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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 beca

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.

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.