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Coughlin: SSDs will not kill disk drives

JohnFen 3y ago
I own a few SSDs, but for me, HDDs still make the most sense for the majority of my storage. It's not even close. High-capacity HDDs are half the price of high-capacity SDDs.
- catiopatio 3y ago
  In addition to the cost advantage, HDD firmware is simpler and more reliable.
- readyplayernull 3y ago
  They can also be left unpowered "forever" without data loss, while SSD lose bits after a few weeks.
  - istjohn 3y ago
    I recently powered up a 2012 Macbook Air with SSD after 7 years and had no data loss.
  - hgomersall 3y ago
    Really? Do you have some evidence for that?
    - accrual 3y ago
      I feel like this would be easy to test, at some cost. Buy N SSDs from X manufacturers. Fill the entire disk with random bits (/dev/urandom), read it back and compute a hash. Wait A, B, C, and D durations. After each duration, read the drives again and compare the hash.
  - FlyingAvatar 3y ago
    Bit rot is definitely a problem with HDDs, especially as their bit densities increased. I've heard that bit rot on SSDs also became a thing as well after they started moving from SLC to MLC. I'd be interested to see a study on how prevalent either of them are.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  My HDDs tend to last longer than my SSDs, too. For bulk data storage that isn't being transported frequently, it's a no-brainer. For anything else, though, I think SSDs still have the advantage despite their shorter lifespans because of their better tolerance for physical impact and higher read/write speeds.
- morninglight 3y ago
  Even stone tablets have to be periodically refreshed. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus%2034&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus%2034&ver...
throw0101b 3y ago
No one deletes data: HDDs are useful for tiered storage and bulk bits. A number of file systems also support transparent tape usage: a stub is left in the directory structure and if anyone tries reading it the bits are fetched from a robot.
- catiopatio 3y ago
  What file systems support transparent tape loading? That’s a neat feature, but I’d expect a lot of software to behave badly if local file system operations suddenly started exhibiting tape-level latency.
  - derefr 3y ago
    Windows Storage Spaces. IIRC, a Tiered Storage Space means that evicted-to-tape files that get OpenFile'd, get copied in full back to the hot disk before the OpenFile completes, such that any IO then proceeds from the hot disk, not from tape.
  - AndrewDucker 3y ago
    IBM Z/OS supports it. You'd try to open a file and it would pop up a "retrieving" message and you'd know you could go and get a cup of coffee while you waited for your file. (That's obviously at the OS layer rather than the filesystem layer. But the application didn't know where the file was until it asked for it.)
  - throw0101c 3y ago
    > What file systems support transparent tape loading? In the enterprise/HPC space, GPFS and Lustre.
  - projektfu 3y ago
    NTFS, if I remember correctly.
- hinkley 3y ago
  It would be nice if more communications protocols achieved feature parity with Ethernet. Or even USB. Give me a hard drive with a connector I can plug into a hub or switch and just keep daisy chaining the oldest hardware deeper and deeper, instead of needing a robot to physically move them around. It’s not like adding a couple microseconds to response time will even be noticed on a crappy old hard drive. Add a deep sleep mode and bam, you got a stew goin’.
SmoothBrain12 3y ago
[dead]
magicalhippo 3y ago
Flash is down to "only" 2x price of regular harddisks for several TB. Sure new HDDs are large, but they're expensive, and it seems unreasonable to me the new HAMR tech will be different. Simple extrapolation puts the crossover a few years into the future last I checked, though there are other aspects as well. Will HDDs die next decade? Surely not. But given flash can go 3D surely its just a question of time until HDDs are like tapes now.
dale_glass 3y ago
Maybe not yet, but eventually? HDD manufacturers do seem to see trouble brewing. Eg, one interesting thing to me is that hard disks are getting more complex. We now have: * Helium * HAMR * SMR * Dual actuators Helium and HAMR improve density, but add cost. SMR improves density but results in drives that need special handling. Dual actuators improve performance, but increase points of failure. Things like HAMR and SMR seem to be a sign that there's not that much more density to squeeze out without taking special measures. One problem is that as drives get larger and larger, RAID sync times keep on growing. Even assuming faster RPM drives and multiple actuators it seems we're getting quite closer to where this becomes a serious problem.
- throwaway154 3y ago
  Surely they reduce cost. Otherwise they'd not be used. A donkey and cart's cheaper than a haulage truck, but donkeys aren't used much in the haulage business anymore.
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    Look at the lifetime cost and the capabilities you're buying.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > A donkey and cart's cheaper than a haulage truck Not when you measure the cost per unit of cargo delivered.
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      That was their point.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  I don't get your argument. Hard drive technology pretty much always got more complex as time goes on. Do you think bits shrink themselves? 20+ years ago, we had "Get Perpendicular" explaining why perpendicular bits were a good idea. https://archive.org/details/get-perpendicular https://archive.org/details/get-perpendicular All future technologies are more complex than our past techs. I mean, should we say that future SSDs are doomed because they're going for 4-bits per cell and 300+ layers of silicon rather than the single-layer single-bit simple designs from 10 years ago?
jedberg 3y ago
Both make good arguments. If the total cost of an SSD is indeed cheaper than spinning rust in five years, then sure, I can see them getting phased out for enterprise. But what about consumers? They don't consider TCO the same way. They don't look at energy or space constraints. They only look at cost per megabyte. As long as SSD is more, they will keep buying spinning rust for backups. The fact that Costco always has backup disks on the shelves tells me that it's a pretty popular item amongst consumers.
- patrakov 3y ago
