47 ms·

SSD Prices in a Free Fall

570 points by nkurz 11y ago

forscha 11y ago
Is the hdd demise indeed expected so quickly?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  It appears so. "By packing 32 or 64 times the capacity per die, 3D NAND will allow SSDs to increase capacity well beyond hard drive sizes. SanDisk, for example, plans 8 TB drives this year, and 16 TB drives in 2016. At the same time, vendors across the flash industry are able to back off two process node levels and obtain excellent die yields." Goodnight spinning disk; you've served us well.
  - Retra 11y ago
    They already seem so clunky and primitive!
  - notNow 11y ago
    Time to join the ranks of his FDD and CD-ROM buddies
  - Keyframe 11y ago
    And we just got 10TB spinning disks on the market! Can't wait for the price to fall down for big SSD storage!
  - x0x0 11y ago
    /me does the happy dance an ssd is the best hardware upgrade I've had in the last 5 years Once you get used to it, try using a computer with spinning rust and it will just feel glacial who doesn't need multi-tb ssds in their laptop?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - codemac 11y ago
    I wouldn't count them out, just as much as disk drives were supposed to replace tape for how long now? I bet disks will get even more dense (think 20+ TiB), have better reliability when powered off, and be sold in pallets to large companies mostly. For the consumer market, disk drives are already pretty much dead.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      It all really depends on the SSD curve. If SSDs continue their price decline and capacity increases as this article mentions, it'd be difficult for HDDs to compete. Tape costs you no power in storage, but HDDs do unless you're powering them down and spinning them back up (which causes significant wear on the motor). SSDs get you cheap storage and lower power consumption, negating both tape and HDDs simultaneously. TL;DR SSD advancement set to deprecate HDDs and tape in near future.
      - codemac 11y ago
        > (which causes significant wear on the motor) [citation needed] Copan and many other companies did really well powering down drives.
  - StillBored 11y ago
    I have no doubt that we will see devices that big. The question is will anyone buy them. So its really a question of cost. HD's will be dead next year if I can buy a 10TB SSD for $300.. If it costs $4000, i'm sure HD's will last another couple years.
- nolok 11y ago
  Not entreprise grade but consummer, and totally anecdotal, but I've bought a 500 GB Samsung EVO 840 SSD for less than 200€ a month ago. Given the specs (performance and capacity) of that drive and my previous experience about a year and a half ago buying a 120 GB SSD, I expected to pay maybe twice that ? Even if the price fall slows down a bit, we're quickly getting to a point where I don't see why you would buy a SSD at home for anything other than your consummer NAS or similar. Anyone who tried a SSD surely isn't willing to go back to HDD for anything other than their "archive/storage" drive. And if this article prediction is true, soon even that will be taken by SSD.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  SSDs need to be powered up fairly often to maintain data integrity. So, they're great for the drives in computers, but for external or backup drives--which might only be powered up occasionally, spinning magnetic disks will still be a better choice for a while, it seems. edit: maybe not. Bringing this article up from samcheng's post below: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...
  - cpr 11y ago
    Do you have a source for this? Just curious.
    - Bill_Dimm 11y ago
      https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24 https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24
      - msie 11y ago
        The title is pure irony ("SSD Storage - Ignorance of Technology is No Excuse"). See an another link posted here. Also from personal experience I have had no problem with an SSD that wasn't powered for 7 days.
      - Symmetry 11y ago
        The author of that piece is actually somewhat confused about how SSDs work. Data retention is a matter of the charge store leaking. An SSD doesn't have any means of refreshing that charge on it's own, the same timer is there whether the drive is on or off. And in fact it will lose data faster if the drive is on since then the drive temperature will be higher. Luckily this sort of data loss isn't a big deal in practice for the reasons outlined elsewhere in this thread.
    - samcheng 11y ago
      This problem is overblown. A new SSD should be expected to have 10 years of data retention, according to: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...
- MCRed 11y ago
  Think about the market dynamics. Not just the 3D technology they are talking about, which brings parity within range, imagine what you would do if you were an SSD maker and this was on the horizon. You'd rush to reach parity because as soon as that happens there's no reason to buy an HD over an SSD. So you're going to want to cut prices as fast as possible so that when the market switches over-- which will be a HUGE tipping point for the industry-- you can get as much market share as you can. Even taking a loss now on a reliable drive may get you customers for life who you can profit from later. I think the transition is going to be extremely dramatic and it's a huge opportunity in this industry. I think we'll be seeing HD makers switching over their product lines to have more and more flash, and more and more flash drives, while re-positioning hard drives to very particular environments where they have an advantage (I'm not sure where these are) But this is going to be a tornado of a market and some people are going to be come very rich as a result.
hbbio 11y ago
In a side-note in the article, the author mentions that Amazon Glacier runs on tape. Although I'm not sure Amazon officially explained the technology, I heard (and read on Wikipedia) that they store data on conventional HDDs, that are however kept "offline". Has anyone here some more knowledge about that?
- _dark_matter_ 11y ago
  Yes please. I was also intrigued by this statement. I was under the impression that Amazon never told what the "secret sauce" was behind Glacier. Looking at Wikipedia now, it seems there are still multiple contending theories. Also, is it true that the service is not very popular? Are people here using it or similar?
  - takasc2 11y ago
    Everyone knows it is not very popular - the limitations are extreme so you have to have a very specific use case for it.
  - JimmaDaRustla 11y ago
    I'm using it for incremental backups of my photo collection. If I ever need to restore my entire collection, its available on S3/Glacier.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - kstrauser 11y ago
    My home Synology unit does nightly backups to Glacier. It'd be terrible to lose our house to natural disaster, but losing all our digital data (photos, records, etc.) would make it just that much worse. For about $10 a month, I know I can recover all that stuff even if we lose everything else.
