SSD prices have still got a long long way to go
You seen how much a 4TB or 8TB SSD is compared to a HHD. You can get something like 5 HHD's for the price of one SSD
What happened to 10,000rpm hard drives ?
- Thread starter digitaldreams
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You seen how much a 4TB or 8TB SSD is compared to a HHD. You can get something like 5 HHD's for the price of one SSD
HDD's have a lot of components in them, also the commodities used to make them, then the physical weight of HDD's adding to shipping.
But totally agree SSD's will be bigger and cheaper one day.
This, basically.
I had one of the first of those to come out. It was an IBM if I remember correctly. It was so noisy and ran so hot I had to make it a special enclosure for it. But at the time it was lighting fast. It was eventually replaced with a Raptor which barely got warm and was comparatively silent.
I still have 2 of these, the 150 Gb versions, they looked great in RAID. They still work but currently not in use.
One packed up a few years ago and WD replaced it with a Velociraptor, not the same.
Reading some of the comments here it sounds like someone needs to tell Seagate that the roadmap it recently published to 100TB mechanical drives in the next few years may need revising, then again we live in a world where in the consumer space NAND is not economical for large drives and the appetite for them in retail at this point is low, objectively Seagate is one of the few OEM's in this space who historically lacked it's own NAND production and had to outsource, so they kind of had an interest in mechanical drives still being a thing, but tiered storage is a thing and NAND isn't ideally suited to longer term storage.
10K and 15K SAS drives haven't gone anywhere, you cans still buy them new, though development has pretty much stopped in recent years and capacity is always going to be low. Enterprise NAND on the other hand has been getting bigger, cheaper and faster, where TCO is a consideration the lower power heat and noise have longer term benefits if the workload fits. So why would anyone still run a 10K/15K set-up? Usually attrition on a legacy system, compatibility and endurance. If you have an existing pool of drives that are 15K and one dies, you replace it. While going NAND may be an option, older controllers and set-up's often don't handle TRIM that well (if at all), and while garbage collection has improved, it's still a consideration and who wants to spend a chunk of budget moving to NAND if you have issues as a result? Power/heat may not be an issue if you are for example in a COLO set-up as long as you stay within the defined limits, that leaves endurance and this one can be significant. if you have the money, then high endurance NAND is a thing, but consumers generally get consumer grade endurance, for example i've written over 2.2PB on a 3.2TB Fusion.io card (its rated to 20PBW), where as my 2TB 970 Evo+ is 'only' rated to 1,200TBW, (1.2PB), now TBW isn't usually a hard limit, some drives will just soldier on till oblivion, but in commercial settings you expect to replace drives prior to the TBW being reached, with a mechanical drive you may choose to pull it after its projected service life (I know business' who used to literally destroy perfectly good drives after 3 years by crushing them on-site or tossing them into industrial shredders), but if it's still working as advertised and not throwing up errors, then in many settings they just run till they no longer satisfy the usage/die/decom.
10K and 15K SAS drives haven't gone anywhere, you cans still buy them new, though development has pretty much stopped in recent years and capacity is always going to be low. Enterprise NAND on the other hand has been getting bigger, cheaper and faster, where TCO is a consideration the lower power heat and noise have longer term benefits if the workload fits. So why would anyone still run a 10K/15K set-up? Usually attrition on a legacy system, compatibility and endurance. If you have an existing pool of drives that are 15K and one dies, you replace it. While going NAND may be an option, older controllers and set-up's often don't handle TRIM that well (if at all), and while garbage collection has improved, it's still a consideration and who wants to spend a chunk of budget moving to NAND if you have issues as a result? Power/heat may not be an issue if you are for example in a COLO set-up as long as you stay within the defined limits, that leaves endurance and this one can be significant. if you have the money, then high endurance NAND is a thing, but consumers generally get consumer grade endurance, for example i've written over 2.2PB on a 3.2TB Fusion.io card (its rated to 20PBW), where as my 2TB 970 Evo+ is 'only' rated to 1,200TBW, (1.2PB), now TBW isn't usually a hard limit, some drives will just soldier on till oblivion, but in commercial settings you expect to replace drives prior to the TBW being reached, with a mechanical drive you may choose to pull it after its projected service life (I know business' who used to literally destroy perfectly good drives after 3 years by crushing them on-site or tossing them into industrial shredders), but if it's still working as advertised and not throwing up errors, then in many settings they just run till they no longer satisfy the usage/die/decom.