  I am a consumer, and I look not only at cost per megabyte. I also need to sleep at night while my laptop gets backed up and while my torrents get downloaded and seeded. Therefore, due to their noise, HDDs in the same room are not an option, no matter the price. For local backups and torrents (i.e. something that I can lose) I nowadays rely on an 8TB QLC SATA SSD connected to the router via USB adapter (in 2016, there was a 1.92 TB SSD), and will buy another one if it gets full.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    I guess it's down to personal preference. The noise of data being written to a HDD is soothing like a lullaby to me. I can rest easy knowing that the hard drive is working away through the night, filling sector after sector with new surprises for me to find in the morning and carefully copying my old data keeping it safe and warm so that it's always there when I need it.
    - justsomehnguy 3y ago
      > The noise of data being written to a HDD is soothing like a lullaby to me Username checks out. But yeah, there are a bazillion ways to store the hdd somewhere where it wouldn't be a noisense and don't care about the wear level
gregwebs 3y ago
There are still a lot of workloads that perform mostly sequential writes and reads that aren't a huge win for SSD. Even if you look at random write workloads many of those start by journaling to a WAL now, so it is possible for the WAL to be on a separate HDD. I assume a lot of this comes down to "object storage": S3 and similar services. As I understand it, these would do actual data storage in HDD (or other cheaper medium for glacier and slower access storage). Metadata caching could use SSD.
i_am_jl 3y ago
Man who runs "Entertainment Storage Alliance" writes white paper claiming that people need lots of storage, so HDDs aren't going anywhere, makes charts to illustrate his feelings, presents no analysis. Whitepaper store link (I have to assume the description isn't updated for each new issue...?) https://tomcoughlin.com/product/digital-storage-technology-newsletter/ https://tomcoughlin.com/product/digital-storage-technology-n... Entertainment Storage Alliance: http://www.entertainmentstorage.org/ http://www.entertainmentstorage.org/ I agree that HDDs aren't going anywhere, but this is a nothing article on an apparently nothing whitepaper.
- loeg 3y ago
  The Pure storage perspective -- that HDD sales will be zero by 2028 -- appears to be similarly motivated. Pure Storage went all-in on flash for Enterprise storage and doesn't have an answer to the market segments better served by HDD. So they would very much prefer for HDDs to be on the cusp of obsolescence.
projektfu 3y ago
People who do data storage/archiving for a living, do SSDs have predictable durability? I know that with magnetic media you can plan to copy them every so often to prevent loss, but is that information well known for TLC/QLC flash? I also know that SanDisk made an archival worm SD card that was supposed to be durable for 100 years, but haven't heard of rates like that for SSDs.
- catboybotnet 3y ago
  You're still at risk for EMP related data loss, and the sun flipping bits is definitely not unheard of. There's a reason ECC memory is popular. One of the most available options you have is archiving all your data onto bluray disks. EMP safe, and going to be around for well past your lifetime.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  What makes me nervous about SSDs is related to this -- I've heard many tales of SSDs simply dying, making data recovery impossible. I've rarely had HDDs die, but the couple of times that I did, they gave plenty of warning that it was coming.
- teddyh 3y ago
  > SSDs have predictable durability? If it is not plugged in, i.e. unpowered, don’t count on anything more than three months. Thread with sources: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573332>
  - supertrope 3y ago
    If it's eMLC, kept at elevated temperature (40C), and unpowered. Consumer drives use higher floating gate voltages so they'll keep data for a year while unplugged.
    - teddyh 3y ago
      A year is still much shorter than most people assume. In my experience, most people think they can buy SSDs, put data on them and then shelve them for 20 years without issue.
ctur 3y ago
This article seems like it is an AI summary of another document. It doesn’t offer anything new, just restating someone else’s analysis. And that analysis comes down to… storage demand will outpace SSDs price point enough that the demand will be met by both SSDs and traditional spinning platters. Which isn’t surprising as even today there is demand for tape. The question is how long the demand will remain vaguely mainstream vs when it will become more niche. The 2028 estimate of storage being dominated by SSDs seems vaguely reasonable to me. Pure’s bravado of staying zero hard drives will be sold after 2028 seems silly but inline with what a flash storage company would say. But from a directional standpoint it probably is right that many use cases will get further eroded by SSDs. One big challenge with hard drives is access speed (throughout and latency) compared to nvme, and hard drives being used more as cold and near line storage is definitely going to continue. Write once access never in many cases.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > Pure’s bravado of staying zero hard drives will be sold after 2028 seems silly but inline with what a flash storage company would say Or what HDD companies would themselves. I recently was forced to buy WD JUCT, which are SATA-2 (!), 5400rpm, 16MB. There were literally no other non-SMR 2.5 drives at tgat moment, even WD REDs.
qwerty456127 3y ago
As a terabyte SSD is enough for everything I need random access to, and hard drives are not particularly reliable for backups storage, I wish we just had cheap reliable tape storage to put backups on. But small-scale tape storages appear to be more expensive per terabyte than HDDs are.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > hard drives are not particularly reliable for backups storage This is true when you compare them to media designed for long-term storage. But HDDs aren't all that terrible at it. I recently needed to dig out a 30 year old hard drive to recover some data from it, and it worked flawlessly.
  - qwerty456127 3y ago
    I did the same last weekend. One of 3 old 120 GB HDDs (of one the very best models available ~17 years ago) I last accessed about 4 years ago just didn't come up (it sounds like it tries repeatedly but fails).
- pjdesno 3y ago