  - teraflop 11y ago
    The big sticking point with Glacier is that the cost model for retrievals is complicated and unintuitive. There's a two-step process where you have to first retrieve data and then download it, and you're billed based on the peak retrieval rate in a month, not the total amount downloaded. It's not so bad now that they let you set a retrieval policy to limit your throughput, but before that, you had to carefully schedule your retrievals in order to avoid unexpected costs. As far as I can tell, Google's new nearline storage offering is superior to Glacier in nearly every way. The retrieval is much faster, and the retrieval costs are a flat rate per gigabyte that's equal to what Glacier gives you in the best case. Only drawback is the lack of a free tier.
wmf 11y ago
The article predicts that SSD prices will fall from 30c/GB to under 5c/GB in 18 months. This seems like a case of citation needed.
- STRiDEX 11y ago
  Can you cite predictions?
  - maaku 11y ago
    Yes, they're called reasons.
  - lappa 11y ago
    You can cite industry improvements in the manufacturing process that companies say will effect the price at a certain point along with scientific developments and in general claims made by actual corporations.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    I mean you can cite predictions but unless there is trend data to back them up I'm not exactly sure how useful they are. I think wmf is looking for citations of things like trend data and maybe even plans from SSD manufacturers that shows "hey we're working on this cool tech that should help us lower costs by next year!" types of things.
  - NeutronBoy 11y ago
    Predictions are guesses with facts to back them up.
Turbo_hedgehog 11y ago
Is keeping a SSD powered on enough to prevent bit rot?
- MCRed 11y ago
  It should have no impact. It really is about write capacity. The little cells can only handle being changed so many times before they wear out. The wearing is a chemical/semi-conductor type problem. It's not like DRAM where keeping power applied keeps the cells "fresh" (and in DRAM it's done literally be refreshing each cell at a certain frequency.) The simple equation is the more times a cell is erased the sooner it fails. Write leveling and other software efforts work to spread around or eliminate unnecessary writes. But over the practical life of a drive (5-10 years?) being powered off will not cause them to lose data. Edit: I've been following FLASH technology since before the terms "FLASH" was coined, back when it was called EEPROM -- Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory, an evolution of PROMs (write once) and ERPOMS (erasable with UV light). If there's a myth out there that flash drives just forget things, I'd like to point out that I've had flash drives (low quality at that) from the 1990s that were left for 20 years and then read successfully! Show some citations of real evidence before you down vote me.
  - cjensen 11y ago
    That's incorrect. Charge leaks very slowly out of cells. It's not a big issue, but it does happen. Powered-on SSD firmware knows about the problem and will maintain the cells. [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...
    - acqq 11y ago
      And AnandTech quotes Intel materials who often boasts to have the most durable drives. Imagine what happens to other ones.
      - philjohn 11y ago
bifrost 11y ago
SSD technology still has a reliability hurdle, you can nuke one in a month if you write to it constantly. Spinning media has much longer read/write durability. Until there is parity its still a bit of an arms race for capacity. Hybrid drives are pretty awful so I don't think they'll stick around. I could see Hierarchical Storage Management make a comeback and an entry to the consumer space, but thats been esoteric at best.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  False. http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
  - cjensen 11y ago
    True, and I've done it! I accidentally used a consumer grade (Crucial M500) in an application where endurance would be reached in less than a month. In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-fail. Edit: Burning up an SSD was how I learned that TRIM is unnecessary: even though many parts of the filesystem were stable and never re-written, the bandwidth was even across the entire drive. The firmware noticed that some cells were underused and moved the stable data off them so it could use up the endurance evenly.
    - Someone 11y ago
      "In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-fail." You call that a catch? I would sell it as a feature. It's way better than "looks OK until t minus 1, can't read or write from time t onwards" or lesser variants of the "try reading everything a few times, and you may get 90% of your data back"
MCRed 11y ago
I can't wait. Once I can reasonably replace everything with SSDs I will. And then I'll never buy spinning rust again. I dreamed of this eventuality in the 1990s. I didn't know what technology would be used. I never expected EEPROMs would evolve in this direction (now marketed as "FLASH") as they were so fickle and unreliable in those days. This will allow lots of interesting things. Imagine a laptop that's got its main RAM backed on a dedicated bit of high speed flash... so it instantly powers off completely and instantly powers back on completely. Soon, we'll have the massive increase in storage capacity much like we've had a massive increase in compute capacity to the point where you no longer really think about it-- all computers are "fast".
awwducks 11y ago
Seems like a prime case for using a (bar/line/etc) graph to show the trend. I'm strangely disappointed in not seeing one.
- antome 11y ago
  That's because SSDs are still 10x the price of HDDs, have little more than halved in price the past year, and they're talking out the ass.
discardorama 11y ago
Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350 Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40 Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity. In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.
- philjohn 11y ago
  The author commented that they've seen a 50% drop in price over the last 8 months (from 20x HDD to 10x HDD), so it's not outside the realms of probability with the increased yields of 3D NAND.
  - discardorama 11y ago
    I doubt the 50% figure. Just as a test: I looked at the price history for a random 256GB SSD (from Crucial). The highest price in the last year? $115. The current price? $99. Not nearly a 50% drop. Link: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-CT256MX100SSD1/product/B00KFAGCWK?context=browse http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-C...
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Is it not superseded by this item? http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX200-250GB-Internal-Solid/product/B00RQA6DTE?context=browse http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX200-250GB-Internal-Soli... The price is about the same, as is the performance, but are they still making the MX100? If not, I think the pricing information for it will not be very informative.
