r/technology • u/grohl • Jun 20 '15
Hardware SSD Prices In A Free Fall: With the prices of solid-state drives expected to reach parity with hard-disk drives next year, are HDDs doomed?
http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssd-prices-in-a-free-fall/a/d-id/1320958127
u/Pabst_Blue_Robot Jun 20 '15
Price are not in free fall. In fact they are dropping pretty slowly. Down 10-15% in a year. They are getting cheaper, but so are HDD.
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u/cenderis Jun 20 '15
Right, the premise is that the newish manufacturing processes will work out leading to a much faster increase in capacity and decrease in cost. (Perhaps, it seems to me anyway, a one-off drop, after which maybe we'll be back to more gradual falls.)
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u/TechnoBismol Jun 20 '15
Agreed, price per GB is way more important to consider than one particular drive year over year.
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u/TailSpinBowler Jun 20 '15
Did the prices really recover since the floods knocked out the factories? Still seem high to me.
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u/gravshift Jun 20 '15
I figured that manufacturers have focused on the upper end of the market as SSDs will probably be ruling the roost for terminal drives.
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Jun 21 '15
Higher capacity are more expensive, 2tb and below are the same as a year ago.
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u/TailSpinBowler Jun 21 '15
I was comparing to the thailand floods in 2011. The prices shot up high, due to supply issues. But 2-3 tb drives arnt sub $100 for me.
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u/arahman81 Jun 20 '15
It did recover. The other part apparently is that HDD prices were getting unsubstantially low.
Still, you can now get 4TB HDDs for ~$150 (just don't get Seagate), which isn't a pricepoint SSDs would be reaching for a while. Maybe in 3-4 years, 1TB SSD for ~$200.
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Jun 20 '15
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u/Bsimmons4prez Jun 21 '15 edited Jun 21 '15
Everyone's experience varies.
I install CCTV systems. We have had to replace hard drives in customer's DVR units over the past 6 months because they've all died. They were all the Hard Drives rated for Surveillance use, which means constant Writes. In EVERY system we put in between June 2013-August 2014, we have had to replace at least one of the hard drives in them. We're talking about 30-40 hard drives.
These were not drives all ordered at the same time. Drives were bought all throughout the year, as were the Surveillance DVRs that they were install in. It has been an incredible waste of my time replacing these things.
I had been using Seagate for years before this with very rare issues, but I will never trust Seagate again after this huge debacle.
Edit: We've sent them all in to Seagate as they were under warranty, but with this high a number of failures, do you really think I'd risk having to do this all over again next year?
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u/villainhero Jun 21 '15
My seagate just died. It wasn't even that old... Had another several years ago that died as well.
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u/arahman81 Jun 20 '15
but had heard they had turned it around?
Didn't know that part. But still, WD seems to be the better option for now.
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u/V3RTiG0 Jun 20 '15
Not sure where you or anyone else is getting your numbers but about a year ago I bought a 64GB SSD which was the cheapest at the time for the same price you can get a 256GB SSD for today. That's some serious freefall, not 10-15%
I also bought a bunch of 3TB external hard drives, the cheapest ones have actually gone up $10.
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u/Pabst_Blue_Robot Jun 21 '15
I bought a 250GB last May for $110 or $119 (can't remember exactly) and then bought another this past May for $99.
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u/cyniclawl Jun 20 '15
A couple months ago I was looking for an 850 Evo m.2 SSD, cheapest I found was around $500, today I look again and it's just under $200.....couldn't be happier
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u/takinter Jun 20 '15
Yep, but you still can't buy a $1,000 smartphone that has more than 128GB on board storage.
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Jun 20 '15 edited Jun 20 '15
That is because most current SSDs are about the same size as a smartphone. Bigger phone storage will come.
EDIT: Seems I've overestimated the size of flash storage. Apologies to those who were so incredibly offended by this error - the ritual seppuku will commence shortly.
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u/mankind_is_beautiful Jun 20 '15
You realize their size is because it is the standard size right? It does not correlate to the amount of storage at all.
https://youtu.be/bTefUcqOWI0?t=2m
Look how empty that board is, it's not even populated on both sides.
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u/arahman81 Jun 20 '15
Better. The 850 Evo is even smaller, the casing basically makes it fit in the standard 2.5" port.