  The price of a single HDD is (very roughly) constant, regardless of capacity; the price of an SSD is mostly determined by the amount of flash. In other words, you can cut an SSD in half, but you can't do that to a hard drive. Flash replaced mini-drives in iPods when the price of "enough" flash (2GB or so) dropped to that of a mini-drive. SSDs replaced HDDs in laptops when the price of a "big enough" SSD (256 MB?) became competitive with an HDD. Every reduction in flash cost after each transition was a win for the vendor, since they could keep storage constant and reduce the price. (unlike HDDs, where the price stays constant and the amount of storage goes up) In each case some users (over-represented here) wanted more storage, and vendors didn't care, or were happy to sell more flash for a price premium. Enterprise systems aren't single drives, but I believe they still have a concept of "enough" - if the savings from HDD are marginal, or the performance loss from concentrating data on fewer and fewer HDDs becomes too much, they'll switch to pure flash. Anecdotally that's already happening. (also, to be honest, another driver is probably because people like to spend their employer's money on high-tech shiny things, which often pays off better career-wise than saving money) For the Googles and Amazons of the world there will probably never be a value of "enough", and HDD won't fade until the IOPS/TB ratio becomes ridiculously bad. Maybe not even then, as HDD may still be the best way to store data for a few decades.
superkuh 3y ago
The introduction of SSDs leading to SSD only personal computers accidentally set computing back about a decade. It's crazy that top tier computer manufacturers are actually selling computers with un-upgradable storage of only 256GB (and only 8GB of ram) in 2023. Then these users end up having to juggle a handful of external drives which are far more unreliable and likely to cause weird problems. The vast majority of my tech support is helping people with tiny SSDs deal with the problems of external drives and cloud storage.
- catboybotnet 3y ago
  It's a feature, not a flaw. You get to sell people on cheap NAND, and your cloud service. Windows will always nag you to use OneDrive, your OEM may have their own bloat/nagware, etc.
- supertrope 3y ago
  It's a trade off. For many years PCs would make sure to include Intel i5 or i7 processors but boot off a HDD because they could list a big 1000GB storage bullet point. Big numbers on boxes sell! This meant slow PCs. Data hoarders should look for a PC with a hard drive or upgrade aftermarket.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
They absolutely will if they ever reach similar $/GB price points. That's the only reason I can think of to buy spinning disk storage in 2023.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Well, that and as other commenters have pointed out, HDDs have benefits in terms of longevity.
brycewray 3y ago
When I recently upgraded my setup, I had to choose whether to convert my local backup processes to SSDs or stick with HDDs, albeit newer and faster HDDs than their snail-like predecessors. I did the usual research into which option made more sense when strictly for backup purposes rather than frequent “live” data access, and decided HDDs were my better long-term choice. YMMV.
xhkkffbf 3y ago
I know spinning disks are fragile, but I've had more problem with cold storage of SSDs. They just seem to forget information or flip bits when they're not kept powered up. Don't ask me why. Since I need cold storage, I hope that hard disks continue to be around.
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
I don't see disk drives going away. They serve a different purpose. As much as I love SSDs, I feel more comfortable storing data on a disk drive for the long term. I don't need performance on network storage either.
pjdesno 3y ago
SSDs had vast improvements in cost over the past decade due to (a) the switch from 2-bit MLC planar NAND to 3-bit (TLC) 3D NAND, and probably (b) the growth of the SSD market - 10 years ago most flash went into iPods, phones, etc., so pretty much all flash chips produced were optimized for that use case, and it cost more to make SSDs out of them. Hard drives spent a decade in the wasteland, with little growth in per-platter capacity (google "superparamagnetic limit" for more info) and gains mostly due to packing more platters by filling the enclosure with helium to reduce aerodynamic drag. (fun fact - cast aluminum is porous to helium, which caused no end of trouble) With HAMR and other recent energy-based workarounds to those density limits, hard drives have a number of years of major TB/$ gains ahead of them, while flash is in the optimizing stage - going from e.g. 96 to 144 3D layers, and diminishing returns (at the expense of big performance costs) going from 3 bits per cell to 4 bits ("QLC") for a 33% boost in capacity. (QLC to PLC only gains an additional 25%, at an even higher cost) If you're managing an exabyte of data or more, HDD is probably an important part of your storage mix for a good number of years going forward - devices are currently maybe 5x cheaper than big QLC drives at the moment, the ratio is probably even better when you price out the systems that house them[*], and HDD $/TB is probably going to improve faster than SSD $/TB for a number of years. I started my career working on Asynchronous Transfer Mode networking; ever since then I'm highly skeptical of anyone saying "our technology will eliminate <entrenched technology X> in five years". Unlike ATM vs Ethernet I think it's quite possible that HDDs will fade to irrelevance in 10-15, but 5 years is ridiculous. If you narrow the statement to "no one will sell 3rd party HDD-based storage systems", it might be true - HDDs will go into AWS, Google, big Ceph deployments, etc. * it's actually a bit difficult to spec a system that doesn't add close to 100% to the cost of the drives themselves for either HDD or SSD, and it also depends on how CPU- and memory-efficient your storage system needs. (e.g. Ceph can be a pig, and note DRAM prices didn't fall in the 2011-2021 decade) There are a number of competitive capacity HDD systems on the market - typically 4U 60-drive machines - while the EL.1 SSD format has just come on the market and you'll probably pay a big premium for systems optimized to house them.
mikequinlan 3y ago
Magnetic tape is still being used for niche applications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-tape_data_storage#Viability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-tape_data_storage#Via...
- pjdesno 3y ago
  We've got a 100PB tape robot. It's not dead, although it's close enough that almost no one noticed when a patent dispute meant that you couldn't buy the highest density tapes for a year or so.
bluedino 3y ago
It's kind of ridiculous that you can get 2TB of SSD storage now for $60 (even if it's not the fastest) https://www.newegg.com/intel-2tb-670p-series/p/N82E16820167473 https://www.newegg.com/intel-2tb-670p-series/p/N82E168201674... For the majority of consumer use cases even 1/4 of that is pretty generous, and Apple just bumped up the MacBook Air from 128GB to 256GB. Even our fancy pants enterprise storage arrays have a 30:1 or 40:1 ratio of HDD to SSD (cache). But of course, those prices aren't coming down anytime soon!