    - astrodust 11y ago
      The prices at the high end have been imploding faster than at the low end.
    - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
      While I suspect your original comment is closer to the truth than the article's (as far as price parity goes), picking a single data point doesn't make the point. It's rare for a drive to suddenly drop in price so significantly without manufacturing changes (thusly a new version of the drive). So while you're unlikely to see the same exact drive for 50% less after a year it's entirely plausible to see a different model, similar or more capacity, drop in price.
bwy 11y ago
I find great irony in statements like these when the motivation of every party is considered. The idea is that prices are "in a free fall," i.e., they haven't fallen completely yet. But this will encourage people to buy SSDs and drive them in the very free fall of which the article speaks! Experienced the same principle in my life a few weeks ago - I moved to a place described as "gentrifying." Realized a week into staying there that I was one of those people who was actually contributing to its gentrification! By no means was it gentrified, though.
- kenjackson 11y ago
  At least you were told it was "gentrifying", not that it was "gentrified". You probably got a discount for moving into a neighborhood that was gentrifying. Once gentrified, the discount probably largely disappears.
monksy 11y ago
Could someone explain the 3d storage innovation to me? Wouldn't stacking flash cells like that be susceptible to interference? (Heat/magnetic or electrical noise?)
- Symmetry 11y ago
  Not really. The charges and currents in a flash chip don't interfere with each other for the same reasons that they don't in any other chip. There's a minimum distance you have to keep things apart but luckily it gets smaller every process node. Heat would be a problem if it was like a processor but you're generally only reading from or writing to one part of the chip at a time so heat isn't a particular concern compared to a processor or DRAM.
- unfasten 11y ago
  Anandtech has some good 3D NAND info. I'm not positive they answer your specific question, but hopefully it's helpful. Here are the two articles I remember: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb-256gb-1tb-review-enter-the-3d-era/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb... (goes on for a few pages after this one) http://anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/3 http://anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/3 (This is mostly about how 3D NAND benefits TLC)
- rhino369 11y ago
  Yes it's very susceptible to interference though coupling of the charge on on the floating gate of the cell and through voltage differentials on the interconnect lines during reading and writing. But 2D NAND storage essentially hit the peak density. The gate is only a few atoms across. The only way to increase density to build up. They had to go back to larger transistor sizes because of all the interference. IIRC from 15-16nm to about 60nm.
ryanmarsh 11y ago
So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level?
- simlevesque 11y ago
  The iPhone storage is eMMC, not SSD.
  - ansible 11y ago
    While they don't use the exact same chips, they are both based on the same NAND Flash storage technology. On a per-GB basis, I'd expect the prices for SSDs and eMMC to track for the foreseeable future.
- Teckla 11y ago
  So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level? Not to mention the iPad. The original iPad came out over 5 years ago with 16 GB of storage. Entry level iPads still have 16 GB of storage. Given that iOS has gotten bigger and retina iPads made a lot of apps bigger, entry level iPad storage has actually regressed considerably. Pretty confusing, given that flash prices have gone down considerably in 5 years. I guess you don't bank $200 billion by being generous to your customers.
  - keithly 11y ago
    They want to push customers to use iCloud for data storage.
    - hueving 11y ago
      No, they want to squeeze an extra $100 out of you for $5 of flash storage. Most people will pay it too because 16GB is pretty crippling. It's like buying a new car that comes with a 5 gallon gas tank that costs $40,000 and having to pay $50,000 for the same model except with a 10 gallon tank. Everyone knows it's a rip off but the car is really cool otherwise and there is no way to change the tank yourself.
peter303 11y ago
HP is working on a memrister based SSD with density of Flash and the speed of transistors http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine-dreams/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine....
- ad_hominem 11y ago
  I believe they killed that off http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machine-repurposes-design-around-conventional-technologies http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machi...
  - qzcx 11y ago
    Not killed off so much as delayed due to lack of ability to mass produce at a decent price point so far. It is far from scrapped. It was over hyped and optimistic to begin with. It just hit the reality that it has several decades of work to catch up on to be on the same page as current tech.
- jerf 11y ago
  While memristors may eventually become an important part of a balanced electrical component diet, I'd say the hype has failed to pan out. Don't hold your breath. Even if it does eventually manifest, it's going to take longer than you can hold your breath.
- jlarocco 11y ago
  Haven't various companies been hyping memristers for years now? Sounds cool, but I'll believe it when I see it.
  - timboslice 11y ago
    I believe the original idea for a memristor came about in 1971 [1]. We still have yet to see it in a physical consumer product. I'm with you - sounds great, but I'll believe it when I see it. http://www.ufpi.br/subsiteFiles/zurita/arquivos/files/Memristor_chua_article.pdf http://www.ufpi.br/subsiteFiles/zurita/arquivos/files/Memris...
yuhong 11y ago
What I am really interested is when SSDs will be cheap enough to be in common OEM systems.
rorykoehler 11y ago
Having had a failure rate above what I was used to with hdds I'd prefer to see an increase in quality rather than a fall in price. It gets annoying having to replace my os ssd every 18 months or so. My most recent phone's memory also died after 30 months.
- potato 11y ago
  > Additionally, wear-out isn’t an issue with SSDs. Those two node uplifts in the manufacturing process add literally years to the device life, and the economics of 3D NAND allow for extra over-provisioning, making the write life of the drive well beyond its time in a data center. This is especially true for archived storage, where writing is at a much lower rate.
  - rorykoehler 11y ago