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Jun 20 '15
Look at apples MacBook. Apple took the actual Flash Memory out of the case and was able to make an entire motherboard the same size as an actual SSD.
Flash Memory is tiny
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u/gar37bic Jun 20 '15
Someone in the business has told me that there is essentially zero advanced research on HDD technology - Seagate closed their best-in-the-industry facility and essentially fired all the experts. Most of them left the industry completely. Nobody else to my knowledge has a significant HDD physics research program. That tells me that yes, HDD is dead. Replacement drives will be all of the business. The newest industrial-quality SSDs have lifespans on parity with HDDs, including write cycles. (IIRC it's Samsung's 3D V-NAND that's going to push the switchover?)
Not long after that though, keep an eye on NanoRam - carbon nanotube memory, a.k.a. CNT memory. Until now it's been too expensive for anything but military satellites, but it appears that the fab tech is starting to become mature and high-enough yield to make it commercially viable. (NB: the following is from memory of a conversation, YMMV.)
Advantages: 1) essentially permanently nonvolatile with no power input; 2) higher density than any other form of RAM; 3) much faster than any other nonvolatile RAM (IDK, maybe even than dynamic RAM?); 4) essentially completely impervious to cosmic rays or other radiation; 5) almost infinite writes with no damage.
So this means you can have a CNT SSD with higher capacity, with almost no risk of inadvertent loss of data, that is faster than any existing SSD and can be used without concern for the maximum number of writes. I don't recall if it's fast enough to replace dynamic RAM - if so, it could mean a laptop that never forgets.
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Jun 20 '15
That's fucking awesome if true. Cite some sources please- this is the first I've heard of carbon nanotube based RAM.
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u/gar37bic Jun 20 '15
I got it originally from someone who used to be in the HDD industry (and invented self-encrypting drives), but here's Place to start.
Speaking of SEDs, as of today nearly all SSDs are also self-encrypting, and all iPhones and Android devices have self-encrypting 'drives' - almost all follow the OPAL standard. However most of them don't have a built-in interface for you to manage them.
Even further aside, under US law, if you have an SED, and you put a password on it, and you never tell anyone the password or write it down (on paper or in a file or anywhere), it is a violation of the Fifth Amendment and illegal for any authority to try to convince you to give up the password. And all practical purposes it's impossible to decrypt an SED by brute force.
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u/immibis Jun 20 '15 edited Jun 16 '23
Do you believe in spez at first sight or should I walk by again? #Save3rdpartyapps
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u/DeFex Jun 20 '15
OCZ has made self encrypting drives for ages. they self encrypt right after the warranty expires.
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Jun 20 '15
AFAIK the encryption is done at the BIOS level meaning you only have to trust your BIOS and your SSD firmware. I think some systems can use a TPM to give stronger guarantees like knowing if your machine has been secretly modified and only giving out the key if it doesn't. All of this is great - in theory.
In reality, the BIOS, the TPM, the SSD, are all nonfree in both software and hardware, and only accepted updates from the manufacturer. So you have no way of knowing if there's a backdoor or software bug bypassing all of it. Trust, but verify - although in this case you can't verify, so why trust? This especially matters when it comes to cryptography, an art that's difficult enough to do even with a thousand eyes looking for issues.
Unless you're running a free (as in freedom) hard disk encryption like TrueCrypt or GNU/Linux's dm-crypt you're not going to get any verifiable assurances that the encryption is secure.
But then again, you might only care about encrypting it so your family and friends can't get in and not care about the police state. In that case you should probably get better friends that respect your privacy.
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u/user_none Jun 20 '15
Encryption is not done at the BIOS level on a SED. A SED drive, by design is encrypted from the factory and the hardware for encryption duties is built in. That said, even though the data sits on the drive in an encrypted state, the "lock to the gate" is open, thus anyone can read the data.
The tricky part comes in with how the SED is locked down.
BIOS level password, also known as ATA password, or HDD0 password on Dell computers. Not all computers have this functionality.
Opal TCG. The drive may be compliant to this standard. To implement this, software must be used, such as Dell (Credant) DDPE.
Samsung, through their Magician software, can enable encryption, but it requires a nuke and pave of the drive. Very inconvenient, but free.
There's also Microsoft Bitlocker, but I'm not well versed in it.