I own a few SSDs, but for me, HDDs still make the most sense for the majority of my storage. It's not even close. High-capacity HDDs are half the price of high-capacity SDDs.

catiopatio 3y ago
In addition to the cost advantage, HDD firmware is simpler and more reliable.
readyplayernull 3y ago
They can also be left unpowered "forever" without data loss, while SSD lose bits after a few weeks.
- istjohn 3y ago
  I recently powered up a 2012 Macbook Air with SSD after 7 years and had no data loss.
- hgomersall 3y ago
  Really? Do you have some evidence for that?
  - accrual 3y ago
    I feel like this would be easy to test, at some cost. Buy N SSDs from X manufacturers. Fill the entire disk with random bits (/dev/urandom), read it back and compute a hash. Wait A, B, C, and D durations. After each duration, read the drives again and compare the hash.
- FlyingAvatar 3y ago
  Bit rot is definitely a problem with HDDs, especially as their bit densities increased. I've heard that bit rot on SSDs also became a thing as well after they started moving from SLC to MLC. I'd be interested to see a study on how prevalent either of them are.
cosmojg 3y ago
My HDDs tend to last longer than my SSDs, too. For bulk data storage that isn't being transported frequently, it's a no-brainer. For anything else, though, I think SSDs still have the advantage despite their shorter lifespans because of their better tolerance for physical impact and higher read/write speeds.
morninglight 3y ago
Even stone tablets have to be periodically refreshed. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus%2034&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus%2034&ver...