    I seem to remember SSD manufacturers rolling out similar perks in their marketing spiel years ago. It would be great if this is for real. The drives I have had issues with have been high write drives and I knew they wouldn't last for ever but they lasted an incredibly short time even when taking this into consideration.
    - lbruder 11y ago
      Did they fail as in "some/all data lost", or did they switch to RO and you could at least get your data off them? Thinking of replacing my current home server HDs with SSD but worried about robustness...
      - rorykoehler 11y ago
        The last one I could secure some but not all of the data before it completely failed. It failed gradually over the course of the day of me trying to rescue it. It was strange. Can't remember the previous ssd but the phone was flat out dead.
- pixl97 11y ago
abandonliberty 11y ago
I wonder how reliability is doing; Unlike HDDs SSDs have a very unpredictable failure pattern, including sudden death rather than slow degradation. If you want to ensure data is safe you need to run a raid 1 or online backup service.
- mcv 11y ago
  Are you saying HDDs can't suffer a sudden death? HD crashes aren't exactly unheard of.
  - abandonliberty 11y ago
    >Mechanical failures account for about 60% of all drive failures.[2] While the eventual failure may be catastrophic, most mechanical failures result from gradual wear and there are usually certain indications that failure is imminent. These may include increased heat output, increased noise level, problems with reading and writing of data, or an increase in the number of damaged disk sectors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background
kylorhall 11y ago
I bought my 180GB SSDs for < 50 cents per GB like 3 years ago and it's barely better than that right now. Storage in general has more to do with availability and demand than technology, there's plenty of times when they've gone up in price.
- bobbles 11y ago
  For me it's like the osbourne effect coming into play.. I would like to switch to full SSD, but I'm not going to do it until the price drops, which if enough people had the same idea, means the demand drops, so the price stays the same... repeat
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
fencepost 11y ago
I can't comprehend trusting data to a (single) 30TB SSD or even 10TB SSDs given the regularly reported failure modes of "It's not a drive anymore." Perhaps it's because I'm not doing anything where massive storage is a requirement, but having data striped in RAID6 makes me happy. I'd be happy to use SSD for the underlying medium, but I want something that's less prone to single points of failure. Backups are all well and good, but what's the interface speed of a drive like that? How long to restore a 20+TB backup?
- mmebane 11y ago
  At least with SSDs, there's much less worry about your RAID 5/6 array self-destructing while it's failing over to a hot spare. With hard drives of that size, I'd only feel comfortable with full mirroring.
  - simplexion 11y ago
    Who in their right mind still uses RAID5 with spinning disks in a production system? That is like not wearing a seatbelt and driving above speed limits constantly.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      Nobody? But RAID6 is still popular, among crazier folk. And RAID6 with SSDs screams. And rebuilds fast.
    - deeviant 11y ago
      What do you do? mirror every drive?
      - simplexion 11y ago
        OBR10
        deeviant 11y ago
bcheung 11y ago
I surprised they didn't include any graphs. I'm very curious to see the trends visually. Prices per GB are still very far off. It's hard to believe they will achieve parity that soon. Here's hoping though.
robocat 11y ago
Fab manufacturing capacity doesn't magically increase because of 3D chips.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
sneak 11y ago
This article makes a previously unasserted claim that Glacier uses tape. Is this accurate? What is the source?
- tammer 11y ago
  It's often assumed that Amazon uses tape for glacier but that's actually unfounded. Amazon's keeping the details of glacier as a trade secret[1] [1]: http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/ http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdx...
mirimir 11y ago
Consumer SDDs are now inexpensive enough for desktop RAID. On Amazon, decent consumer 240GB-1TB SDDs are available at $0.32-$0.40 per GB. And in my experience, SSDs are so fast that even RAID6 arrays rebuild very quickly after replacing a member. I use Linux software RAID.
ghshephard 11y ago
I find it surprising that most people aren't recognizing that SSDs don't even need to come close to price parity to completely replace hard drives. Random access alone makes them so much more valuable, and a good SSD is now worth more than extra memory in terms of increasing the performance of a computer system.
ksec 11y ago
They are talking as if 3D NAND is free. The maximum of 64 layers is not yet production ready AFAIK. Even the 32 is too expensive, we are talking about 8 or 16 layers coming soon , which when you include two nodes step back you are talking about 2x to 4x improvement. 3D NAND isn't free to manufacture either. When you add up the cost, 3D NAND will be no more then a continuation of SSD falling prices according to its current tends in the coming years. P.S - It just means it will prolongs the life of NAND and SSD will continue to get faster, higher capacity and cheaper before hitting its limits.
mirimir 11y ago
Total cost of ownership is another issue: > Also, with much lower power use, there is a TCO saving to be added to the equation. Power savings work out at around $8/drive-year, so add another $40 to the 5-year TCO balance and the hard-drive doesn't look so good. And I wonder if Mr. O'Reilly has included the cost of power for cooling.
markhahn 11y ago
Flash has had a drop in price because it gained mainstream utility, and therefore serious volume production. It's entirely unclear whether this will continue. The physics of flash cells is not all that promising: there's certainly no Moore's gravy-train. 3D is a decent tweak, but it's not like 4D is coming next. As flash cells shrink, they become flakier (which might not hurt drive-writes-per-day, but is that the right metric?)
pacquiao882 11y ago
They are just getting rid of stock before NVMe M.2 SSD's go mainstream with 10x performance and lower production costs compared to AHCI SATA3 SSD's. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_headed_in_2015/ http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_h...
tuzemec 11y ago
Also the noise of the HDDs is killing me. I have quite a silent rig (fiddling with music/audio in my spare time) and the most noisy thing was the HDD where my audio samples were. So I've moved everything to SSD and I'm looking for another 512GB to add.
adibchoudhury 11y ago
These estimates seem a bit exaggerated at this point. SSD is still lagging in terms of capacity, and in my household we only have a handful of devices using SSD. While it's become more widely-adopted for sure, HDD's are not "doomed" until SSD capacity goes up and prices plummet. Still too expensive for an SSD.

