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Flash Drives Replace Disks at Amazon, Facebook, Dropbox
- LaSombra 14y agoIf that's true, I hope that reduces SSD/Flash prices for consumers.
- bingaling 14y agoThey've been dropping: http://camelcamelcamel.com/SAMSUNG-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-7PC256B-WW/product/B0077CR66A http://camelcamelcamel.com/SAMSUNG-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-7PC2...
- veemjeem 14y agoIt's crazy how fast the prices are dropping. I feel like they dropped by 40% in the last 6 months. The cheapest 2.5" drive available on newegg is now a flash drive. It's probably hard to make a spindle drive any cheaper than $50 for laptops. I have a feeling the prices are going to similar to usb thumb drives soon. It's under $1 per GB on SSDs now, which is definitely affordable for average consumers (around $90 for 128GB). I bought a 256GB SSD in Feb this year for around $360. That exact same drive is now $260.
- tumblen 14y agoNovember 2011 I bought a Samsung 470 128GB for $199. 2 weeks ago I bought a Samsung 830 (faster) 256GB (twice as big) for $220. The price drop is pretty amazing.
- commandar 14y agoNewegg had 120GB 830s for $89 earlier this morning, for a more apples-to-apples comparison.
- photojosh 14y agoThe beauty is that SSD/Flash pricing is directly affected by Moore's law... so as has happened with RAM, prices halve / capacity doubles roughly every 18 months. AFAICT hard drives seem to increase capacity fairly linearly, so we might very well have a cross-over within a decade.
- th0ma5 14y agoWhen I read this I thought they really meant flash in a general way like USB sticks, heh, not in an underlying technology way. I've read of several people doing such a thing but it seems to be a unnecessary hack anymore. (see http://analogbit.com/node/4 http://analogbit.com/node/4 )
- cluda01 14y agoDo flash drives still have a ceiling for how many times you can re-write a particular cell? This is fairly common lore and the article didn't mention it.
- jbrackett 14y agoYes, my understanding is that this is inherent in the technology. AnandTech had a pretty good article about it a few months ago. I'm sure there are others as well. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5518/a-look-at-enterprise-performance-of-intel-ssds http://www.anandtech.com/show/5518/a-look-at-enterprise-perf...
- 127001brewer 14y agoThe following link has information about the life-span of SSD's: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-520-sandforce-review-benchmark,3124-11.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-520-sandforce-review... Briefly, under heavy use, a drive can last at least five (5) years. Edit: Corrected a typo.
- Armbrs 14y agoNever actually delete any data, and you don't have to worry about re-writes.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoYes, but there are two types of flash cell you can use. SLC cells have an order of magnitude higher write-cycle lifetime than MLC cells, which is why there's a difference in "enterprise" vs. consumer ssds. In practice for most uses an SLC based flash drive will be retired before it reaches its durability limits.
- StavrosK 14y agoEh, I just had an X-25M G2 start to fail the other day, after two years of desktop use. Intel replaced it within the week for free, but it was hardly retired.
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- kfury 14y agoI can absolutely see Dropbox, Google and Facebook creating a class of SSDful machines as a middle performance layer between RAMful and Diskful machines, but price point and storage limits have a long way to go before there's any wholesale replacement of diskful machines with SSDs. Also, I'm really surprised there's a datacenter that has a meaningful amount of Facebook, Mozilla, Dropbox and Google servers in the same DC. Looks like someone might be trying to bolster their DC image a bit.
- davidandgoliath 14y agore: bolster their DC image -- equinix doesn't need to bolster anything. $166 a share: EQIX on Nasdaq. They're fairly well renowned for their facilities around the world.
- 18pfsmt 14y agoI'm sorry, but share price has almost no meaning without knowing the number of shares outstanding; and then, it only let's you know that the market currently values them at ~$8B. It still seems like a non sequitur, as they are still competing with Raxspace among others. So why wouldn't they need extra press attention?
- uslic001 14y agoI have installed 3 in the past month as the prices have come down. I should have done it sooner but did not realize how much they speed up a computer to the point where it is hard to use a computer with a old fashioned hard drive now.
- patrickgzill 14y agoFacebook has an open source Linux module that uses SSDs as read and write accelerators for regular disks: https://github.com/facebook/flashcache https://github.com/facebook/flashcache
- sciurus 14y agoThere's also bcache, which may make it into mainline linux one day. https://lwn.net/Articles/497024/ https://lwn.net/Articles/497024/ http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/ http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/
- ajross 14y agoI'm not sure I buy this as a good idea quite yet. Flash is, right now, about 8x cheaper than DRAM per storage and 10x more expensive than disks. And the DRAM latency is, of course, about 1000x better still. Basically for many workloads, it's now (edited: original said "not" -- oops) possible to fit entire data sets in RAM, backed by cheaper traditional disks that essentially just stream write logs. And for workloads where storage costs actually dominate (I'm thinking youtube/dropbox type stuff) it seems like access is mostly streaming, where HD performance is actually quite good. Obviously SSDs make a ton of sense in the consumer space, where you only get one drive. But if you could pick your RAM/Flash/Disk mix yourself and tailor it to your app, I guess I don't see a lot of advantage to putting your money into the "middle" of that stack.
