes, what else are you going to use to store the vast majority of infrequently accessed content? Am I missing something?

wtallis 3y ago
Fitting in between two other technologies on the Pareto frontier doesn't guarantee the niche will stay wide enough to be economically viable. Optane failed because it couldn't carve out enough of a market in between flash and DRAM. But I don't expect hard drives to die out entirely within the foreseeable future. Their niche will get smaller, but they're able to steal some market share from tape and can sacrifice performance to save power, while probably staying cheaper on an up-front $/TB basis than flash.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  TLDR: I think electricity costs of HDDs will come down rather than HDDs go away because the gap between flash and tape is so large on both performance and $/gb. Optane is a different story. I can see drives switching to 5400RPM or even more complex stuff being developed like variable rate (like write out at one rate RPM but only go up to 15k RPM for reads when there’s sufficient traffic and park when idle) to conserve energy. Additionally, by looking at what data is cold and “defragging” in a distributed fashion, you could arrange for entire host machines attached to the disks to shut down. I would imagine that the electricity hog is the machine itself rather than HDDs idling with their heads parked and thus you’d see more savings that way. Re Optane I agree not all Pareto frontier niches survive just because they exist but Optane is different here because it’s not a strict Pareto frontier. It’s more expensive, used more electricity, and has less capacity than SSDs. The introduction of NVMe made flash performance competitive enough with Optane that there wasn’t much to maneuver (https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-980-Pro-NVMe-PCIe-M2-2TB-vs-Intel-905P-Optane-NVMe-PCIe-960GB/m1454302vsm498903 https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-980-Pro-NVMe-P... - granted 3 year gap but I think Intel wasn’t necessarily able to sustain continued performance improvements and could only really improve $/GB). Intel also failed to invest SW to take advantage of its byte addressability by reducing RAM usage through XIP although not sure how big of a difference that would end up being.
kibwen 3y ago
Can we step back and appreciate both how impressive and how bizarre it is that, in the year 2023, tape media is still somehow the cheapest per byte?
- eimrine 3y ago
  Nothing impressive for me, tape has the longest ping (especially in the worst-case scenario) and the least number of interactions (I mean it can not survive just one million reads).
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    It's usage scenario is completely different though. Generally, LTO is best-suited for backups and appending changes to the tape rather than reading it back. It's the backup method you hope you never need to use, but you'll be glad it's there if the shit hits the fan that badly.
    - eimrine 3y ago
      I have a prediction/belief that in Blockchain era a lot of people are going to use those huge LTO for the sake of mining which is going to be something as important to us as smartphones in 2023.

PotatoPancakes 3y ago

Actual summary: > Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&F: “The ultimate trigger here is power. It’s just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity.” Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure’s DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part. > HDD vendors sing a different tune, of course. Back in 2021, HDD vendor Seagate said the SSD most certainly would not kill disk drives. So the claim being made here is that SSDs will "soon" achieve a lower lifetime cost than HDDs per unit of storage, due to high electricity prices.

ghaff 3y ago
Except that for infrequently accessed archival storage, you can power off the drives. (Which is--presumably--what AWS Glacier is.)

wtallis 3y ago

The headline seems a bit sensationalized, but there certainly are major forces pushing hard drives toward being a niche storage technology rather than a mainstream or default choice. Hard drive prices ($/TB) haven't been improving as quickly as SSD prices. SSDs have already overtaken hard drives for low capacities. For datacenters, SSDs provide more TB per rack unit. As drives get bigger, hard drive performance characteristics become more tape-like; some workloads will be unable to benefit from better $/TB of larger drives because they cannot tolerate the performance hit of consolidating more data behind a single actuator. At scale, whether to use hard drives or SSDs is not so much a question or how much capacity or performance you need, but the ratio of capacity to performance. Hard drives are best for cold data, SSDs have been the choice for hot data and are taking over for warm data.