570 points by nkurz 11y ago

forscha 11y ago

Is the hdd demise indeed expected so quickly?

toomuchtodo 11y ago
It appears so. "By packing 32 or 64 times the capacity per die, 3D NAND will allow SSDs to increase capacity well beyond hard drive sizes. SanDisk, for example, plans 8 TB drives this year, and 16 TB drives in 2016. At the same time, vendors across the flash industry are able to back off two process node levels and obtain excellent die yields." Goodnight spinning disk; you've served us well.
- Retra 11y ago
  They already seem so clunky and primitive!
- notNow 11y ago
  Time to join the ranks of his FDD and CD-ROM buddies
- Keyframe 11y ago
  And we just got 10TB spinning disks on the market! Can't wait for the price to fall down for big SSD storage!
- x0x0 11y ago
  /me does the happy dance an ssd is the best hardware upgrade I've had in the last 5 years Once you get used to it, try using a computer with spinning rust and it will just feel glacial who doesn't need multi-tb ssds in their laptop?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- codemac 11y ago
  I wouldn't count them out, just as much as disk drives were supposed to replace tape for how long now? I bet disks will get even more dense (think 20+ TiB), have better reliability when powered off, and be sold in pallets to large companies mostly. For the consumer market, disk drives are already pretty much dead.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    It all really depends on the SSD curve. If SSDs continue their price decline and capacity increases as this article mentions, it'd be difficult for HDDs to compete. Tape costs you no power in storage, but HDDs do unless you're powering them down and spinning them back up (which causes significant wear on the motor). SSDs get you cheap storage and lower power consumption, negating both tape and HDDs simultaneously. TL;DR SSD advancement set to deprecate HDDs and tape in near future.
    - codemac 11y ago
      > (which causes significant wear on the motor) [citation needed] Copan and many other companies did really well powering down drives.
- StillBored 11y ago
  I have no doubt that we will see devices that big. The question is will anyone buy them. So its really a question of cost. HD's will be dead next year if I can buy a 10TB SSD for $300.. If it costs $4000, i'm sure HD's will last another couple years.
nolok 11y ago
Not entreprise grade but consummer, and totally anecdotal, but I've bought a 500 GB Samsung EVO 840 SSD for less than 200€ a month ago. Given the specs (performance and capacity) of that drive and my previous experience about a year and a half ago buying a 120 GB SSD, I expected to pay maybe twice that ? Even if the price fall slows down a bit, we're quickly getting to a point where I don't see why you would buy a SSD at home for anything other than your consummer NAS or similar. Anyone who tried a SSD surely isn't willing to go back to HDD for anything other than their "archive/storage" drive. And if this article prediction is true, soon even that will be taken by SSD.
snowwrestler 11y ago
SSDs need to be powered up fairly often to maintain data integrity. So, they're great for the drives in computers, but for external or backup drives--which might only be powered up occasionally, spinning magnetic disks will still be a better choice for a while, it seems. edit: maybe not. Bringing this article up from samcheng's post below: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...
- cpr 11y ago
  Do you have a source for this? Just curious.
  - Bill_Dimm 11y ago
    https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24 https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24
    - msie 11y ago
      The title is pure irony ("SSD Storage - Ignorance of Technology is No Excuse"). See an another link posted here. Also from personal experience I have had no problem with an SSD that wasn't powered for 7 days.
    - Symmetry 11y ago
      The author of that piece is actually somewhat confused about how SSDs work. Data retention is a matter of the charge store leaking. An SSD doesn't have any means of refreshing that charge on it's own, the same timer is there whether the drive is on or off. And in fact it will lose data faster if the drive is on since then the drive temperature will be higher. Luckily this sort of data loss isn't a big deal in practice for the reasons outlined elsewhere in this thread.
  - samcheng 11y ago
    This problem is overblown. A new SSD should be expected to have 10 years of data retention, according to: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...
MCRed 11y ago
Think about the market dynamics. Not just the 3D technology they are talking about, which brings parity within range, imagine what you would do if you were an SSD maker and this was on the horizon. You'd rush to reach parity because as soon as that happens there's no reason to buy an HD over an SSD. So you're going to want to cut prices as fast as possible so that when the market switches over-- which will be a HUGE tipping point for the industry-- you can get as much market share as you can. Even taking a loss now on a reliable drive may get you customers for life who you can profit from later. I think the transition is going to be extremely dramatic and it's a huge opportunity in this industry. I think we'll be seeing HD makers switching over their product lines to have more and more flash, and more and more flash drives, while re-positioning hard drives to very particular environments where they have an advantage (I'm not sure where these are) But this is going to be a tornado of a market and some people are going to be come very rich as a result.

hbbio 11y ago

In a side-note in the article, the author mentions that Amazon Glacier runs on tape. Although I'm not sure Amazon officially explained the technology, I heard (and read on Wikipedia) that they store data on conventional HDDs, that are however kept "offline". Has anyone here some more knowledge about that?