throw0101b 3y ago

No one deletes data: HDDs are useful for tiered storage and bulk bits. A number of file systems also support transparent tape usage: a stub is left in the directory structure and if anyone tries reading it the bits are fetched from a robot.

catiopatio 3y ago
What file systems support transparent tape loading? That’s a neat feature, but I’d expect a lot of software to behave badly if local file system operations suddenly started exhibiting tape-level latency.
- derefr 3y ago
  Windows Storage Spaces. IIRC, a Tiered Storage Space means that evicted-to-tape files that get OpenFile'd, get copied in full back to the hot disk before the OpenFile completes, such that any IO then proceeds from the hot disk, not from tape.
- AndrewDucker 3y ago
  IBM Z/OS supports it. You'd try to open a file and it would pop up a "retrieving" message and you'd know you could go and get a cup of coffee while you waited for your file. (That's obviously at the OS layer rather than the filesystem layer. But the application didn't know where the file was until it asked for it.)
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > What file systems support transparent tape loading? In the enterprise/HPC space, GPFS and Lustre.
- projektfu 3y ago
  NTFS, if I remember correctly.
hinkley 3y ago
It would be nice if more communications protocols achieved feature parity with Ethernet. Or even USB. Give me a hard drive with a connector I can plug into a hub or switch and just keep daisy chaining the oldest hardware deeper and deeper, instead of needing a robot to physically move them around. It’s not like adding a couple microseconds to response time will even be noticed on a crappy old hard drive. Add a deep sleep mode and bam, you got a stew goin’.

SmoothBrain12 3y ago

[dead]

magicalhippo 3y ago

Flash is down to "only" 2x price of regular harddisks for several TB. Sure new HDDs are large, but they're expensive, and it seems unreasonable to me the new HAMR tech will be different. Simple extrapolation puts the crossover a few years into the future last I checked, though there are other aspects as well. Will HDDs die next decade? Surely not. But given flash can go 3D surely its just a question of time until HDDs are like tapes now.

dale_glass 3y ago

Maybe not yet, but eventually? HDD manufacturers do seem to see trouble brewing. Eg, one interesting thing to me is that hard disks are getting more complex. We now have: * Helium * HAMR * SMR * Dual actuators Helium and HAMR improve density, but add cost. SMR improves density but results in drives that need special handling. Dual actuators improve performance, but increase points of failure. Things like HAMR and SMR seem to be a sign that there's not that much more density to squeeze out without taking special measures. One problem is that as drives get larger and larger, RAID sync times keep on growing. Even assuming faster RPM drives and multiple actuators it seems we're getting quite closer to where this becomes a serious problem.