Shorel 3y ago
I prefer my data medium-rare.
tharkun__ 3y ago
As a regular joe that wants to store some TBs of data it does not matter to me whether the $/TB has been improving faster or slower. I just care that I can still read my data after X years and what the lower $/TB is. SSD improved price by 60% and HDD by 2%? I don't care if HDD is still half as expensive per TB as SSD per unit of space taken in my enclosure...

cperciva 3y ago

They might be right that spinning rust isn't going to be used for online storage due to the energy cost, but that doesn't mean it can't still be useful for offline storage. I'm not buying this.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Well, at that point, why not LTO? Much better price-per-TB, despite initially comparatively expensive buy-in price for the drive/library.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  If you're not an enterprise user, LTO makes no financial sense whatsoever. In addition, it just isn't very convenient; it's not a random-access media. With a HDD, you can just plug it in, use rsync to update only things that have changed, unplug it, and set it on a shelf. The use case is entirely different.
midoridensha 3y ago
SSDs are useless for offline storage: if they aren't powered on and accessed often enough, the data just disappears. They're totally unsuitable for archiving.
- 112233 3y ago
  On a tangent: are there any data about nand data retention in low temperatures? Such as putting microsd in a freezer at -15°C ?
- abvaw 3y ago
  Whaaa? How much time? Does this also apply to SD cards and such?
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    Here's a link I found with a quick google search: https://www.minitool.com/partition-disk/what-happens-to-data-on-ssd-when-power-is-lost.html https://www.minitool.com/partition-disk/what-happens-to-data... According to this, JEDEC Solid State Technology Association's standard is that SSDs should be able to retain data for 1 year at 30C. Not great for an archival medium. Here's a Quora discussion about it: https://www.quora.com/How-long-can-SSD-store-data-without-power-Can-data-be-recovered-from-SSD https://www.quora.com/How-long-can-SSD-store-data-without-po... Vendors will claim much better numbers than this, but the standard isn't very good.

AraceliHarker 3y ago

It is important to note that Pure Storage is a vendor of all-flash storage solutions, so there may be some exaggeration in their claims.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Yes, I would take it with a very large can of salt.
candiodari 3y ago
For one they totally neglect that NAND loses data over time. Granted, not fast. But a 10 year old flash drive is more likely than not to be unreadable. This problem has not been resolved. Hard drives, while they do have a finite lifespan, can probably survive 100 years or more. Furthermore, the components likely to fail can be replaced. Surprisingly CD-ROM (and DVD-ROM and ...) are going to last for centuries or millennia. Even writable CD-ROM will do. They also have the advantage that if necessary you can read them through a microscope. So failing components don't matter that much. With enough patience you could read them with a microscope, pen and paper.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  The more limited life span, lack of warning about impending failure, and greater cost (at the drive sizes I want) are why I haven't moved to SSDs yet. The speed advantage over platters is nice and all, but isn't really a factor for me.
- stevefan1999 3y ago
  > NAND loses data over time All kinds of data medium loses their information over time. Even the novel you wrote in highschool 10 years ago (as an example) with pen & paper would lose ink overtime due to evaporation. There is a reason books are lost in time. There is one and probably only one exception to this: flowing data. Only data that is constantly refreshed would stay on forever.
  - candiodari 3y ago

Euphorbium 3y ago

Whats preventing datacenters from using free solar energy? Once you produce your own clean power, electricity price becomes irrelevant.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Has anyone done the maths on the square footage of the average data centre roof against the average power consumption of a modern-day data centre? It's either going to be disappointing relative to the cost of the panels, or very cool. I tend to be very conservative over these things, but in the right climate, probably starts to make sense for some data centres, but depends on what you're running in them. If it's mining crypto or running Xbox cloud gaming then lol, probably not. Cooling is probably the biggest pain; the sunnier the climate, the more demanding cooling is going to be.
- wtallis 3y ago
  Solar irradiance is 1361 W/m^2 before accounting for losses due to the atmosphere, the sun not being directly overhead, solar panels not converting all wavelengths to electricity, etc. But none of those inefficiencies matter, because 1.3kW in a square meter means that we have an upper bound of solar power generation for a footprint roughly equal to that of a server rack, and the power is roughly that of one server (for compute; storage servers can have lower power density). Since servers are in fact operated in racks, we immediately know that solar power on the roof of a datacenter will fall short by at about two orders of magnitude at a minimum.
Ekaros 3y ago
Solar does make lot of sense with data centres. But they are also run continuously so you need also other supply. Running servers only when you get decent output is not exactly very sellable idea. So at other times you still need to buy power.
- Euphorbium 3y ago
  You can heat bricks and use the heat at night.