_dark_matter_ 11y ago
Yes please. I was also intrigued by this statement. I was under the impression that Amazon never told what the "secret sauce" was behind Glacier. Looking at Wikipedia now, it seems there are still multiple contending theories. Also, is it true that the service is not very popular? Are people here using it or similar?
- takasc2 11y ago
  Everyone knows it is not very popular - the limitations are extreme so you have to have a very specific use case for it.
- JimmaDaRustla 11y ago
  I'm using it for incremental backups of my photo collection. If I ever need to restore my entire collection, its available on S3/Glacier.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- kstrauser 11y ago
  My home Synology unit does nightly backups to Glacier. It'd be terrible to lose our house to natural disaster, but losing all our digital data (photos, records, etc.) would make it just that much worse. For about $10 a month, I know I can recover all that stuff even if we lose everything else.
- teraflop 11y ago
  The big sticking point with Glacier is that the cost model for retrievals is complicated and unintuitive. There's a two-step process where you have to first retrieve data and then download it, and you're billed based on the peak retrieval rate in a month, not the total amount downloaded. It's not so bad now that they let you set a retrieval policy to limit your throughput, but before that, you had to carefully schedule your retrievals in order to avoid unexpected costs. As far as I can tell, Google's new nearline storage offering is superior to Glacier in nearly every way. The retrieval is much faster, and the retrieval costs are a flat rate per gigabyte that's equal to what Glacier gives you in the best case. Only drawback is the lack of a free tier.

wmf 11y ago

The article predicts that SSD prices will fall from 30c/GB to under 5c/GB in 18 months. This seems like a case of citation needed.

STRiDEX 11y ago
Can you cite predictions?
- maaku 11y ago
  Yes, they're called reasons.
- lappa 11y ago
  You can cite industry improvements in the manufacturing process that companies say will effect the price at a certain point along with scientific developments and in general claims made by actual corporations.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  I mean you can cite predictions but unless there is trend data to back them up I'm not exactly sure how useful they are. I think wmf is looking for citations of things like trend data and maybe even plans from SSD manufacturers that shows "hey we're working on this cool tech that should help us lower costs by next year!" types of things.
- NeutronBoy 11y ago
  Predictions are guesses with facts to back them up.

Turbo_hedgehog 11y ago

Is keeping a SSD powered on enough to prevent bit rot?

MCRed 11y ago
It should have no impact. It really is about write capacity. The little cells can only handle being changed so many times before they wear out. The wearing is a chemical/semi-conductor type problem. It's not like DRAM where keeping power applied keeps the cells "fresh" (and in DRAM it's done literally be refreshing each cell at a certain frequency.) The simple equation is the more times a cell is erased the sooner it fails. Write leveling and other software efforts work to spread around or eliminate unnecessary writes. But over the practical life of a drive (5-10 years?) being powered off will not cause them to lose data. Edit: I've been following FLASH technology since before the terms "FLASH" was coined, back when it was called EEPROM -- Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory, an evolution of PROMs (write once) and ERPOMS (erasable with UV light). If there's a myth out there that flash drives just forget things, I'd like to point out that I've had flash drives (low quality at that) from the 1990s that were left for 20 years and then read successfully! Show some citations of real evidence before you down vote me.
- cjensen 11y ago
  That's incorrect. Charge leaks very slowly out of cells. It's not a big issue, but it does happen. Powered-on SSD firmware knows about the problem and will maintain the cells. [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...
  - acqq 11y ago
    And AnandTech quotes Intel materials who often boasts to have the most durable drives. Imagine what happens to other ones.
    - philjohn 11y ago

bifrost 11y ago

SSD technology still has a reliability hurdle, you can nuke one in a month if you write to it constantly. Spinning media has much longer read/write durability. Until there is parity its still a bit of an arms race for capacity. Hybrid drives are pretty awful so I don't think they'll stick around. I could see Hierarchical Storage Management make a comeback and an entry to the consumer space, but thats been esoteric at best.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
False. http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
- cjensen 11y ago
  True, and I've done it! I accidentally used a consumer grade (Crucial M500) in an application where endurance would be reached in less than a month. In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-fail. Edit: Burning up an SSD was how I learned that TRIM is unnecessary: even though many parts of the filesystem were stable and never re-written, the bandwidth was even across the entire drive. The firmware noticed that some cells were underused and moved the stable data off them so it could use up the endurance evenly.
  - Someone 11y ago
    "In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-fail." You call that a catch? I would sell it as a feature. It's way better than "looks OK until t minus 1, can't read or write from time t onwards" or lesser variants of the "try reading everything a few times, and you may get 90% of your data back"

MCRed 11y ago

I can't wait. Once I can reasonably replace everything with SSDs I will. And then I'll never buy spinning rust again. I dreamed of this eventuality in the 1990s. I didn't know what technology would be used. I never expected EEPROMs would evolve in this direction (now marketed as "FLASH") as they were so fickle and unreliable in those days. This will allow lots of interesting things. Imagine a laptop that's got its main RAM backed on a dedicated bit of high speed flash... so it instantly powers off completely and instantly powers back on completely. Soon, we'll have the massive increase in storage capacity much like we've had a massive increase in compute capacity to the point where you no longer really think about it-- all computers are "fast".

awwducks 11y ago

Seems like a prime case for using a (bar/line/etc) graph to show the trend. I'm strangely disappointed in not seeing one.

antome 11y ago
That's because SSDs are still 10x the price of HDDs, have little more than halved in price the past year, and they're talking out the ass.

discardorama 11y ago

Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350 Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40 Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity. In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.

philjohn 11y ago
The author commented that they've seen a 50% drop in price over the last 8 months (from 20x HDD to 10x HDD), so it's not outside the realms of probability with the increased yields of 3D NAND.
- discardorama 11y ago
  I doubt the 50% figure. Just as a test: I looked at the price history for a random 256GB SSD (from Crucial). The highest price in the last year? $115. The current price? $99. Not nearly a 50% drop. Link: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-CT256MX100SSD1/product/B00KFAGCWK?context=browse http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-C...
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Is it not superseded by this item? http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX200-250GB-Internal-Solid/product/B00RQA6DTE?context=browse http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX200-250GB-Internal-Soli... The price is about the same, as is the performance, but are they still making the MX100? If not, I think the pricing information for it will not be very informative.
  - astrodust 11y ago
    The prices at the high end have been imploding faster than at the low end.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    While I suspect your original comment is closer to the truth than the article's (as far as price parity goes), picking a single data point doesn't make the point. It's rare for a drive to suddenly drop in price so significantly without manufacturing changes (thusly a new version of the drive). So while you're unlikely to see the same exact drive for 50% less after a year it's entirely plausible to see a different model, similar or more capacity, drop in price.