Caporegime
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10,000 rpm drives never took off because they were extremely expensive, loud and hot. A niche product used by a handful including myself. The actual drives were also tiny as other drives moved on they were actually comparable in terms of read and write just random seeks was the weak point. Then SSD came along.
If you need speed you get an SSD. If you need massive amounts of storage you get a mechanical drive.
You shouldn't need both on the same drive so people buy an SSD and a mechanical if they need lots of space and speed and just run the apps off the SSD.
Lolwut? Show me a 12TB SSD for £160? Or a 14TB SSD for £180.
I got 2 for my unraid server last year.
SSD won't match that for 20+ years
As some of the approaches like 3D stacked NAND, QLC, etc. mature I think we'll see a big jump sooner than that - technology advancements are likely to bring step changes along the way out of sync with the smoothed longer term trend line of NAND capacity/price. I'll be surprised if approx. 8TB solid state isn't getting close to those kind of prices in 5 years (probably more like £300) and within those prices in 10.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16544/seagates-roadmap-120-tb-hdds
5 years = 50TB mechanical is a thing, NAND isn’t going to compete in £/TB for a lot longer than that. I suspect we will continue to live in a 3 tier storage world of mechanical SATA, NAND SATA and NVMe with NAND SATA marketed as the budget option being pushed to compete with mechanical SATA in £/TB, but it’ll take many years before £/TB parity exists. In much the same way as parents don’t usually encourage offspring to kill each other, mechanical drives will enjoy a level of protection until NAND makes more financial sense due to who owns who.
I was meaning in terms of his example where capacities like 12TB are available in solid state space at those kind of prices - not whether mechanical/NAND are going to compete on capacity/price.
We seem to get quite sudden jumps in these things as tech advances/matures - what seemed like 20 years away in 2006 for instance with solid state storage came and went 5 odd years ago.
Yep mechanical is pretty much treated as a cash cow to fund R&D for NAND. It's the same principle why we still keep tape around.
Caporegime
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I don't think we will. Size isn't the big driver it's speed for some reason even though speed is already at levels past what's required for the home user.
You can get a 1TB nvme M2 for around £90-£120 on a deal.
I don't see why anyone requires a 20TB SSD drive tbh.
Why would you possibly need that speed and storage in a home setting?
Look at consoles. I think the PS3 came with 40GB.
PS4 came with 500GB.
Ps5 came with a 1TB drive.
Next console your looking at 2-4TB in 7 years time.
After that your looking at 5-6 TB in 15 years time.
So realistically speaking advanced pc users in 20 years minimum will have 14-16TB SSD drives. Which will be more than double that of consoles of the time.
Which is the case today. What size of SSD does the average pc gamer have?
I'd say 250GB-500GB SATA drive is the most common. Only advanced users have 1tb or 2tb SSD.
I just got an Asus laptop and it had a 250gb nvme M2 drive for instance. I upgraded to 1tb but only because a good deal was on otherwise I'd have just shoved a 500gb sata in the spare slot.
I don't see us having 14-16TB SSD for a long long time. Not in a normal sense where it costs £200 or less and is therefore mainstream.
They will have them in Amazon data centres sure. But I'm talking specifically in the average advanced users pc.
Even a 16tb mechanical drive is not a normal purchase only a handful of people will actually own one.
How many people do you know that requires that amount of storage?
Lets just say what is normal for you isn't always going to be normal for everyone else. For example the last time I purchased an SSD smaller than 500GB would be 2014, it would be 2013, but apple got me on a MBPr that I needed off the shelf. I also haven't paid more than £75/TB for a brand new NVMe drive in the last 2+ years and I know quite a few people with 16TB drives, though most tend to stick to 12-14TB as that's the better £/TB and also has better availability at present. I wouldn't conclude i'm normal and you're abnormal or that people who have different usage requirements to either of us fall into either category, remember the context here is OCUK's storage sub-forum, it's not unusual for people to be running a multi drive desktop and/or NAS or dropping a grand on a GPU. That's perhaps not as common on other forum with different focus.
Caporegime
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I run an unraid server so I have several large drives however I'm not a normal consumer.
I'm saying that 14-16TB ssds just won't be a normal thing for at least 20 years.
Once they are below £200 is when they will be considered mainstream and comparable to mechanical drives of today in terms of £/TB. I don't think that may ever happen tbh. In 20 years time cloud gaming and cloud storage is likely to have gotten to the point along with broadband that buying storage will be a thing of the past.
We will all be streaming from the cloud