throwaway154 3y ago
Surely they reduce cost. Otherwise they'd not be used. A donkey and cart's cheaper than a haulage truck, but donkeys aren't used much in the haulage business anymore.
- dsr_ 3y ago
  Look at the lifetime cost and the capabilities you're buying.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > A donkey and cart's cheaper than a haulage truck Not when you measure the cost per unit of cargo delivered.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    That was their point.
dragontamer 3y ago
I don't get your argument. Hard drive technology pretty much always got more complex as time goes on. Do you think bits shrink themselves? 20+ years ago, we had "Get Perpendicular" explaining why perpendicular bits were a good idea. https://archive.org/details/get-perpendicular https://archive.org/details/get-perpendicular All future technologies are more complex than our past techs. I mean, should we say that future SSDs are doomed because they're going for 4-bits per cell and 300+ layers of silicon rather than the single-layer single-bit simple designs from 10 years ago?

jedberg 3y ago

Both make good arguments. If the total cost of an SSD is indeed cheaper than spinning rust in five years, then sure, I can see them getting phased out for enterprise. But what about consumers? They don't consider TCO the same way. They don't look at energy or space constraints. They only look at cost per megabyte. As long as SSD is more, they will keep buying spinning rust for backups. The fact that Costco always has backup disks on the shelves tells me that it's a pretty popular item amongst consumers.

patrakov 3y ago
I am a consumer, and I look not only at cost per megabyte. I also need to sleep at night while my laptop gets backed up and while my torrents get downloaded and seeded. Therefore, due to their noise, HDDs in the same room are not an option, no matter the price. For local backups and torrents (i.e. something that I can lose) I nowadays rely on an 8TB QLC SATA SSD connected to the router via USB adapter (in 2016, there was a 1.92 TB SSD), and will buy another one if it gets full.
- autoexec 3y ago
  I guess it's down to personal preference. The noise of data being written to a HDD is soothing like a lullaby to me. I can rest easy knowing that the hard drive is working away through the night, filling sector after sector with new surprises for me to find in the morning and carefully copying my old data keeping it safe and warm so that it's always there when I need it.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > The noise of data being written to a HDD is soothing like a lullaby to me Username checks out. But yeah, there are a bazillion ways to store the hdd somewhere where it wouldn't be a noisense and don't care about the wear level

gregwebs 3y ago

There are still a lot of workloads that perform mostly sequential writes and reads that aren't a huge win for SSD. Even if you look at random write workloads many of those start by journaling to a WAL now, so it is possible for the WAL to be on a separate HDD. I assume a lot of this comes down to "object storage": S3 and similar services. As I understand it, these would do actual data storage in HDD (or other cheaper medium for glacier and slower access storage). Metadata caching could use SSD.

i_am_jl 3y ago

Man who runs "Entertainment Storage Alliance" writes white paper claiming that people need lots of storage, so HDDs aren't going anywhere, makes charts to illustrate his feelings, presents no analysis. Whitepaper store link (I have to assume the description isn't updated for each new issue...?) https://tomcoughlin.com/product/digital-storage-technology-newsletter/ https://tomcoughlin.com/product/digital-storage-technology-n... Entertainment Storage Alliance: http://www.entertainmentstorage.org/ http://www.entertainmentstorage.org/ I agree that HDDs aren't going anywhere, but this is a nothing article on an apparently nothing whitepaper.

loeg 3y ago
The Pure storage perspective -- that HDD sales will be zero by 2028 -- appears to be similarly motivated. Pure Storage went all-in on flash for Enterprise storage and doesn't have an answer to the market segments better served by HDD. So they would very much prefer for HDDs to be on the cusp of obsolescence.

projektfu 3y ago

People who do data storage/archiving for a living, do SSDs have predictable durability? I know that with magnetic media you can plan to copy them every so often to prevent loss, but is that information well known for TLC/QLC flash? I also know that SanDisk made an archival worm SD card that was supposed to be durable for 100 years, but haven't heard of rates like that for SSDs.

catboybotnet 3y ago
You're still at risk for EMP related data loss, and the sun flipping bits is definitely not unheard of. There's a reason ECC memory is popular. One of the most available options you have is archiving all your data onto bluray disks. EMP safe, and going to be around for well past your lifetime.
JohnFen 3y ago
What makes me nervous about SSDs is related to this -- I've heard many tales of SSDs simply dying, making data recovery impossible. I've rarely had HDDs die, but the couple of times that I did, they gave plenty of warning that it was coming.
teddyh 3y ago
> SSDs have predictable durability? If it is not plugged in, i.e. unpowered, don’t count on anything more than three months. Thread with sources: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573332>
- supertrope 3y ago
  If it's eMLC, kept at elevated temperature (40C), and unpowered. Consumer drives use higher floating gate voltages so they'll keep data for a year while unplugged.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    A year is still much shorter than most people assume. In my experience, most people think they can buy SSDs, put data on them and then shelve them for 20 years without issue.

