5 ms·

My guess is this is what Google and Amazon are also doing for Nearline and Glacier. When will SSD drives catch up in storage capacity and price to traditional

by jtchang 11y ago

My guess is this is what Google and Amazon are also doing for Nearline and Glacier. When will SSD drives catch up in storage capacity and price to traditional spinning platters? A SSD consumes very little power so this type of setup will not be as necessary. Also what about the life cycle of drives that get powered on and off repeatedly? On one hand you have backblaze running consumer off the shelf drives 24/7. On the other you have FB/Google/Amazon powering on and off these drives.

wmf 11y ago
When will SSD drives catch up in storage capacity and price to traditional spinning platters? Never. Someone did calculate that if you can get flash that lasts 15 years it would be cheaper than disk, though (because the disk has to be replaced). I can't find the links on those. Also what about the life cycle of drives that get powered on and off repeatedly? We wrote a paper on that topic where we treated start-stop cycles as a resource to be rationed with a token bucket filter: http://storage-conference.org/2011/Papers/Research/10.Felter.pdf http://storage-conference.org/2011/Papers/Research/10.Felter...
- JunkDNA 11y ago
  "Never" is a pretty log time. Curious what reasons you have for making that statement?
  - rasz_pl 11y ago
    physics
- dexterdog 11y ago
  But a flash disk that is healthy after 14 years is taking up probably 4x or more the DC space and power at a lower speed of a replacement disk at the end of its life span. The power part is probably not that significant, but the space and port availability is. 15 years is an eternity in hardware.
stox 11y ago
In this environment, the power cycles are going to be less stressful than typical, as you won't see the degree of thermal cycling you do in a hot chassis. I'd love to see what the data says a year out.
narsil 11y ago
> My guess is this is what Google and Amazon are also doing for Nearline and Glacier. Pretty likely. One of the post's authors, Kestutis Patiejunas, was an architect working on Glacier a few years ago. (src: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kestutisp https://www.linkedin.com/in/kestutisp )
antome 11y ago
SSD-HDD prices are a moving goalposts problem. $/GB for HDDs halve every few years. While prices for SSDs are coming down at a dramatic pace, they will probably slow as they get close to HDD $/GB.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  That's only an issue for enterprise class storage of course. The speed (latency mostly, but also throughput) advantages of SSD mean that HDD are eventually going to disappear on the consumer side. The real question is when "eventually" is - I keep predicting in "two-three years" - but then two-three years comes along, and HDDs are going strong as ever. I'm guessing that when you can get a 2 TB SSD for < $100, they'll finally become the dominant consumer storage platform.
  - lsc 11y ago
    >The speed (latency mostly, but also throughput) advantages of SSD mean that HDD are eventually going to disappear on the consumer side. The last few years have been weird - hell, ram is literally more expensive, per gigabyte, than it was in 2012. PC software requirements seems to be standing still. A five-year-old PC is still perfectly usable. This wasn't true at all for most of my life. I mean, yes, if storage space requirements don't start growing, of course, you are right, because hard drives, while they are big, are slow. But... hopefully, this is a temporary setback. Someone will figure out how to make use of the surplus transistors in desktop PCs. I mean, it can't be that hard; from what I saw in the '90s and early aughts, Microsoft seemed to release a new version of word every few years, and it required a new PC, even though I personally couldn't see how it was better. But... apparently that isn't happening anymore. My point here is just that if the need for disk space grows as fast as hard drive and ssd size per dollar grow, SSD might never become completely dominant, assuming that hard drives maintain their space per dollar advantage. Of course, if things keep going where they have been going for the last few years, where system requirements for desktops don't really increase over time, then of course you are right, there would be no reason to have spinning disk. You can already see this, sort of, in mobile, where storage expectations are dramatically lower, but spinning disk never had a real toehold there. Do you remember those tiny spinning hard drives that were packaged in CF cards? oh man, so cool! and so fragile.

by jtchang 11y ago

wmf 11y ago

When will SSD drives catch up in storage capacity and price to traditional spinning platters? Never. Someone did calculate that if you can get flash that lasts 15 years it would be cheaper than disk, though (because the disk has to be replaced). I can't find the links on those. Also what about the life cycle of drives that get powered on and off repeatedly? We wrote a paper on that topic where we treated start-stop cycles as a resource to be rationed with a token bucket filter: http://storage-conference.org/2011/Papers/Research/10.Felter.pdf http://storage-conference.org/2011/Papers/Research/10.Felter...

JunkDNA 11y ago
"Never" is a pretty log time. Curious what reasons you have for making that statement?
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  physics
dexterdog 11y ago
But a flash disk that is healthy after 14 years is taking up probably 4x or more the DC space and power at a lower speed of a replacement disk at the end of its life span. The power part is probably not that significant, but the space and port availability is. 15 years is an eternity in hardware.

stox 11y ago

In this environment, the power cycles are going to be less stressful than typical, as you won't see the degree of thermal cycling you do in a hot chassis. I'd love to see what the data says a year out.

narsil 11y ago

> My guess is this is what Google and Amazon are also doing for Nearline and Glacier. Pretty likely. One of the post's authors, Kestutis Patiejunas, was an architect working on Glacier a few years ago. (src: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kestutisp https://www.linkedin.com/in/kestutisp )

antome 11y ago

SSD-HDD prices are a moving goalposts problem. $/GB for HDDs halve every few years. While prices for SSDs are coming down at a dramatic pace, they will probably slow as they get close to HDD $/GB.

ghshephard 11y ago
That's only an issue for enterprise class storage of course. The speed (latency mostly, but also throughput) advantages of SSD mean that HDD are eventually going to disappear on the consumer side. The real question is when "eventually" is - I keep predicting in "two-three years" - but then two-three years comes along, and HDDs are going strong as ever. I'm guessing that when you can get a 2 TB SSD for < $100, they'll finally become the dominant consumer storage platform.
- lsc 11y ago
  >The speed (latency mostly, but also throughput) advantages of SSD mean that HDD are eventually going to disappear on the consumer side. The last few years have been weird - hell, ram is literally more expensive, per gigabyte, than it was in 2012. PC software requirements seems to be standing still. A five-year-old PC is still perfectly usable. This wasn't true at all for most of my life. I mean, yes, if storage space requirements don't start growing, of course, you are right, because hard drives, while they are big, are slow. But... hopefully, this is a temporary setback. Someone will figure out how to make use of the surplus transistors in desktop PCs. I mean, it can't be that hard; from what I saw in the '90s and early aughts, Microsoft seemed to release a new version of word every few years, and it required a new PC, even though I personally couldn't see how it was better. But... apparently that isn't happening anymore. My point here is just that if the need for disk space grows as fast as hard drive and ssd size per dollar grow, SSD might never become completely dominant, assuming that hard drives maintain their space per dollar advantage. Of course, if things keep going where they have been going for the last few years, where system requirements for desktops don't really increase over time, then of course you are right, there would be no reason to have spinning disk. You can already see this, sort of, in mobile, where storage expectations are dramatically lower, but spinning disk never had a real toehold there. Do you remember those tiny spinning hard drives that were packaged in CF cards? oh man, so cool! and so fragile.