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SanDisk announces 4TB SSD, hopes for 8TB next year.
- mkempe 12y agoWhat is the anticipated price/TB curve of SSD over the next five years? at what point would most consumer storage switch from HDD to SSD? If we start with a HDD/SSD price ratio of 1:7 (based on a quick check with Amazon) and hope for SSDs to get cheaper/TB by 50% each coming 18 months (?) we'd have a strong incentive to switch by year 2019.
- adventured 12y agoI think we're pretty close to the mainstream switching now. Inexpensive, large external HDDs will fill the gap on media storage for consumers long after the main drive has been switched to SSD for speed. Consumers aren't going to wait for SSD to catch up to 5tb HDD externals that you'll be able to get for $129. They'll simply buy a system with 512gb to 1tb of SSD storage, and pick up the external if they need it.
- nardi 12y agoThat already happened. The biggest computer manufacturer (Apple) doesn't sell a machine without an SSD.
- redial 12y agohttp://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac I think you are being a little premature. All iMacs have hard drives by default.
- wazoox 12y agoThey are hybrid drives, though. The only pure HDD option seems to be the 3 TB drive.
- redial 12y agoNo, the default in every iMac is a 1TB Hard Drive. http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME086LL/A&step=config http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME086LL/A&ste... http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME087LL/A&step=config http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME087LL/A&ste... http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME088LL/A&step=config http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME088LL/A&ste... http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME089LL/A&step=config http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME089LL/A&ste...
- wazoox 12y agoWeird, the product page seems to present the hybrid drive as the default option.
- alexcroox 12y agoDefinitely feeling the pain of the standard HDDs put in our 2013 27inch iMacs
- konstruktor 12y agoInteresting and eye-opening statement, but not entirely correct: The entry level iMac and Mac Mini SKUs have regular hard drives.
- mcintyre1994 12y agoAre Apple only the biggest if we include iPhones and/or iPads? I don't think anybody puts an HDD into a smartphone/tablet (it's surely all flash?) so it seems we'd have to limit the definition of computer to laptop/desktop to get anything interesting. Otherwise machines with an HDD are a minority already like you said.
- nardi 12y agoApple is the largest laptop/desktop manufacturer.
- mcintyre1994 12y agoDo you have a source at all for that? I've found multiple articles saying Lenovo overtook HP for that title around July 2013 but nothing naming Apple. According to [0] Apple weren't in the top six at that point. I did find articles from early 2012 calling Apple the biggest but that was of course based on iPads almost entirely. For example [1] has some figures from then, 5.2 million macs to over 10 million units each from HP, Lenovo and Dell. [0] http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23637017/hewlett-packard-loses-crown-top-personal-computer-manufacturer http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23637017/hewlett-packard-loses... [1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/01/24/apple_now_largest_computer_maker_sold_more_ipads_alone_than_hp_sold_pcs http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/01/24/apple_now_largest_...
- mikhailt 12y agoNo, they're not. They're the most profitable, not the same as the biggest. HP/Lenovo have the top two spots, they're selling tens of millions per quarter. Apple barely breaks 5 million. Apple doesn't have great business nor governmental support, which eliminates them from being considered at thousands of companies.
- nardi 12y agoYou're right. I was thinking of profit. Sorry for posting misinformation.
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- mikhailt 12y agoApple is not the biggest manufacturer, it's the most profitable but it is not the biggest one by far. http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/01/09/apples-domestic-mac-sales-surge-285-as-overall-pc-market-shrinks-75 http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/01/09/apples-domestic-ma...
- edward 12y agoSee my website that tracks price per TB of HDD and SSD: http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/ http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/
- mkempe 12y agoThat's very nice. Are you keeping historical data? These would be interesting as diagrams.
- edward 12y agoI have over two years of historical data. I'm going to make some charts.
- Carioca 12y agoYou have laptop batteries in your SSD listings
- edward 12y agoThanks, newegg keep messing up the categories.