bwy 11y ago

I find great irony in statements like these when the motivation of every party is considered. The idea is that prices are "in a free fall," i.e., they haven't fallen completely yet. But this will encourage people to buy SSDs and drive them in the very free fall of which the article speaks! Experienced the same principle in my life a few weeks ago - I moved to a place described as "gentrifying." Realized a week into staying there that I was one of those people who was actually contributing to its gentrification! By no means was it gentrified, though.

kenjackson 11y ago
At least you were told it was "gentrifying", not that it was "gentrified". You probably got a discount for moving into a neighborhood that was gentrifying. Once gentrified, the discount probably largely disappears.

monksy 11y ago

Could someone explain the 3d storage innovation to me? Wouldn't stacking flash cells like that be susceptible to interference? (Heat/magnetic or electrical noise?)

Symmetry 11y ago
Not really. The charges and currents in a flash chip don't interfere with each other for the same reasons that they don't in any other chip. There's a minimum distance you have to keep things apart but luckily it gets smaller every process node. Heat would be a problem if it was like a processor but you're generally only reading from or writing to one part of the chip at a time so heat isn't a particular concern compared to a processor or DRAM.
unfasten 11y ago
Anandtech has some good 3D NAND info. I'm not positive they answer your specific question, but hopefully it's helpful. Here are the two articles I remember: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb-256gb-1tb-review-enter-the-3d-era/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb... (goes on for a few pages after this one) http://anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/3 http://anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/3 (This is mostly about how 3D NAND benefits TLC)
rhino369 11y ago
Yes it's very susceptible to interference though coupling of the charge on on the floating gate of the cell and through voltage differentials on the interconnect lines during reading and writing. But 2D NAND storage essentially hit the peak density. The gate is only a few atoms across. The only way to increase density to build up. They had to go back to larger transistor sizes because of all the interference. IIRC from 15-16nm to about 60nm.

ryanmarsh 11y ago

So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level?

simlevesque 11y ago
The iPhone storage is eMMC, not SSD.
- ansible 11y ago
  While they don't use the exact same chips, they are both based on the same NAND Flash storage technology. On a per-GB basis, I'd expect the prices for SSDs and eMMC to track for the foreseeable future.
Teckla 11y ago
So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level? Not to mention the iPad. The original iPad came out over 5 years ago with 16 GB of storage. Entry level iPads still have 16 GB of storage. Given that iOS has gotten bigger and retina iPads made a lot of apps bigger, entry level iPad storage has actually regressed considerably. Pretty confusing, given that flash prices have gone down considerably in 5 years. I guess you don't bank $200 billion by being generous to your customers.
- keithly 11y ago
  They want to push customers to use iCloud for data storage.
  - hueving 11y ago
    No, they want to squeeze an extra $100 out of you for $5 of flash storage. Most people will pay it too because 16GB is pretty crippling. It's like buying a new car that comes with a 5 gallon gas tank that costs $40,000 and having to pay $50,000 for the same model except with a 10 gallon tank. Everyone knows it's a rip off but the car is really cool otherwise and there is no way to change the tank yourself.

peter303 11y ago

HP is working on a memrister based SSD with density of Flash and the speed of transistors http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine-dreams/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine....

ad_hominem 11y ago
I believe they killed that off http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machine-repurposes-design-around-conventional-technologies http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machi...
- qzcx 11y ago
  Not killed off so much as delayed due to lack of ability to mass produce at a decent price point so far. It is far from scrapped. It was over hyped and optimistic to begin with. It just hit the reality that it has several decades of work to catch up on to be on the same page as current tech.
jerf 11y ago
While memristors may eventually become an important part of a balanced electrical component diet, I'd say the hype has failed to pan out. Don't hold your breath. Even if it does eventually manifest, it's going to take longer than you can hold your breath.
jlarocco 11y ago
Haven't various companies been hyping memristers for years now? Sounds cool, but I'll believe it when I see it.
- timboslice 11y ago
  I believe the original idea for a memristor came about in 1971 [1]. We still have yet to see it in a physical consumer product. I'm with you - sounds great, but I'll believe it when I see it. http://www.ufpi.br/subsiteFiles/zurita/arquivos/files/Memristor_chua_article.pdf http://www.ufpi.br/subsiteFiles/zurita/arquivos/files/Memris...

yuhong 11y ago

What I am really interested is when SSDs will be cheap enough to be in common OEM systems.

rorykoehler 11y ago

Having had a failure rate above what I was used to with hdds I'd prefer to see an increase in quality rather than a fall in price. It gets annoying having to replace my os ssd every 18 months or so. My most recent phone's memory also died after 30 months.

potato 11y ago
> Additionally, wear-out isn’t an issue with SSDs. Those two node uplifts in the manufacturing process add literally years to the device life, and the economics of 3D NAND allow for extra over-provisioning, making the write life of the drive well beyond its time in a data center. This is especially true for archived storage, where writing is at a much lower rate.
- rorykoehler 11y ago
  I seem to remember SSD manufacturers rolling out similar perks in their marketing spiel years ago. It would be great if this is for real. The drives I have had issues with have been high write drives and I knew they wouldn't last for ever but they lasted an incredibly short time even when taking this into consideration.
  - lbruder 11y ago
    Did they fail as in "some/all data lost", or did they switch to RO and you could at least get your data off them? Thinking of replacing my current home server HDs with SSD but worried about robustness...
    - rorykoehler 11y ago
      The last one I could secure some but not all of the data before it completely failed. It failed gradually over the course of the day of me trying to rescue it. It was strange. Can't remember the previous ssd but the phone was flat out dead.
pixl97 11y ago

abandonliberty 11y ago

I wonder how reliability is doing; Unlike HDDs SSDs have a very unpredictable failure pattern, including sudden death rather than slow degradation. If you want to ensure data is safe you need to run a raid 1 or online backup service.

