Will SSD's make HDD's extinct?

[Hugo Drax]

When 1 tab ssd sells for 90 dollars then you can say Winchester drives are extinct.

 

[Puffnstuff]

They should fill high performance HDD's with compressed hydrogen and name them "Fire HD Pro" series.

They could use the advertising moniker "the hottest drives on the planet" lol.

 

[hectorsm]

When 1 tab ssd sells for 90 dollars then you can say Winchester drives are extinct.

By then you'll probably be needing 2 or 4 TB.

 

[Zodiark1593]

120GB is cutting it close even for many business. I work for a state agency and I'm seeing some PCs run out of space with 160GB drive. Most of our data is on the network so most of the space is been eating up by large apps. Our division has been upgrading these HDD to 500GB.

Different use scenarios. At my business, the PCs are barely beyond the 40 GB mark even with Office and other such suites installed on all of them (though most licenses never get used). Most here use web apps for inventory transactions. SSDs across the board, even 120 GB ones would be an absolute godsend especially during patch Tuesday where updates suck down anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes.

Those that need more storage (and workstation users) would of course be the exception.

 

[Topweasel]

You can count on the HDD platter density to continue to increase in the next few years. I don't see SSD replacing HDD by 2020. It's too early to say for sure but most likely be closer to 10 years from today.

SSD capacity growth has been out pacing HDDs for awhile and they have been struggling since the 1TB per platter point to increase density quick enough. Now anything over 6TB either is meant for cold storage or using tech that is prohibitively expensive. 2020 should be the point that SDDs hit a price and capacity point where an SSD should become the defacto drive for consumers.

Once that happens HDDs only real service will be cold or nearly cold archivable storage.

 

[Arachnotronic]

My machines all currently have SSDs only, but I have been finding myself needing to delete/re-install games to effectively manage space.

I just ordered a pair of 5TB HDDs to help me with my problem

 

[hhhd1]

I do not see SSDs or even tapes replacing HDDs for the average user cold storage.

The SSDs have major flow of being prone to major corruption when used inside a HDD caddy that is not powered often.

 

[Cerb]

A "worn out HDD" is a nonsensical concept. HDDs don't have write cycles.

SSDs don't have bearings. HDDs have non-replaceable wear parts. It's not a nonsensical concept at all.

I do not see SSDs or even tapes replacing HDDs for the average user cold storage.

Nor hot storage. Just because it's moved to a NAS on the LAN, or a giant NAS out in the cloud, doesn't mean it's not being used for live data, day in and day out.

The SSDs have major flow of being prone to major corruption when used inside a HDD caddy that is not powered often.

With limited write cycles applied, they don't. The problem there is that the reality is a best guess, rather than known. They put high confidence on that 1-5 years (JEDEC uses 1, but makers sell flash they rate for longer retention, though usually not for general storage, today), but still as a black box, with, "here be dragons," after that. And, the changes in the NAND from one process to another are innovative enough that no one is willing to put confidence in the next generation of flash behaving like an old proven generation, just with lower write cycles. To what degree HDDs and tape can be trusted, they have a long history, the physics regarding the data staying on the platter are not exceptionally complex, and the technology used has not changed all that much (SMR was probably the strangest density improvement yet seen).

IoW, saying they are prone to major corruption assumes knowledge of a positive. The reality is that we don't know well enough to say one way or the other. It could even vary by maker, with the same specs.

 

[hhhd1]

I have dealt with 2 crucial M4 MLC for over 3 years, both with data retention errors:

first one: (128gb)
after dealing with it for over 3 years, i discovered that, when reading old static data, it usually start to have slow downs after 2 months, with SMART 'ECC recoverable errors', and after 6 months, it start with total read error, and SMART 'unrecoverable errors'.

second one: (64gb)
after 2 years of static data, it starts failing to read in a weird way ...
some time windows just report failed to read file 'xxxx.dll' etc. , or similar.

in both cases, simple data refresh/overwrite does not help.

in both cases, the only thing that helps is taking a full disk image, then overwriting with zero's, and then overwriting the original image.

commands i use to restore original state: 
cat /dev/sda > tmpfile
cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda
cat tmpfile > /dev/sda

in both cases, ssds were used daily, longest offline time is one or two weeks.

both SSDs have 10% wear , wasted approximatly about 300 write cycles.