- DanielBMarkham 12y agoFun Saturday question. It's 2014. How long until we see notebooks (or tablets or any other portable computing device) with 1PB of storage? 15 years? I'd say no longer than 25 years -- if we're still carrying around computing devices by then (and it hasn't all just been subsumed into the cloud)
- Nux 12y agoYou'd think; but with all this "centralisation" trends (fb/g+/cloud/etc) there might be no need for them.
- phaemon 12y agoIf you assume we're on 1 TB at the moment, and capacity doubles every 18 months (SSDs are a bit ahead of this at the moment), then 15 years is about right. By 2030 seems like a fairly safe bet (barring major disaster before then). [Edit: Yes, thanks, I meant TB, not GB. Fixed.]
- gberger 12y agoYou mean 1 TB, right?
- mantrax5 12y agoLinear projections don't work. This is why by linear projection we should have 20GHz 128 core CPUs but things have progressed differently in history. Capacity will grow until it hits one of two types of limits: physics or the market. If physics doesn't allow for 1PB SSD in a notebook, you won't get it. If the market doesn't see the value in 1PB notebook disks (and I'd claim they won't see it, even after 15 years) you won't see notebooks with 1PB SSD.
- Expez 12y agoOver the last decade SSDs have increased their storage capacity at an incredible rate. This growth has mostly been fueled by adapting better process technology. I read a while back that the move to ever smaller scales (now 19nm) came at the costs of increased errors rates and that the limiting factor going forward would be error correction. Has this situation changed, or is SanDisk just throwing chips at the capacity problem, along with better controllers, and targeting an enterprise segment willing to pay the price?
- 31reasons 12y agoThen why the entry level Mac Book Air still has paltry 250 GB! I hope they catchup with the rest of the world soon.
- jhallenworld 12y agoI'm sure they wear out quick with heavy writes. On the other hand, the killer app for these has to be media streaming. How many more movies can Netflix support with these new drives? I wonder if they are space limited or iops limited. "The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications, such as data warehousing, media streaming and web servers. The typical workload envisioned for the 4TB drive is 90% read and 10% write, SanDisk stated."
- lomnakkus 12y ago"I'm sure they wear out quick with heavy writes." Do you have something to back that assertion up? Seriously, I'm interested, so if you have links to further information, I'm sure everyone would appreciate it.
- jhallenworld 12y agoWell here is one, but this is really for the device level: http://nepp.nasa.gov/workshops/etw2012/talks/Tuesday/T04_Heidecker_Flash_Qualification.pdf http://nepp.nasa.gov/workshops/etw2012/talks/Tuesday/T04_Hei... If I find a good system-level paper, I'll post it. Anyway, SSD drive wear tends to be rated like this: 5 years for x number of full drive writes per day. For good drives, x is 1. For really good SLC NAND based drives x could be as much as 10, but they are very expensive. For cheap consumer drives x could be 1/10. Based on vendor sales meetings, the aggressively large drives also have low write endurance (but then they say they are not optimized for heavy writes). Better drives should have a built-in write counter so you can track the remaining life. Another interesting parameter is their power-off "data retention" time. At end of life, this tends to be specified to be just 90 days.
- tim333 12y agoThere seems a lot of contradictory data out there but Techreport did an experiment with 6 consumer grade 256GB drives endlessly reading and writing: http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endur... They were still going after 600TB of read writes though with some degradation: http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
- bananas 12y agoIt'll be 2022 before I can afford one though... (I still have a 128Gb SSD).
- zanny 12y agoWell, in 2010 a 256GB ssd was upwards of $500+. Today, a TB SSD costs that. So yeah, capacity for price increases 4x over in 4 years. So 2022 is a good estimate for commodity 4TB SSDs. I wonder if we will ever get nand storage below mechanical in price per GB. Even in 2022 I can image 8 - 10 TB mechanical disks being only $100 still, while the 2TB SSDs cost about that. Because by then we are probably hitting some physical limits.
- sitkack 12y ago3.5 years for commodity 4TB SSD or less. I have a 1TB SSD, would gladly switch to a 2TB model for twice the price. As the Sandisk announcement shows, it is market not physical forces that will get us to 4TB.
- frozenport 12y agoRAID
- kondro 12y agoIn a notebook?