sebazzz 3y ago

One thing that HDDs seem to have and SSDs seem to lack is that they fail _reliably_. Some SMART values get higher, warning, then error. Sometimes directly in error. Tick tick tick tick. But you often can still recover some data. SSDs on the other hand: from one day to the next they are dead, don't do NVME or SATA handshakes anymore, and you're done. I wonder if SSD firmware still needs to mature to the point of still allowing some connectivity and data recovery.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Yes, I have suffered data loss from both HDDs and SSDs, paid for the recovery services available, and HDDs have always been the ones to see any degree of success. SSDs? You're probably screwed.
- quags 3y ago
  I’ve done three recoveries to a remote service for clients - the first failed and two which were ssd had a full success.m but all were ssds. Hdds I never sent to recovery because generally they were not complete failures (ie some bad blocks and a copy around was possible ) or the board could be replaced to fix it with the same model and firmware.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Meaningful data recovery from a failed SSD could need tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment, depending on how it failed.
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    Can you give a source for why you think that?
hilbert42 3y ago
"I wonder if SSD firmware still needs to mature to the point..." This is a major issue, I've had almost brand new SSDs fail catastrophically without warning. In one instance I'd gone to great trouble to create an organized data disk for archiving and it failed just as I was about to back it up, and nothing I did could get it to even recognize the SATA interface let alone give me access to the data. This is most annoying, first, why does the interface have to also die when something goes wrong with the memory? Second, can't the firmware at least tell us what's wrong with the memory? (Given the interface is essentially the smallest part of the drive's real estate it's unlikely the bit that fails, similarly the firmware would be second smallest—even then, why isn't redundancy built into drives for these two vital components (two of each)?) So what's going on? To maintain the integrity of our data we not only need these issues solved but also we need to know much more about the architecture of SSD drives. As users, we ought to pay much more attention to the fact that much of this problem stems from the inordinate amount of secrecy SSD manufacturers adopt. We really do need some new manufacturer to come to market with a drive based on data integrity, its selling point would be 'it's open, here's what we do and here are our tools to help you recover your data'. There's also the longevity problem that needs resolution, I've put SSD as backups into storage only to come back several years later to find the data missing. As it is, the data on HDDs is ephemeral enough, but relying on a 'well' of electrons trapped in 'glass' is not only risky but almost foolhardy. If it had not been for the speed and convenience of SSDs we'd never have contemplated using them in the first instance. Before we scrap HDDs we really do need much more reliable data storage than SSDs, especially so for archival data. It remains to be seen what eventuates, but whatever it is it should be based on a technology (physics) that's inherently reliable and stable, crystals for instance.

radicality 3y ago

Could someone help me understand something I noticed recently when shopping around for SSDs - the pretty large difference in power usage between the more consumer-targeted models vs datacenter models. How much of it is attributed to larger memory sizes vs other factors? Examples: - Intel 660p 2TB: 100mW active. Older and slower, but only 100mW! - Samsung 990 Pro 2TB: 5-6 watts - Micron 9400 >=8TB: 15-25 watts ! Intel: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/consumer-ssds/660p-series-brief.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/memory... Samsung: https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sheet/Samsung_NVMe_SSD_990_PRO_Datasheet_Rev.1.0.pdf https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sh... Micron link: https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/documents/products/product-flyer/9400_nvme_ssd_product_brief.pdf https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/documents...

rektide 3y ago
1.6/0.6M read/write iops the Micron. There's probably still some difference, but iops/watt is probably a more reasonable way to look at these.
wtallis 3y ago
The 100mW active power rating for the 660p is almost certainly measured while running MobileMark, a general system performance benchmark that is very lightweight and leaves the storage completely idle for the bulk of the test duration. So that power rating is really more of an indicator about idle power in a machine sitting at the desktop doing nothing (but not in a suspend/sleep state at the system level). The 990 Pro power rating and the enterprise SSD power rating are both for a drive that's actually busy. The Micron 9400 has a controller with twice as many channels and none of the performance-sacrificing optimizations that consumer SSD firmware comes with.

nubinetwork 3y ago

Most of my computers use ssd or nvme, except for my 16tb file server, which is a mixture of 12 hard drives and 6 ssds. I would upgrade it to a system of 4/8 nvme drives, but I'm still on the fence as to whether they could survive 5 years before needing replacement again.

wkat4242 3y ago

I don't think so. Eventually maybe but €220 for 14TB is not in the realm of SSDs yet and it won't be by 2028.

jeegsy 3y ago

And just like that, I now know "Pure Storage" is a company that exists!

diggernet 3y ago

When HDDs fade away, what can we use for reliable storage? The endurance of SSDs has dropped from 100K cycles for SLC to 1K cycles for QLC. That makes an SSD essentially a consumable. Some say you should replace them every couple years. Meanwhile, I've got HDDs that are 10 years old and still going strong. Is there anything out there, or even on the horizon, that would be reliable long-term like HDD?