The Future of HDD?

[ronbo613]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcough...re-hdd-growth/

[lawlz]

No mention of SSD technology being far superior?

[BFG10K]

Originally Posted by lawlz

No mention of SSD technology being far superior?

The 'Egg has 3TB Barracudas for $150, or 5c per GB. SSDs will be very lucky to reach that metric in 5 years.

[biostud]

More and more content will be streaming and online storage. But for storage of photos and video the hdd still gives the best $/gb.

[Blain]

Originally Posted by ronbo613

The Future of HDD?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcough...re-hdd-growth/

No... Thomas Coughlin makes a living writing about tech, but he isn't Nostradamus

[ShintaiDK]

HDs will only be on a downward spiral. Only to end up in smaller segments like tapes.

I wouldnt be surprised if HD development stagnates. Or even prices going up as volume decreases.

I think I recall seeing that 80% of all shipped laptops in 2015 is expected to be with SSDs.

[Jeff7181]

HDD's aren't going anywhere anytime soon. The argument is analogous to the argument that tape is going away. While it may be less prevalent, it's often the best way to move many TB of data off-site every day via services such as Iron Mountain rather than spending a fortune on the network connectivity required to do the same thing.

HDD vs. SSD is the same situation. For consumers who need a few hundred GB of storage now, or a few TB in the near future, SSD's will fit that segment. However, SSD just won't cut it for the enterprise. There are storage vendors on the verge of shipping 4U disk shelves loaded with 48 3.5 inch SATA drives. With 4TB drives available now, and 6TB drives possible next year you can't tell me that flash will replace spindles anytime soon. That's easily over 1 PB per 4U shelf even taking into account disks used for parity and hotspares.

Currently where I work, we're struggling to find a use for SSD for two reasons. One, a 2-3 hundred 15k SAS disk aggregate is FAST. Add a few TB of read cache and a 100 GB write cache and unless you're reading/writing the full capacity of your storage system, you'll be hard pressed to see a difference between all those spindles and cache vs. SSD. And two, with 1 shelf of SSD having only about 1.5TB of usable space we'd need 6 shelves for our largest data set. That's half a rack. To put all our other performance sensitive data sets on SSD, we'd need at least 24 more shelves of SSD. Two and a half racks just to house the disk we currently need for our working data sets with no room to grow as opposed to 1 rack of 15k SAS and an expansion slot taken up in the head for a 2 TB flash memory cache module.

[ronbo613]

But for storage of photos and video the hdd still gives the best $/gb.

No way would I be able to afford SSDs to store my photos and videos. I have more than 2TB(and counting) of scanned slides and negatives, that's before digital photo files. Digital HD video at 12-14G per hour? Double that(at least) for backup. Uses up storage pretty quickly.
Cloud storage may be the future, but it is too expensive for me at this stage of the game and, pardon me for being a little paranoid, but I would prefer to not store my precious photos off site.
Depends on what you do. For average personal use, cloud storage and a single SSD in your computer is fine. For heavy duty computing, you need more.

The 'Egg has 3TB Barracudas for $150, or 5c per GB.

I saw a WD Black 4TB hard drive at newegg today for $330. I would love to have a few of those, just can't afford it right now.

[Mr. Pedantic]

Originally Posted by Blain

No... Thomas Coughlin makes a living writing about tech, but he isn't Nostradamus

That's a good thing, it means his predictions might actually mean something.

[KentState]

Originally Posted by Jeff7181

...

Agree. We even found that the aggregate of HDD is plenty fast to fully saturate a Cisco Nexus switch with just a little bit of SSD caching and storage. At my current job, we archive a lot of documents and the need for HDD storage will remain for a long time. There is absolutely 0 benefit to SSD when access time isn't a major priority.

[dagamer34]

SSDs in consumer products (focus on speed).
Magnetic hard drives in servers (focus on storage space).
Tape drives for backup (focus on longevity).

[NikolaeVarius]

Originally Posted by KentState

Agree. We even found that the aggregate of HDD is plenty fast to fully saturate a Cisco Nexus switch with just a little bit of SSD caching and storage. At my current job, we archive a lot of documents and the need for HDD storage will remain for a long time. There is absolutely 0 benefit to SSD when access time isn't a major priority.

How about fewer points of failure due to lack of moving parts, less heat, lower power consumption.

[philipma1957]

Originally Posted by NikolaeVarius

How about fewer points of failure due to lack of moving parts, less heat, lower power consumption.

how much power do 6x 512gb ssds pull vs 1x 3tb hdd.


BTW I am a pro ssd user,

but if you are storing 2tb info in 6 ssds raid0 vs 2tb info in 1x 3tb hdd power and failure are not going to be much in favor of the ssd's if at all.

[ShintaiDK]

We use SSDs alot in the server space. Specially for database servers and other with high I/O. For some servers, HDs are simply not an option due to speed. But 10 HDs uses close to 100W. 10 SSDs uses...10W? Thats also 90W in 24/7 operation. And 90W that needs 30W of cooling or so.

[KentState]

Originally Posted by NikolaeVarius

How about fewer points of failure due to lack of moving parts, less heat, lower power consumption.

More shelves, more disk, more rack space, more power, more expensive, more controllers. How many SSD's would it take at 240GB each to get to 80TB compared to 600GB-1TB disk? How much more will that run at $1000 per 240GB Intel SSD vs $600 for a SAS drive? It's a rather pointless and expensive investment at the enterprise level and provides nothing for file storage.