 

[bononos]

I have dealt with 2 crucial M4 MLC for over 3 years, both with data retention errors:
......
both SSDs have 10% wear , wasted approximatly about 300 write cycles.

Thats horrible, doesn't sound like its normal for ssds.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I don't think so, at least not any time soon due to price per TB and the fact that they wear out based on usage. SSDs are great for OS drives so programs and OS boots faster, but spindle drives are still better for mass data storage in raid configurations, where you do not want to even worry about any kind of wear and tear. VMs, and other high I/O stuff basically. Yeah huge corporations with lots of money can afford to do this with more expensive enterprise grade SSDs and will probably upgrade them all at a 5 year cycle before they wear out, but enthusiasts or simply people who have high data needs can't afford that.

On the other hand, when SSDs reach a price point where they are comparable with spindle drives, I could perhaps see myself considering them in raid arrays for mass storage for the performance benefits and just deal with the fact that I may have to replace them all due to wear at say, 5 year intervals, or w/e. (just pulling that number out of my ass, no idea really how long they'd last in my environment). I would just schedule my backups to be less often and do other optimizations to try to spare their life.

One big issue I face with my current storage situation is that during heavy I/O operations such as backup jobs, everything slows right down, such as file access. Sometimes if I have too many jobs running at once it even gets to a point where VMs start to fail. This is an issue I still need to figure out but just have not gotten anywhere. I imagine with SSDs this would simply not be an issue as stuff would just happen faster without loading down the system for so long. Rsync is notorious for randomly deciding to take very long on a certain file, or that an entire directory has changed, when it has not. It would probably not happen as much with SSDs. I imagine raid 5 or 6 is probably more viable with SSDs too. With HDDs the rebuild times are so long and there is a bit of a performance hit, so I tend to go raid 10 but raid 5/6 is more bang for your buck.

I wonder if anyone has done tests with raided SSDs in a SOHO server environment (non enterprise drives) that gets an enterprise comparable amount of disk I/O, like VMs, database servers, nightly backups, lots of application writing to log files, etc.

 

[Cerb]

I have dealt with 2 crucial M4 MLC for over 3 years, both with data retention errors:

first one: (128gb)
after dealing with it for over 3 years, i discovered that, when reading old static data, it usually start to have slow downs after 2 months, with SMART 'ECC recoverable errors', and after 6 months, it start with total read error, and SMART 'unrecoverable errors'.

second one: (64gb)
after 2 years of static data, it starts failing to read in a weird way ...
some time windows just report failed to read file 'xxxx.dll' etc. , or similar.

in both cases, simple data refresh/overwrite does not help.

in both cases, the only thing that helps is taking a full disk image, then overwriting with zero's, and then overwriting the original image.

commands i use to restore original state: 
cat /dev/sda > tmpfile
cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda
cat tmpfile > /dev/sda

in both cases, ssds were used daily, longest offline time is one or two weeks.

both SSDs have 10% wear , wasted approximatly about 300 write cycles.

Was the flash getting hot on a regular basis (temperature seems to have a huge effect on retention)? What are the chances that firmware bugs played a role (based on what it took to fix it...)? With so few writes, it's probably not direct wear on the flash. The newer Micron ones (and Sandisk) have RAID5-like redundancy added, and also throttle if they start getting hot. I wouldn't be surprised, if the drive were written to once, then stored at around room temp, those same errors would actually not occur.

I can't go back to HDDs for the OS, but I'm not going to trust any SSDs without automated, or very easy (IE, plug drive in, click mouse, wait), backups in place (within my main desktop, FI, I have 3 times a week backups being done from the SSD to the HDD). With HDDs, the last several years, I increasingly see failures too quick to do anything about, probably accounting for half of them. But, the few SSDs I've seen go out, including a couple of my own, went from fine to FUBAR in merely seconds. I've only seen one actually log bad sectors, but otherwise operate OK. Even with overall better reliability than HDDs, if failure creeps up on you, and especially if it's not random (like a bad firmware, or bad drive batch), you can get to be in a pretty bad way.

 

[crashtech]

Will HDDs make tape obsolete? Not yet. So will SSDs make HDDs obsolete? Also not yet.

