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Are mechanical drives ever going to go away?

jimbob200521

jimbob200521

Diamond Member
I've debated beginning to upgrade my server storage from mechanical to SSD's but the worry still persists in my head about data degradation. The drives would have large amounts of data (video files, photos, documents, etc) that don't get read at all frequently. Am I worrying too much about data loss over time of not being written and read to or has this issue largely been taken care of with today's modern drives? I'd hate to invest in new SSD's then go to read a file many years down the line only to find it's corrupted or no longer there.

Thoughts on the evolution of this type of storage anyone?
 
Maybe once they can get the size large enough of Mechanical drives I would say yes. But till then, probably not.
 
jimbob200521 said:
Am I worrying too much about data loss over time of not being written and read to or has this issue largely been taken care of with today's modern drives? I'd hate to invest in new SSD's then go to read a file many years down the line only to find it's corrupted or no longer there.
Click to expand...

This issue has never been as big of an issue as people make it.
 
XavierMace said:
This issue has never been as big of an issue as people make it.
Click to expand...
I beg to differ, we just do not have firm data on what happens.
The data is supposed to be safe for up to a year, but, lots of things can change that, with temps being the primary concern.
I had 1 SSD unpowered for only 8 months, and it encrypted itself with no help from me.
Thus, I would say, do NOT store important long term data on any NAND device without having some kind of power refresh to it. In other words, don't throw it in a safe/vault and forget about it, since you will likely lose all your data if it remains unpowered long enough.
 
I just don't see the point of using an SSD for a backup disk given the contention over this issue, even if it is overblown.

The current state of affairs has practical SSD capacity lagging behind HDD capacities. Even with lower prices on SSDs now, there is still a sizeable difference in expense-per-gigabyte.

That being said, I'd only pick an SSD for a boot-system disk. After building a Q6600 in '07 with 4x HDDs, I strive now to reduce the number of drives in a workstation to minimum, and the weight of accumulated HDDs with it. Then there's the power-draw factor.

So I might have an SSD boot drive, a smaller SSD caching drive, which caches a single large HDD. The SSDs consume a lot less power; I have only one HDD running on a system, and with a hot-swap bay, external drive-box or the backup capability of our server -- there's no reason to worry about data-loss in the scenario presented in this thread.
 
We quickly hit the physical limit of NAND density whereas new ways to record rust seem to always come about. They complement each other well. I prefer configurations in both, whether discretely managed or in a tiered setup. There is no benefit to storing rarely used files on premium NAND. Until 10GbE becomes mainstream, even a single mechanical drive is sufficient for streaming purposes. The benefits of SSD are mostly realized in programs and system files. JMO
 
jimbob200521 said:
I've debated beginning to upgrade my server storage from mechanical to SSD's but the worry still persists in my head about data degradation. The drives would have large amounts of data (video files, photos, documents, etc) that don't get read at all frequently. Am I worrying too much about data loss over time of not being written and read to or has this issue largely been taken care of with today's modern drives? I'd hate to invest in new SSD's then go to read a file many years down the line only to find it's corrupted or no longer there.

Thoughts on the evolution of this type of storage anyone?
Click to expand...
Unfortunately data degradation over time hasn't really been taken care for all NAND processes. Samsung's 840 "fix" was more of a workaround that simply hides the issue by more aggressive rewriting of stale data, whilst other newer 16nm TLC drives (eg, BX200's) have been seen to slowdown after a few weeks too. I started a thread on potential 850 EVO slowdown's after 6 months or so, and while I thank the few who contributed, my ultimate conclusion is there still isn't anywhere near enough data to make any conclusion. Tech sites who should have been doing this stuff have been a total waste of space, each falling over themselves to copy / paste the same 550MB/s CrystalDiskMark speeds on 2 minute old data...

The only drive I'll ever take seriously for fairly durable data storage is the 850 PRO (40nm, MLC), and the price of that is still 10x that of a HDD and obviously hasn't been dropping recently either despite Samsung's move from 32 to 48 3D layers. In fact I think SSD's have hit a wall over the past 6 months - low-end planar TLC drives being cheap for a reason, Crucial's TLC drives continuing to fall through the floor after previous excellent MLC generations, whilst high end Samsungs are really not dropping in price at all, probably due to complete lack of competition. Likewise for NAS usage cost for cost you could have 4x 3TB drives mirrored and still have change to spare for the price of a single 2TB 850 PRO. Makes zero sense given any serious data storage plan will obviously require more than one drive. And there's still no big speed-ups when moving large files if Gigabit network bandwidth is the intermediate bottleneck. Or if the bottleneck for playing media files back is simply "human" speed (you can only watch movies and listen to music so fast). 😀

So my answer is no, HDD's are not going away anytime soon certainly for secondary / critical data storage. I agree with BonzaiDuck in saying they're great speedy boot / gaming / cache drives (and I wouldn't go back to HDD for a system drive), but given the current "durability race to the bottom", I also wouldn't touch most SSD's for secondary / long-term / cold storage of mostly unchangeable data, or server / NAS use. I don't even think NAND technology itself is a suitable solution for that. A few years' back people would laugh at dirt-cheap sh*tty brands of optical disc that couldn't be read back after just 2-3 years, or discovering that cheap old IDE HDD in the back of the cupboard after 8 years and finding the data still reads back fine, yet expensive SSD's that "guarantee" data for only 12 months unpowered and require huge amounts of ECC guestimating reading back data they wrote mere weeks ago is supposedly the "new norm"? How far that bar has been lowered...
 