mcv 11y ago
Are you saying HDDs can't suffer a sudden death? HD crashes aren't exactly unheard of.
- abandonliberty 11y ago
  >Mechanical failures account for about 60% of all drive failures.[2] While the eventual failure may be catastrophic, most mechanical failures result from gradual wear and there are usually certain indications that failure is imminent. These may include increased heat output, increased noise level, problems with reading and writing of data, or an increase in the number of damaged disk sectors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background

kylorhall 11y ago

I bought my 180GB SSDs for < 50 cents per GB like 3 years ago and it's barely better than that right now. Storage in general has more to do with availability and demand than technology, there's plenty of times when they've gone up in price.

bobbles 11y ago
For me it's like the osbourne effect coming into play.. I would like to switch to full SSD, but I'm not going to do it until the price drops, which if enough people had the same idea, means the demand drops, so the price stays the same... repeat

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

fencepost 11y ago

I can't comprehend trusting data to a (single) 30TB SSD or even 10TB SSDs given the regularly reported failure modes of "It's not a drive anymore." Perhaps it's because I'm not doing anything where massive storage is a requirement, but having data striped in RAID6 makes me happy. I'd be happy to use SSD for the underlying medium, but I want something that's less prone to single points of failure. Backups are all well and good, but what's the interface speed of a drive like that? How long to restore a 20+TB backup?

mmebane 11y ago
At least with SSDs, there's much less worry about your RAID 5/6 array self-destructing while it's failing over to a hot spare. With hard drives of that size, I'd only feel comfortable with full mirroring.
- simplexion 11y ago
  Who in their right mind still uses RAID5 with spinning disks in a production system? That is like not wearing a seatbelt and driving above speed limits constantly.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Nobody? But RAID6 is still popular, among crazier folk. And RAID6 with SSDs screams. And rebuilds fast.
  - deeviant 11y ago
    What do you do? mirror every drive?
    - simplexion 11y ago
      OBR10
      - deeviant 11y ago

bcheung 11y ago

I surprised they didn't include any graphs. I'm very curious to see the trends visually. Prices per GB are still very far off. It's hard to believe they will achieve parity that soon. Here's hoping though.

robocat 11y ago

Fab manufacturing capacity doesn't magically increase because of 3D chips.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

sneak 11y ago

This article makes a previously unasserted claim that Glacier uses tape. Is this accurate? What is the source?

tammer 11y ago
It's often assumed that Amazon uses tape for glacier but that's actually unfounded. Amazon's keeping the details of glacier as a trade secret[1] [1]: http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/ http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdx...

mirimir 11y ago

Consumer SDDs are now inexpensive enough for desktop RAID. On Amazon, decent consumer 240GB-1TB SDDs are available at $0.32-$0.40 per GB. And in my experience, SSDs are so fast that even RAID6 arrays rebuild very quickly after replacing a member. I use Linux software RAID.

ghshephard 11y ago

I find it surprising that most people aren't recognizing that SSDs don't even need to come close to price parity to completely replace hard drives. Random access alone makes them so much more valuable, and a good SSD is now worth more than extra memory in terms of increasing the performance of a computer system.

ksec 11y ago

They are talking as if 3D NAND is free. The maximum of 64 layers is not yet production ready AFAIK. Even the 32 is too expensive, we are talking about 8 or 16 layers coming soon , which when you include two nodes step back you are talking about 2x to 4x improvement. 3D NAND isn't free to manufacture either. When you add up the cost, 3D NAND will be no more then a continuation of SSD falling prices according to its current tends in the coming years. P.S - It just means it will prolongs the life of NAND and SSD will continue to get faster, higher capacity and cheaper before hitting its limits.

mirimir 11y ago

Total cost of ownership is another issue: > Also, with much lower power use, there is a TCO saving to be added to the equation. Power savings work out at around $8/drive-year, so add another $40 to the 5-year TCO balance and the hard-drive doesn't look so good. And I wonder if Mr. O'Reilly has included the cost of power for cooling.

markhahn 11y ago

Flash has had a drop in price because it gained mainstream utility, and therefore serious volume production. It's entirely unclear whether this will continue. The physics of flash cells is not all that promising: there's certainly no Moore's gravy-train. 3D is a decent tweak, but it's not like 4D is coming next. As flash cells shrink, they become flakier (which might not hurt drive-writes-per-day, but is that the right metric?)

pacquiao882 11y ago

They are just getting rid of stock before NVMe M.2 SSD's go mainstream with 10x performance and lower production costs compared to AHCI SATA3 SSD's. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_headed_in_2015/ http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_h...

tuzemec 11y ago

Also the noise of the HDDs is killing me. I have quite a silent rig (fiddling with music/audio in my spare time) and the most noisy thing was the HDD where my audio samples were. So I've moved everything to SSD and I'm looking for another 512GB to add.

adibchoudhury 11y ago

These estimates seem a bit exaggerated at this point. SSD is still lagging in terms of capacity, and in my household we only have a handful of devices using SSD. While it's become more widely-adopted for sure, HDD's are not "doomed" until SSD capacity goes up and prices plummet. Still too expensive for an SSD.