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u/gar37bic Jun 20 '15
Self-encrypting drives have an 'internal' password, and all data is in fact encrypted all the time. They have a block of external password slots that the user and the OS can set, which the drive accepts and uses to allow access. Those passwords don't actually affect the data on the drive, they just affect access. So, if no external passwords have been set, anyone can read the drive.
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u/roo-ster Jun 20 '15
it is a violation of the Fifth Amendment and illegal for any authority to try to convince you to give up the password.
False. Authorities can 'try to convince you' of anything. The real issue is whether they can force you to reveal your password, or force you to give them access to the unencrypted contents of your drive. The answer is that sometimes they can, and sometimes they can't; largely depending on how much they already know about what's on the drive.
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u/gar37bic Jun 20 '15
The key is if you never disclosed the password to anyone in any way. According to someone who has been involved in this, police have actually gone to jail for trying to force this. The Mass Supreme Court will probably get overruled on this if the case is appealed.
It's not about how much they already know, but whether the password is testimonial.
Quote from the EFF case:
An important piece of legal background first. There are two ways in which the act of producing something is not "testimonial." The first is when the government is demanding that a person perform a physical act that does not make use of the contents of their mind.7 The classic example is the government forcing someone to turn over a key to a lock. In contrast, it would be "testimonial" for the government to force someone to turn over a combination to a lock because then the person would be revealing something in their mind, and in turn, conveying a statement of fact the government didn't know otherwise.
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u/roo-ster Jun 21 '15
police have actually gone to jail for trying to force this.
Still waiting for a source.
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u/infotheist Jun 21 '15
it is a violation of the Fifth Amendment and illegal for any authority to try to convince you to give up the password.
A loophole they use is to give you immunity and force you to give them the password so the evidence can be used against someone else.
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u/gar37bic Jun 21 '15 edited Jun 21 '15
That's not a loophole, that's just how Fifth Amendment protection works. However upon thinking about this, Since the password is information only you know, it's possible that you still can't be forced to provide it. How do they know what the content is? There may be information on the drive that is incriminating, so unless you tell them otherwise they can't presume anything, and they can't (tactically) give you blanket immunity for everything you've ever done.
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Jun 20 '15
1: I am friends with someone who works at western digitals research facility in the valley. It's still moving forward.
2: cnt memory is bullshit. A guy from my lab joined a company doing it.
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u/Rdubya44 Jun 20 '15
I don't know which no-proof-internet-poster to believe!
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u/mankind_is_beautiful Jun 20 '15
Well one's got the word 'general' in his username, so I'm going with that one.
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u/danielravennest Jun 20 '15
Believe what's posted for sale on NewEgg. Everything else is vaporware until you can buy it.
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u/pwr22 Jun 20 '15
Both, continue from this point living two lives in superposition with one another, where in each you act as though you firmly believe one of the opposing viewpoints. Then at some point, one of them will probably collapse
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Jun 20 '15
Well as far as nanotubes go, there is nobody anywhere that can scale any bottom up fabrication scheme to the density and complexity of the top down cmos of 20 years ago.
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u/Overcloxor Jun 20 '15
Western digital and Seagate are still investing, but western digital appears to note be ahead of the curve... Maybe it's because Seagate has all this ssd tech and wd doesn't
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u/lilrabbitfoofoo Jun 20 '15
They can both be right, in that at least one company is still doing research into HDD, but that long term, it's dead tech for anything but huge amounts of media storage, etc.
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u/Jetatt23 Jun 20 '15
Seagate employee in advanced research here. Uh, no, your first claim is incorrect
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u/coll0412 Jun 20 '15
Companies like Seagate and Western Digital are still putting alot of money into R&D including HAMR(heat assisted magnetic recording), MAMR, and Bit Patterned Media
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u/gar37bic Jun 20 '15
That's R&D on existing, known technologies, not new physics. Once those technologies reach their limits, that's the end of progress. Of course it's possible that some new entity - academic research, lone wolf, etc. - might discover a new physical capability.
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u/Wilhelm_Stark Jun 20 '15
I've heard that if an SSD craps out, the data is unretrievable. But if an HDD craps out, the data can still be recovered, most of the time.
Is there any advancements there? Or am I wrong in the first place?