The question humanity should be asking is, "what is the digital equivalent of carving this data into stone?"

 

[myocardia]

"what is the digital equivalent of carving this data into stone?"

Pressed DVDs or Blu Rays, but that could get expensive pretty fast, I'm guessing.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Was the flash getting hot on a regular basis (temperature seems to have a huge effect on retention)?

In a mini-ITX build I did, the SSD mounts, under the top cover, right above the chipset / ICH chipset (on a 775 ITX board), and the Intel temp monitoring utility shows the ICH temp ranges from 95-105C. It was shutting off during Windows Update, that's when I found out that the CPU fan wasn't spinning (a cable was in the way), and after installing the util, that the ICH temps run pretty hot on that board.

 

[hhhd1]

Additional information about my two Crucial M4's:

the first sign of trouble with the Crucial m4 64gb after 2 years of static data was that it stopped loading windows properly, sometime the user profile fails to load, and sometimes windows 'hangs' while starting up and showing the windows logo .. and few weeks after the first signs, specifically in the last 10 days before i had to reset it with zeroes, it completely dropped from being recognized by bios 3 times, .. every time, I performed the 'power cycle' trick, and it did work afterwords for 2 days or so.

after i overwrote with zeroes, it worked fine ever since. (that was over 2 months ago.)

this lead me to believe that the famous 'dropping from bios' issue that the M4 ssd is known for is some sort of data retention issue.

Was the flash getting hot on a regular basis (temperature seems to have a huge effect on retention)? What are the chances that firmware bugs played a role (based on what it took to fix it...)? With so few writes, it's probably not direct wear on the flash. The newer Micron ones (and Sandisk) have RAID5-like redundancy added, and also throttle if they start getting hot. I wouldn't be surprised, if the drive were written to once, then stored at around room temp, those same errors would actually not occur.

The 128gb driver with most of the issues, yes, it was in a laptop with poor cooling, and with very poor air flow, the laptop itself used to shutdown from over heating.

it only takes 2 months in the above conditions to show ECC errors.

when i took that same SSD outside of the laptop for testing, and i was ready to start using it as a paper weight, i thought i do some testing ..
so i performed a 4 month retention test, i started with updating the firmware from 0309 to the latest 070H, i filled it with some .iso files, and only just connected the SSD weekly to do read tests and CRC checks, i saw that after 4 months, there wasn't any read errors or ECC errors, however, there was still significant slow down in a specific part of the SSD that only got worse slowly and gradually increasing over time.

this suggested that not all NAND chips in the SSD are of the exact same quality.

( if interested, I can post screen shots of gradual decrease of speed overtime, benchmarked using hdtune )

after that 4-month retention test, I started using the same SSD in another laptop that supposed to have much better air flow, however, after 2 months still got ECC recoverable errors, and horrible slow downs, and occasionally the OS fails to load completely.

maybe the heat generated by the SSD itself during running is affecting it also ?

anyway, .. overwriting with zeros every 2 months seems to solve the problem, because going back to HDD in this laptop would be horrible ...
some tasks finish 5-times to 10-times faster with SSD, like for example working with large images in photoshop ..

 

[Dave3000]

I don't think that SSDs will make HDDs obsolete for at least 5 more years. What about people who rip their blu-rays to their hard drives? Is there a 6 TB SSD and if there is one is it less than $240? How many uncompressed Blu-ray movies can a 2TB SSD store? 80 or so? Should those people that rip their blu-rays switch to streaming and accept the quality loss? I don't see SSDs replacing hard drives in home media servers any time soon, maybe a small SSD to store the OS, but not for storing uncompressed Blu-ray movies or uncompressed music.

 

[Cerb]

I don't think that SSDs will make HDDs obsolete for at least 5 more years. What about people who rip their blu-rays to their hard drives? Is there a 6 TB SSD and if there is one is it less than $240? How many uncompressed Blu-ray movies can a 2TB SSD store? 80 or so? Should those people that rip their blu-rays switch to streaming and accept the quality loss? I don't see SSDs replacing hard drives in home media servers any time soon, maybe a small SSD to store the OS, but not for storing uncompressed Blu-ray movies or uncompressed music.