Secondly, who cares about failure of a disk every now and then? They are all under warranty and typically replaced by the SAN vendor before you know they actually failed. Also, if you are renting hosting space, you are given an allotment of power per rack with cooling already factored in. A fully loaded SAN running HDD will not typically be a problem.

[VirtualLarry]

Originally Posted by ShintaiDK

10 SSDs uses...10W?

I would say 20-30W, realistically, if they were all loaded at once.

[ShintaiDK]

Originally Posted by KentState

More shelves, more disk, more rack space, more power, more expensive, more controllers. How many SSD's would it take at 240GB each to get to 80TB compared to 600GB-1TB disk? How much more will that run at $1000 per 240GB Intel SSD vs $600 for a SAS drive? It's a rather pointless and expensive investment at the enterprise level and provides nothing for file storage.

Secondly, who cares about failure of a disk every now and then? They are all under warranty and typically replaced by the SAN vendor before you know they actually failed. Also, if you are renting hosting space, you are given an allotment of power per rack with cooling already factored in. A fully loaded SAN running HDD will not typically be a problem.

You can get SSDs much larger than 240GB.

And the price difference for performance drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148975
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148531

HDs only got the slow large storage segment left.

[KentState]

Originally Posted by ShintaiDK

You can get SSDs much larger than 240GB.

And the price difference for performance drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148975
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148531

HDs only got the slow large storage segment left.

Your second link is broke. EMC and Netapp typically only put 120GB or 240GB SLC drives in their sans. You can easily saturate a Nexus switch running just the slow HDD so I'm not sure how they are just relegated to the "slow" segment.

[jolancer]

Just my opinion...

consumer and enterprize usage compairisons have alot of differences.

Originally Posted by NikolaeVarius

How about fewer points of failure due to lack of moving parts, less heat, lower power consumption.

In theory that sounds correct but from what iv heard around so far none of that actually applies yet to private consumer usage. SSDs seem to have there own set of issues and failure risks on the consumer end, and for the average user since an HDD isn't constantly reading/writing data all day like it might be in enterprize situations, the power consumption levels compared to SSDs is still moot at this point.

I dont go outa my way to find what maybe going on few years from now, but just my opinion... there maybe a phase of hybrid development after SSD catches up to HDD(price wise/bug wise/reliability/etc) similar to implementation of hybrid vehicals

[BFG10K]

Originally Posted by biostud

More and more content will be streaming and online storage.

Cloud still needs something to store it on. I think all that'll happen is a market shift, where some of the HDDs that used to reside in PCs will now reside in cloud data stores. But HDD use will go up because data requirements are going up.

I personally wouldn't trust cloud at all. All it takes is a connection failure at either end and suddenly your data is inaccessible. Streaming sucks too as many people have meter broadband and/or data caps. I'd much rather have a Bluray disc that I can watch whenever I please.

[BFG10K]

Originally Posted by ShintaiDK

You can get SSDs much larger than 240GB.

And the price difference for performance drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148975
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148531

HDs only got the slow large storage segment left.

You can get HDDs much larger than 1TB too; several vendors have enterprise rated 4TB versions.

Heck, 1TB VelociRaptors are enterprise rated, and the 'Egg has them for ~$220.

[ronbo613]

Maybe the future is neither HDD or SSD, it may be something beyond both of those technologies...

[blastingcap]

Originally Posted by BFG10K

Cloud still needs something to store it on. I think all that'll happen is a market shift, where some of the HDDs that used to reside in PCs will now reside in cloud data stores. But HDD use will go up because data requirements are going up.

I personally wouldn't trust cloud at all. All it takes is a connection failure at either end and suddenly your data is inaccessible. Streaming sucks too as many people have meter broadband and/or data caps. I'd much rather have a Bluray disc that I can watch whenever I please.

I agree with you re: cloud. Bandwidth speeds and costs, plus security concerns, make me not want to entrust any more than I already do to the cloud--and I do entrust a lot already (kindle, gmail, gdrive for smaller docs). I draw the line at media like my personal photos/music/videos.

[exdeath]

GB/s >>>>> $/GB

A million terabytes is useless to me if I can only access it at 90 kilobytes per second and want to hang myself and avoid using my computer any time I need something.

Get with the 21st century already. Nobody accesses data at kilobytes per second anymore. WTF?

My damn wireless phone has a higher transfer than the random access transfer rate of a spinning metal plate.

[beginner99]

Originally Posted by BFG10K

Cloud still needs something to store it on. I think all that'll happen is a market shift, where some of the HDDs that used to reside in PCs will now reside in cloud data stores. But HDD use will go up because data requirements are going up.

I personally wouldn't trust cloud at all. All it takes is a connection failure at either end and suddenly your data is inaccessible. Streaming sucks too as many people have meter broadband and/or data caps. I'd much rather have a Bluray disc that I can watch whenever I please.

exactly. Not to mention that there just is not enough bandwidth for the cloud, not even close. Were I live download is ok but upload is just unusable. Only thing the "cloud" can be used is for backing up documents in the MB range which was possible a decade ago (email storage...) without the need for calling it "the cloud".

And yeah availability will also be a great issue...