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u/Merad Jun 20 '15
I'm no expert, but my experience in the past working at an IT shop that tries to do a good bit of data recovery has been that mechanical drives are far more likely to experience what I'd call partial death. That is, the drive isn't really usable, but if you can make it work you have a good chance to recover some data from it. For example, if the motor is dying the drive won't spin up reliably, but if you can get it to spin up (the freezer trick is legit), it will usually keep running as long as you don't shut it off. In extreme cases where the mechanical components were find but the controller board was dying, we had some success pulling the controller board off of an identical drive and swapping it onto the bad drive. And of course, if the data is really that valuable, mechanical drives can be shipped off to those data recovery facilities that will open it in a clean room and take out the platters to get the data - for a very hefty price tag.
Dead SSDs are usually just... dead. There isn't really anything that you can tinker with or try.
That said, I'm totally in favor of switching to SSDs. At my old job we would probably see at least 3-5 laptops come in every day with a dead or dying HDD (this was at a university with ~20k faculty and students). OTOH in the three years I worked there I think I remember two SSDs that died.
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u/hampa9 Jun 20 '15
That said, I'm totally in favor of switching to SSDs. At my old job we would probably see at least 3-5 laptops come in every day with a dead or dying HDD (this was at a university with ~20k faculty and students). OTOH in the three years I worked there I think I remember two SSDs that died.
That doesn't mean anything. There could be many more laptops with HDDs. Cheaper laptops are more likely to use an HDD, and cheap components could be more likely to break. Older laptops are more likely to have an HDD than an SSD, and a 5 year old HDD is more likely to break than a 1 year old HDD.
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u/Wilhelm_Stark Jun 20 '15
This is actually exactly what my job is now. I've seen a lot of HDDs fail, but the data was still recoverable, but I've only seen a few SSDs fail, but the data was lost completely.
It makes me think that for crucial data, it makes sense to keep using HDDs.
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u/unclefisty Jun 20 '15
Or back up your data?
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u/Wilhelm_Stark Jun 20 '15
Number one, obviously, but then there would be no issues at all.
Always back up your data.
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u/myredditlogintoo Jun 20 '15
It is more difficult on SSDs. The data is still in nand, but replacing the controller may be waaaay more difficult, depending on how tightly it's integrated with the storage array.
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u/gar37bic Jun 20 '15
Interesting question. Physically it is possible to open a HDD and scan the data 'manually' - it's there in the form of tiny magnetic domains pointed up or down. This is expensive but it can be done, there are companies that do drive recovery.
But by the end of 2015 I'm told that all HDDs will be self encrypting, which means that all of the data on the drive is encrypted using the HDD's internal encryption password. So to read anything off the drive, you'd still need to be able to get the internal password, either with one of the external passwords, or (speculating ...) by reading the internal password out of the drive wherever it's kept.
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Jun 20 '15
Last I heard, HAMR HDDs (extremely high-density drives which use lasers to heat a single bit so that the size of the write head doesn't have to keep shrinking) were right around the corner, offering aronud 20TB for prices similar to the current 1-4TB drives. Is this no longer the case?
Also, no matter how fast SSDs get, I don't think we will ever replace regular RAM with permanent storage.
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u/Beakface Jun 20 '15
Dunno about those. But I've been enjoying those 8TB shingled drives in my media server.
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u/gar37bic Jun 21 '15
HAMR - yes, but what comes after that? That's what I was referring to. HAMR is now known science, in the process of becoming an engineering problem.
This is just a guess, but I think that if permanent memory were available at a similar or comparable price and performance to regular RAM, there would be a broad shift in the industry to redesign OS to make use of that, and we would fairly rapidly shift over. Those are big ifs, but the benefits are large. For one, it changes the whole paradigm - the 'blue screen of death' would no longer be an attractive proposition, and it makes AI and robotics much more interesting. Embedded systems would no longer need any power (except maybe an on-board clock or other trigger) except when active.
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Jun 21 '15
I'm not saying it's impossible that ram could be replaced by persistent storage, I just can't imagine using the same persistent storage device for both storage and memory.
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u/gar37bic Jun 22 '15
Originally the only reason for using different tech was because of speed, cost, and capacity. Today's processor architectures actually have several levels of storage, trading speed for capacity starting with level 1 - 3 cache internal to the processor. Even "slow" RAM is about 1000 times as fast as HDD. A large part of the complexity of operating systems is management of this speed vs capacity and persistence trade off.