Plus, we're mostly still on GbE, if not N300/600 or AC, so a RAID 1 of new drives will be as fast as will be needed, until it's almost full.

 

[moonbogg]

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/4-terabyte-ssd-under-500-usd.html

The moment of death approaches near. Who gets to call the time of death? I'd like to be that guy. I'll be watching closely so I can declare to the world that HHD's are finally and officially dead. With a 4TB SSD for under $500, that time is coming quickly. HDD's are taking their last few breaths now. Won't be more than a few years.

 

[Charlie98]

I don't think that SSDs will make HDDs obsolete for at least 5 more years. What about people who rip their blu-rays to their hard drives? Is there a 6 TB SSD and if there is one is it less than $240? How many uncompressed Blu-ray movies can a 2TB SSD store? 80 or so? Should those people that rip their blu-rays switch to streaming and accept the quality loss? I don't see SSDs replacing hard drives in home media servers any time soon, maybe a small SSD to store the OS, but not for storing uncompressed Blu-ray movies or uncompressed music.

I agree... the benefit of the SSD is speed, something you don't need in an HTPC environment, or, for that matter, any sort of bulk data storage. SSD's (in their current incarnation) just don't make sense for that kind of duty.

 

[moonbogg]

I don't think that SSDs will make HDDs obsolete for at least 5 more years. What about people who rip their blu-rays to their hard drives? Is there a 6 TB SSD and if there is one is it less than $240? How many uncompressed Blu-ray movies can a 2TB SSD store? 80 or so? Should those people that rip their blu-rays switch to streaming and accept the quality loss? I don't see SSDs replacing hard drives in home media servers any time soon, maybe a small SSD to store the OS, but not for storing uncompressed Blu-ray movies or uncompressed music.

Netflix. I don't know why people own movies anyway. Once I've watched something then its just kind of done. Because I've watched it already. You know, there aren't any more surprises left. I know what's going to happen. I know when they will shoot their guns. I know when they are going to scream. I know when the plane is going to crash. I know when darth vadar will tell Luke, "Luke, I am your father".
I'd rather just remember a movie than watch it over and over so many times to the point that even having it on blue ray isn't efficient enough for my repeat watching habit. I watch it over and over so many times I must have it on a HARD DRIVE so I can just click play over and over and not worry about the disk wearing out from spinning around in the thingy because I watched it so much I broke the blue ray disc. I need that movie on a damn hard drive because that's how I roll.
Sorry, but I don't roll like that.

 

[Cerb]

Netflix. I don't know why people own movies anyway.

Tons of movies aren't on Netflix. Quite a lot aren't on any streaming service today. Plus, extras aren't there, unless you pay more for the virtual copy than a physical one would cost.

I've finally gotten around to ripping all my video discs, and have found many I have not yet watched, that either aren't available streaming; are available from Amazon for likely more than I paid for the discs; or are only available from Vudu, and for way more than I paid, in that case. Turner seems to be especially bad about doing their best to keep them locked up, from the ones I've checked out (I like old B movies--actually, I like newer STV ones, as well ).

Make anything older than 10-15 years <=$5 digital (permanent license, not short-term rental), in HD, with the extras, and I'll give up on physical copies (I get that new titles need real money, and all). That day may come, but we're not quite there yet.

 

[crashtech]

I suppose the quality is there with streaming if you have the bandwidth, but the connection speed required for true HD is not yet ubiquitous; I have purchased many of my favorite movies on Blu-Ray for that reason, ripping them to conventional HDDs on the NAS so the discs won't get handled.

 

[Charlie98]

Once I've watched something then its just kind of done. Because I've watched it already.

Some movies are so good I like watching them over and over, or having one of them on for background while I'm working or something. But to each his own...

 

[Cerb]

I suppose the quality is there with streaming if you have the bandwidth, but the connection speed required for true HD is not yet ubiquitous; I have purchased many of my favorite movies on Blu-Ray for that reason, ripping them to conventional HDDs on the NAS so the discs won't get handled.

That is true, as well. IMO, Netflix and Amazon's regular HD looks about as good as a really nice DVD encode (like anything after around 2005, or Superbit and the like from before then), and Netflix's SHD only a bit better, in 720P, for things with a lot of motion.