If they could make hybrid 1TB flash drives where 1TB of data is flash and 1TB of data is mechanical, and the mechanical part was actually more of a data backup utility rather than something that was actually used regularly, that'd be something interesting. I know we're suppose to have data backups of everything but why not have some sort of psuedo Raid 1 config with a flash drive and mechanical drive. It'd be expensive now but if they could make a 1TB flash drive for $50 and mechanical for $50, and fit it in the area of a 2.5" drive, that'd be pretty sweet.
 
There are already 16 TB SSD's in the 2.5" form factor, so I don't think we've hit any wall yet. It's ridiculously expensive, but the tech is there. I'd say HDD's are closer to hitting the capacity/density wall.

Data retention is certainly an issue and I agree with Elixer that we just don't have enough data yet, since these drives have only been around for a few years. We'll only know a decade or two from now. Slowdowns are just an inconvenience, but if the data actually becomes unreadable at some point in the not too distant future, that's a bigger issue.

There's also the issue of whether it's necessary to store everything on SSD's. For data storage, the high performance of SSD's just isn't a needed. Sure it would be nice to copy my movie collection to that new 4TB drive at 500+ MB/s instead of <100MB/s, but I'm only going to do it once and then the data will just sit there for years.
 
Eventually, yes. Not quite that soon, but eventually. We got rid of floppies and optical media. HDs are next. Especially when SSDs become bigger and cheaper.
 
nerp said:
Eventually, yes. Not quite that soon, but eventually. We got rid of floppies and optical media. HDs are next. Especially when SSDs become bigger and cheaper.
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+1 Yes ssd are getting cheaper and thumb drive getting bigger also,Not in size,well you know what i mean
 
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Elixer said:
I had 1 SSD unpowered for only 8 months, and it encrypted itself with no help from me.
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You're suggesting that a SSD with no power, somehow managed to power itself on and encrypt itself? Do you believe in ghost and other supernatural phenomena also?
 
XavierMace said:
This issue has never been as big of an issue as people make it.
Click to expand...

I don't know about that. I dug an E-350 rig with a Vertex2 50GB and Win7 64-bit out of storage, and it had issues restarting. I put in a fresh SSD and a fresh copy of Windows, and the problem went away.
 
Elixer said:
I beg to differ, we just do not have firm data on what happens.
The data is supposed to be safe for up to a year, but, lots of things can change that, with temps being the primary concern.
I had 1 SSD unpowered for only 8 months, and it encrypted itself with no help from me.
Thus, I would say, do NOT store important long term data on any NAND device without having some kind of power refresh to it. In other words, don't throw it in a safe/vault and forget about it, since you will likely lose all your data if it remains unpowered long enough.
Click to expand...

A) Ignoring why you'd buy a more expensive SSD for cold storage.... I literally don't know a single person that backs up data to a drive once and tosses it in a safe/drawer/closet. So for 99.9999% of the population the possibility of data loss when unpowered for extended periods of time is moot.

B) How exactly do you think it managed to encrypt itself without power to the device?

VirtualLarry said:
I don't know about that. I dug an E-350 rig with a Vertex2 50GB and Win7 64-bit out of storage, and it had issues restarting. I put in a fresh SSD and a fresh copy of Windows, and the problem went away.
Click to expand...

I assume you did no actual troubleshooting just declared the SSD the problem and replaced it with another substandard SSD?
 
XavierMace said:
A) Ignoring why you'd buy a more expensive SSD for cold storage.... I literally don't know a single person that backs up data to a drive once and tosses it in a safe/drawer/closet. So for 99.9999% of the population the possibility of data loss when unpowered for extended periods of time is moot.

B) How exactly do you think it managed to encrypt itself without power to the device?



I assume you did no actual troubleshooting just declared the SSD the problem and replaced it with another substandard SSD?
Click to expand...

What more troubleshooting do I need to do? Swap A/B, problem goes away, problem must have been with the swapped component. Windows install was an old fresh install, the system was ready for sale. So nothing wrong with the Windows install that I know of.

And what, pray tell, is the definition of a "sub-standard" consumer SSD? Anything lower than a Samsung 840/850 Pro?
 
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