ctur 3y ago

This article seems like it is an AI summary of another document. It doesn’t offer anything new, just restating someone else’s analysis. And that analysis comes down to… storage demand will outpace SSDs price point enough that the demand will be met by both SSDs and traditional spinning platters. Which isn’t surprising as even today there is demand for tape. The question is how long the demand will remain vaguely mainstream vs when it will become more niche. The 2028 estimate of storage being dominated by SSDs seems vaguely reasonable to me. Pure’s bravado of staying zero hard drives will be sold after 2028 seems silly but inline with what a flash storage company would say. But from a directional standpoint it probably is right that many use cases will get further eroded by SSDs. One big challenge with hard drives is access speed (throughout and latency) compared to nvme, and hard drives being used more as cold and near line storage is definitely going to continue. Write once access never in many cases.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
> Pure’s bravado of staying zero hard drives will be sold after 2028 seems silly but inline with what a flash storage company would say Or what HDD companies would themselves. I recently was forced to buy WD JUCT, which are SATA-2 (!), 5400rpm, 16MB. There were literally no other non-SMR 2.5 drives at tgat moment, even WD REDs.

qwerty456127 3y ago

As a terabyte SSD is enough for everything I need random access to, and hard drives are not particularly reliable for backups storage, I wish we just had cheap reliable tape storage to put backups on. But small-scale tape storages appear to be more expensive per terabyte than HDDs are.

JohnFen 3y ago
> hard drives are not particularly reliable for backups storage This is true when you compare them to media designed for long-term storage. But HDDs aren't all that terrible at it. I recently needed to dig out a 30 year old hard drive to recover some data from it, and it worked flawlessly.
- qwerty456127 3y ago
  I did the same last weekend. One of 3 old 120 GB HDDs (of one the very best models available ~17 years ago) I last accessed about 4 years ago just didn't come up (it sounds like it tries repeatedly but fails).
pjdesno 3y ago
The price of a single HDD is (very roughly) constant, regardless of capacity; the price of an SSD is mostly determined by the amount of flash. In other words, you can cut an SSD in half, but you can't do that to a hard drive. Flash replaced mini-drives in iPods when the price of "enough" flash (2GB or so) dropped to that of a mini-drive. SSDs replaced HDDs in laptops when the price of a "big enough" SSD (256 MB?) became competitive with an HDD. Every reduction in flash cost after each transition was a win for the vendor, since they could keep storage constant and reduce the price. (unlike HDDs, where the price stays constant and the amount of storage goes up) In each case some users (over-represented here) wanted more storage, and vendors didn't care, or were happy to sell more flash for a price premium. Enterprise systems aren't single drives, but I believe they still have a concept of "enough" - if the savings from HDD are marginal, or the performance loss from concentrating data on fewer and fewer HDDs becomes too much, they'll switch to pure flash. Anecdotally that's already happening. (also, to be honest, another driver is probably because people like to spend their employer's money on high-tech shiny things, which often pays off better career-wise than saving money) For the Googles and Amazons of the world there will probably never be a value of "enough", and HDD won't fade until the IOPS/TB ratio becomes ridiculously bad. Maybe not even then, as HDD may still be the best way to store data for a few decades.

superkuh 3y ago

The introduction of SSDs leading to SSD only personal computers accidentally set computing back about a decade. It's crazy that top tier computer manufacturers are actually selling computers with un-upgradable storage of only 256GB (and only 8GB of ram) in 2023. Then these users end up having to juggle a handful of external drives which are far more unreliable and likely to cause weird problems. The vast majority of my tech support is helping people with tiny SSDs deal with the problems of external drives and cloud storage.

catboybotnet 3y ago
It's a feature, not a flaw. You get to sell people on cheap NAND, and your cloud service. Windows will always nag you to use OneDrive, your OEM may have their own bloat/nagware, etc.
supertrope 3y ago
It's a trade off. For many years PCs would make sure to include Intel i5 or i7 processors but boot off a HDD because they could list a big 1000GB storage bullet point. Big numbers on boxes sell! This meant slow PCs. Data hoarders should look for a PC with a hard drive or upgrade aftermarket.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

They absolutely will if they ever reach similar $/GB price points. That's the only reason I can think of to buy spinning disk storage in 2023.