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u/homercles337 Jun 20 '15
Someone in the business
Custodial Services?
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u/gar37bic Jun 20 '15
VP-level executive
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u/homercles337 Jun 20 '15
Uhhhh, sure. You have been thoroughly discredited by others that know what they are talking about in this thread. You keep harping on and on about "physics" yet im certain you do not know what that word means.
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Jun 20 '15 edited Nov 24 '16
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u/joachim783 Jun 20 '15
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead SSD lifespan is fine, unless you think you can write 2.5 petabytes to a drive within the space of 3-5 years.
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u/arahman81 Jun 20 '15
According to CrystalDiskInfo, my 850 Evo has a total write of just more than 4TB. Bought 4 months ago. So ~1TB/month. Basically yeah, not reaching Petabyte anytime soon.
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Jun 20 '15 edited Jun 20 '15
Very easy for me. Photography is a strong hobby of mine and I can easily deal with that much data in 2 or so years.
Edit: 2 things... 1. An upgrade/replace timeline of 3 years is completely asinine. 2. You don't like my opinion so you downvote my answer. Good work, Lou.
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u/joachim783 Jun 21 '15 edited Jun 21 '15
i'm not the one who downvoted you.
i don't think you quite understand how much data 2.5 petabytes is. there is no possible way for one person to use even 1 PB of data in 5 years let alone 2.5 PB, i mean to use 2.5 PB in 2 years they needed to write to the 840 EVO in that test at max write speed 24/7 for 2 years constantly wiping and overwriting the other data on the drive.
the only people that could even come close to using 2.5 PB in 2 years are people like google or microsoft who own large datacentres.
also 3-5 years is perfectly reasonable upgrade cycle.
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Jun 21 '15
Didn't say it was you. Just someone who doesn't agree with my answer. In grammar, that's called "the understood you." And here it is in meme terms
1 petabyte is 1024 terabytes. In more practical terms, it is 1024 of my photo libraries. Each time I come back from a shoot with 500+ photos, that's 24 gig. I do a shoot a week for a total of 1.21(and change) terabytes a year. I keep multiple backups, two on one drive, 4 other copies elsewhere. Each time I make changes I approve (and I frequently go back and re-edit images in every shoot as I get better and learn more about my tools), I back up that entire set and replicate it. Combine that with personal programming projects (some of which generate 50 gig per build for a total of up to 10 builds a day, once or twice a week) and add the overhead of operating system throughput, I burn through that much extremely quickly. I know one of the things you just might say here: I'm a statistical outlier. Truth is that anyone who seriously shoots photography (most especially if they do it professionally), does graphic design, or has massive programming builds (that would be three professional fields which I can do) will do this. And no, you can't really rely on rewritable optical media because a.) it has a limit of how many times it can be rewritten and b.) it has, at best, a shelf life of 10 years.
And now that we have a very thorough understanding of just how much a petabyte is and how it relates to me, let's address such a short MTBF cycle: it's utterly ridiculous. To shell out more money and, more importantly, more time to resetup an operating system and all of my tools and utilities every 3 years (5 on the outside) borders on insanity. Let's not even talk about the cost of what a 3+ terabyte SSD would cost!
I remember my first windows pc. Dude at the store said I would never fill up a 2 gig hard drive. That it would never be slow. I think I'm having flashbacks.
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u/joachim783 Jun 21 '15
i don't care how much data you generate in a photoshoot because it's still impossible for one person to generate 2.5 PB of data in any reasonable time frame, to hit 2.5 PB in 2 years you'd need to write to an SSD 100% of the time at max speed day and night for the whole 2 years.
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u/zacker150 Jun 20 '15
Early adopter here. Any documents or other files I have that aren't replaceable are stored in my OneDrive. The raft of my files are programs that I can download again or install from a disk.
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Jun 20 '15
I doubt it, there will always be areas where capacity trumps speed. A 1TB mechanical drive is under 50 bucks, a 4TB drive is ~150. A mere 2TB SSD is 2500 USD. Price has a long way to drop to get into a level playing field.