- excuse-me 14y agoEspecially since the article suggests that most of the SSDs are being used for meta-data / content-management with the actual data being on spinning disks, possibly in another data center. Since they have so much lower power demands I wonder if they are going to move further up the pipe? Instead of the ISP routing a request to an index server which then decides which is the nearest DC or akaimai host with the actual data - would the first line of dropbox/amazon/google/netflix actually move into the ISP's local rack.
- jchrisa 14y agoAt scale, disk throughput more than anything else will dominate. How long do you want backups to take? If ssds are faster they might mean fewer servers with more disk throughput per server can give users a snappier experience.
- dredmorbius 14y agoHow much do persistent HD shortages (especially for higher-volume, high-speed drives) since the Japanese earthquake/tsunami and Thailand flooding have to do with moving relative price points of SSD vs. rotational disk? Also: for app sever storage (and temporary database tables), SSD makes a lot of sense, and contemporary needs vs. available size (100-200 GB is plenty for many system installs, if not a factor-of-ten overkill) makes SSD vs. rotational a no-brainer.
- nirvana 14y agoIt appears to me that with hard drives the Thailand flood and Japanese earthquake are causing us to lose a generation. Thus instead of going from 1TB mobile drives to 2TB drives, we're having another year of them selling 1TB drives. This will make flash more competitive as it cuts price per GB in half or by a third over that same period.... but I think it is a temporary effect. Innovation in spinning rust has not slowed down in the labs, I presume, so I think that when the manufacturing sector is back up to speed they'll be pushing out the same innovations in 2013 they would have otherwise, and possibly skip a generation. Which is not to say that the writing isn't still on the wall for spinning rust... eventually Flash will catch up in price/GB, though volumes will explode even when its still twice as expensive as the demand will ramp up dramatically.
- corin_ 14y agoI don't think it has had a much of an impact as I personally expected it to have, though no-doubt it has helped SSDs at least a little. The biggest effect I've seen is that a bunch of companies (generally big companies, but not HDD creators) have made a shit-load of profit from reselling stock they had before the floods because they realised it would make them more money than using the drives for the purpose they were bought for.
- nirvana 14y agoFlash is really great in theory, but in my experience with intel and sandforce controllers, it isn't reliable enough. I've bought 2 flash drives and had 4 failures already. I've seen both drive controllers get themselves wedged to the point where they just shut down and go dead. This happens because they aren't doing a straight 1-1 mapping and along with wear leveling (which is necessary) they're trying to compress (sandforce) and optimize (intel) the way data is stored but their algorithms are too complex to be fully debugged (as of last year, anyway.) I've gone back to spinning rust as a result. I'd love to move my servers to flash, but not until they go back to really straightforward controllers (I hear the samsung controllers are very reliable, and this is why Apple chose them for their laptops) and don't do anything more than wear leveling. For performance in servers, I'm going with a lot of RAM. Right now the drive failure rates of SSDs are way too high in my experience, and reading between the lines and user reviews on retailer sites it seems that my experience is not unusual.
- pivo 14y agoJust curious (and I haven't really used any SSDs yet) if your drive failure experience is with consumer or "Enterprise" SSDs? I'd expect that the enterprise versions would be more resilient but I don't know.
- corin_ 14y agoThey key aspects for Enterprise drives (both disks and SSDs) are generally 1.) Performance and 2.) When you buy them they come from seperate batches (i.e. a single failure doesn't indicate more are likely to follow). Servers should basically be created to cope with drive failure in such a way that % of failure isn't an impact on "will this cause problems" but merely on working out the cost of using them.
- reeses 14y agoActually, the key difference with "enterprise" SSD is that they overprovision the drive to have a cell reserve. That's why you can buy a 512Go consumer drive or a 480Go enterprise drive. As cells get wonky, they are 'replaced' from the reserve.
- thomasfl 14y agoMaybe we all should chip in on some SSD's for Hacker News?
- kogir 14y agoIf only it were that simple :) Sadly, HN is not disk IO bound.
- qq66 14y agoInteresting that Dropbox is making heavy use of SSDs, as I would think that most of their content is more static long-term than similar data at Facebook, for example.
- RandallBrown 14y agothey're using SSDs for their metadata about the files you store. The actual files are stored in Amazon S3.
- PaulHoule 14y agoThe economic crossover for HDD, SDD and distributed main-memory database depends on data volume vs. query volume. SSD and DMRD win when the query volume is high compared to the data volume since with HDD you'll need to build multiple copies of the system (or equivalent) to handle the load, whereas SSD and DMRD serve more queries with less hardware. On the other hand, in cases where query volume is low, HDD is cheaper. But if time-to-market matters, you really do want to reduce the turnaround time for your batch jobs and exploratory queries because in the development of KB's with a subjective element you'll probably need to throw 10-100 things at the wall to get the one that sticks.
- Dinoguy1000 14y agoI really like the correction at the end of the article: > Due to a typo, this article originally said that a 300 terabyte hard drive sells for about $350. 300 terabytes for $350? In one drive? Sign me up. =D
- Dinoguy1000 14y agoWhat's with the downvote? I was being sarcastic. =/
- lawnchair_larry 14y agoDoesn't dropbox use AWS? Do they have their own drives?
- thomasnno 14y agoThe article states that Dropbox store the files themselves on AWS, and the metadata about the files on their own servers, many of which use SSDs.