- frozenport 12y agoIts quite common, I have one for example.
- sitkack 12y agoOnly the Lenovo W series supports RAID afaik.
- neom 12y agoI wish intel was innovating a little more.
- listic 12y agoMe too. But I guess Intel is not that much strategically interested in competing in ever more competitive SSD space, with decreasing profit margins and increasingly larger R&D budgets needed. Not that Intel couldn't afford them, but I think it's not as attractive for them as the CPU market right now.
- agumonkey 12y agoAnd they already have a money bleeding segment : smartphone class SoC.
- wmf 12y agoIntel makes the best enterprise SSDs, but they abandoned the consumer SSD market.
- rincebrain 12y agoBy what standard did they abandon the consumer market? Their 530 drives come in all the standard consumer form factors and their 330/335 drives still work wonderfully.
- wtallis 12y agoIntel's 310, 320, and 710 were based on the X25-M G2 with firmware updates and newer denser flash. Other than that, all their 300, 500, and 700 series drives used third-party controllers until the 730 released two months ago. Of particular note is the fact that the 730 is the first non-enterprise drive to ship with a SATA 6Gbps-capable Intel controller. Intel's SSD controllers are what earned them their reputation for high performance reliable drives, and that's been missing from their consumer drives for a long time. Now, they're mostly just another Sandforce and Marvell OEM, with preferential pricing on IMFT flash and a longer QA cycle. The 730 isn't a clear winner like Intel's previous in-house drives, because the first release of that controller (the SSD DC3700) was so long ago that other vendors have put together and shipped consumer drives that can compete with the 730.
- coreymgilmore 12y agoIs it just me, or are the performance numbers a bit disappointing given the size and price tag? I guess its a balance between size and speed.
- Igglyboo 12y agoThe drives are for enterprise datacenters, not consumers.
- rasz_pl 12y agoThats a cop out. Its synonymous with 'yes they suck, but we will charge arm and a leg for them so some enterprise sucker is bound to bite'. They also have VERY limited writes/sector count (brobably in the hundreds) before they will start to fail, this has been handled by another PR statement "The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications"
- mikhailt 12y agoEnterprise means reliability (specific NAND quality, long validation process at multiple levels), long term support (including warranty costs), and firmware tailored for enterprise workloads. Enterprise pays for SSDs that's tested throughly at firmware, controller, memory levels. They're not paying for the fastest, just the most reliable. Many of the consumer SSDs are not tested to this extent, that's why the prices are so cheap. Look at OCZ as an example. Would you as a business owner pay 100$ for 1000 SSDs that may glitch out early and have firmware bugs or would you pay 300$ for SSDs that's solid without having to go through firmware updates, glitches, and so on?
- dredmorbius 12y agoSolid throughput or random IOPS? Latter looks pretty good to me, particularly if you're used to spinning rust.
- beachstartup 12y agojust a data point: for our enterprise customers, 800GB intel datacenter 3500 series flash drives (the penultimate model good for most write-heavy applications) are already basically the same price as 600GB 15k SAS drives and actually cost less if you drop the raid controller which isn't that great with ssd (in our experience).
- userbinator 12y agoWith all the process shrinks, and packing more bits per cell, NAND flash is getting to the point where its characteristics are closer to DRAM than traditional magnetic storage; like hard drives the data will stay there for a while when they're powered off, but like DRAM, it's not going to be there forever. However, unlike DRAM and more like hard drives, they wear out. For enterprise cache-like applications this makes sense, but with DRAM prices not that far off (only a few times), I wonder if battery-backed DRAM might actually offer better value (and theoretically could be far higher performing) than having to replace worn-out SSDs periodically.
- d0ugie 12y agoWow, 8TB, that's a lot of girly pictures! For the same general use purposes, do SSDs put out significantly less heat versus HDDs and also burn less electricity, and enough so to, for example, help eliminate the need for fans? For the typical consumer, not necessarily what to decide what to stuff into an HP 980, is it now clear that cost per byte is evening out and that soon the typical array of laptops in your local Best Buy including the cheaper of the lot will have SSDs? Tl;dr, are hard drives being completely phased out faster and faster?