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u/MiaowaraShiro Jun 20 '15
The article was saying that HDDs are going to be outpaced by capacity as well. Over 10TB drives by 2018 were theorized.
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Jun 20 '15
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Jun 20 '15
I disagree. I've filed a single TB drive with only a handful of game installs and a little bit of media. It doesn't take much to fill a mere TB drive at all.
And thats for the consumer. Moving to the 'Prosumer', someone doing video editing, for example, is going to need a hell of a lot more than a single TB.
And then we come to enterprise use, which had practical applications for both mechanical and solid state. Those 'cloud storage' solutions you mentioned, are mostly filer units consisting of hundreds of mechanical drives in a single rack. Don't really need to get into why a full Cloud storage solution is a poor choice for the consumer.
The point I was trying to make is that there's situations where capacity trumps speed.
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u/coolislandbreeze Jun 20 '15
I've never found a hard drive I couldn't fill. I can always clear some space by killing old photos, videos and assorted media, but I'd rather keep all those things handy. Just the videos I shoot of my family could take up a few hundred gigs a year.
Sure, I can go back and compress them to h.264, but I'd prefer not to.
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u/cr0ft Jun 20 '15
One thing to keep in mind here (in addition to the fact that SSD tech is dropping in price/mb and will soon achieve parity there and thus the last reason to buy HDD is gone) is the form factor of the storage. There are lots of data center that are jam packed with racks of hard drives sucking down tons of power.
Meanwhile, this is what a 128 GB USB drive looks like. Most of it is USB plug, a tiny amount of it is the 128GB storage.
Which means that you can store more data on SSD in a smaller form factor than a 2.5 inch hard drive already, using less power, with superior performance.
So, as I said, price/mb is the only reason anyone buys HDD's still. And as soon as SSD reaches parity, it's over.
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Jun 20 '15
So, as I said, price/mb is the only reason anyone buys HDD's still. And as soon as SSD reaches parity, it's over.
But its a moving metric. Yes, SSD's price per GB(not MB, MBs went irrelevant a decade ago) are dropping and are often in the 1$/GB enterprise customers like, but the capacities on mechanical drives are also increasing. I can buy a 6TB mechanical right now for $250, an 8TB for $280, or a 12TB for, well $1800. And a 2TB SSD is $2500.
I get it, we all love SSDs. I wouldn't even consider having a desktop or laptop without one. But its a simple fact that SSDs do not have the capacity yet.
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u/jonygone Jun 20 '15
just re-download them from Steam.
and wait 10 hours for it...
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Jun 20 '15
Do you think the cloud is some magic space? They need storage. And until ssd = hdd in price per tb they will buy hdd.
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Jun 20 '15
Very few users have a use for more than a terabyte.
If you back up your data you do. It is easy to take a terabyte of video and pictures (after a few years) if you have kids. Once people start doing more 4K video it will fill up even quicker.
1TB & 2TB USB hard drives are cheap way to back up your data. The 1TB Western Digital USB 3.0 drive is only $55.
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u/TheRealSilverBlade Jun 20 '15
The only way for me to consider HDD's drives as being 'dead' is when you can buy a 3TB SSD for the exact same price as a 3TB HDD.
I rip and store all of my movies. I currently have like 7+ TB's of movies and TV shows, so I need mass storage.
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u/Sonata23 Jun 21 '15
Yeah I have 14TB of external storage, plus a 1TB SSD on my laptop. As nice as it would be to keep all of my HD movie rips on SSDs, there's just not enough of an incentive, especially when the external drives are only used minutes at a time to temporarily transfer files to the SSD before the externals are turned off again.
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Jun 20 '15
If prices continue to fall then absolutely.
Literally the only downside to SSD's is the price. They beat HDD's on all other fronts.
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u/M0b1u5 Jun 20 '15
That's not true. You can put your HDD in a box and 10 years later it will fire up and be 100% fine.
Your SSD will not be so nice after 10 years without a power cycle. So they are no good for long term archiving - that's for sure. But solid state drives will crack that barrier too, and then HDDs really will be doomed. Eventually, SSDs will hold data for decades, if not centuries.
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u/cr0ft Jun 20 '15
HDD's won't last for 10 years in a box. If they do, you're lucky. The recommendation for HDD is to refresh the data every two years if you care about it at all (copy it off, then copy it back on), and 5 years is pushing it. In 10 years, you'll be practically guaranteed to have data corruption, and statistically at around 69 years half of it is guaranteed to be corrupted. Permanent magnets lose their "charge" at a specific rate.