JohnFen 3y ago
Well, that and as other commenters have pointed out, HDDs have benefits in terms of longevity.

brycewray 3y ago

When I recently upgraded my setup, I had to choose whether to convert my local backup processes to SSDs or stick with HDDs, albeit newer and faster HDDs than their snail-like predecessors. I did the usual research into which option made more sense when strictly for backup purposes rather than frequent “live” data access, and decided HDDs were my better long-term choice. YMMV.

xhkkffbf 3y ago

I know spinning disks are fragile, but I've had more problem with cold storage of SSDs. They just seem to forget information or flip bits when they're not kept powered up. Don't ask me why. Since I need cold storage, I hope that hard disks continue to be around.

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

I don't see disk drives going away. They serve a different purpose. As much as I love SSDs, I feel more comfortable storing data on a disk drive for the long term. I don't need performance on network storage either.

pjdesno 3y ago

SSDs had vast improvements in cost over the past decade due to (a) the switch from 2-bit MLC planar NAND to 3-bit (TLC) 3D NAND, and probably (b) the growth of the SSD market - 10 years ago most flash went into iPods, phones, etc., so pretty much all flash chips produced were optimized for that use case, and it cost more to make SSDs out of them. Hard drives spent a decade in the wasteland, with little growth in per-platter capacity (google "superparamagnetic limit" for more info) and gains mostly due to packing more platters by filling the enclosure with helium to reduce aerodynamic drag. (fun fact - cast aluminum is porous to helium, which caused no end of trouble) With HAMR and other recent energy-based workarounds to those density limits, hard drives have a number of years of major TB/$ gains ahead of them, while flash is in the optimizing stage - going from e.g. 96 to 144 3D layers, and diminishing returns (at the expense of big performance costs) going from 3 bits per cell to 4 bits ("QLC") for a 33% boost in capacity. (QLC to PLC only gains an additional 25%, at an even higher cost) If you're managing an exabyte of data or more, HDD is probably an important part of your storage mix for a good number of years going forward - devices are currently maybe 5x cheaper than big QLC drives at the moment, the ratio is probably even better when you price out the systems that house them[*], and HDD $/TB is probably going to improve faster than SSD $/TB for a number of years. I started my career working on Asynchronous Transfer Mode networking; ever since then I'm highly skeptical of anyone saying "our technology will eliminate <entrenched technology X> in five years". Unlike ATM vs Ethernet I think it's quite possible that HDDs will fade to irrelevance in 10-15, but 5 years is ridiculous. If you narrow the statement to "no one will sell 3rd party HDD-based storage systems", it might be true - HDDs will go into AWS, Google, big Ceph deployments, etc. * it's actually a bit difficult to spec a system that doesn't add close to 100% to the cost of the drives themselves for either HDD or SSD, and it also depends on how CPU- and memory-efficient your storage system needs. (e.g. Ceph can be a pig, and note DRAM prices didn't fall in the 2011-2021 decade) There are a number of competitive capacity HDD systems on the market - typically 4U 60-drive machines - while the EL.1 SSD format has just come on the market and you'll probably pay a big premium for systems optimized to house them.

mikequinlan 3y ago

Magnetic tape is still being used for niche applications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-tape_data_storage#Viability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-tape_data_storage#Via...

pjdesno 3y ago
We've got a 100PB tape robot. It's not dead, although it's close enough that almost no one noticed when a patent dispute meant that you couldn't buy the highest density tapes for a year or so.

bluedino 3y ago

It's kind of ridiculous that you can get 2TB of SSD storage now for $60 (even if it's not the fastest) https://www.newegg.com/intel-2tb-670p-series/p/N82E16820167473 https://www.newegg.com/intel-2tb-670p-series/p/N82E168201674... For the majority of consumer use cases even 1/4 of that is pretty generous, and Apple just bumped up the MacBook Air from 128GB to 256GB. Even our fancy pants enterprise storage arrays have a 30:1 or 40:1 ratio of HDD to SSD (cache). But of course, those prices aren't coming down anytime soon!