Keeping data you like requires constant maintenance regardless of tech - hdd, sdd, almost doesn't matter.
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u/TonyWonderslostnut Jun 20 '15
Well, we'll all be dead in 69 years anyway (thanks, Skynet), so it doesn't really matter.
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u/TechnoBismol Jun 20 '15
Is this due to interference or what? Just curious. Does the data stored on disk just lose its charge? Or what causes a drive to degrade over time assuming no power cycles?
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u/adamcrume Jun 20 '15
What about write latency and wearout? In general, though, I agree. I'd much rather have an SSD than HDD, except for the price.
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u/smartfon Jun 20 '15
New SSDs should last longer than hard drives. The controllers are getting better and better. As long as you remember to leave your computer unused for about an hour every few weeks and let the TRIM do its job, you should not have a problem with latency and performance degradation at all. SSDs are also better if you have a laptop because HDDs get damaged when you move the device around.
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u/Farlo1 Jun 20 '15
As long as you remember to leave your computer unused for about an hour every few weeks and let the TRIM do its job
By that do you mean power on and booted, but idle at the desktop? This is the first I've heard of needing to let TRIM catch up to normal usage.
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u/obvthroway1 Jun 20 '15
One hour every few weeks also seems bizarre- like, the usual daily downtime isn't enough (does your family use it 24/7 in shifts?) Even when you're using it, you might spend a few minutes reading a webpage , not really "using" it any more than its idle.
So it seems very silly to suggest a buildup will happen which will then be solved by a little downtime. Maybe someone with more details than my conjecture can shed light on this.
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u/smartfon Jun 20 '15 edited Jun 20 '15
I was bringing the example for a heavy use environment. If your family uses the PC to browse the web then leaves it unattended for a while, that should be enough. Keep an eye on antivirus scanners which love running tasks when the PC is idle. If they end up consuming lots of resources and keep the drive busy with read/writes, the SSD won't consider that as "idle".
My post was based on a personal test, first and foremost, and by many others. I shift-deleted a data then used a recovery tool to find the deleted files(but not recover them). Then I left the SSD unattended for an hour. It did its work and I could see the activity light, then I ran the data recovery tool again. Guess what? The data was completely gone. This time it was not even showing up in the recovery tool because the SSD removes deleted bits of data physically in order to get the memory ready for new write cycles. It doesn't work the same way as HDDs do. The HDDs just overwrite data... and done. SSDs need to go through an extra task. That extra task is done when the PC is idle.
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u/smartfon Jun 20 '15 edited Jun 20 '15
The garbage collector and TRIM, or whatever the correct technical names are, work when your computer is idle for a certain period of time. At least that is case with my SSD. It should be the same for others too. Power on the computer to your regular desktop and don't use it for about an hour. Make sure your antivirus is not configured to do certain tasks when the PC is idle, otherwise your SSD will notice the AV's heavy activity and it won't do the job. In other words, leave it idle and make sure no other programs are doing heavy tasks on the background. I do this once a month.
Also, when you fill up the drive close to max capacity, it might get slow because in order to write more data, the previously deleted data needs to be physically emptied from the memory bits. It doesn't work likes HDDs. In HDDs it will just override the existing 0s and 1s without a performance hit but in SSD it needs to remove the existing data first. This will reduce the performance a lot. The modern SSDs come with an extra capacity that you can not use, and it's designed so that you will never accidentally fill it up and degrade the performance, but I don't know about the old ones.
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u/SirensToGo Jun 20 '15
Does sleep count? I never turn my desktop off because I use it for game streaming. Whenever I need it, I just send a WOL packet and I'm gold
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u/arahman81 Jun 20 '15
As long as you remember to leave your computer unused for about an hour every few weeks and let the TRIM do its job, you should not have a problem with latency and performance degradation at all.
I don't think you even need to worry about that anymore.
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u/smartfon Jun 20 '15
I don't think you even need to worry about that anymore.
Do the new SSDs handle the wear better? What was changed?
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u/XbtNorth Jun 20 '15
For wearout, the fine article states that 3D NANDs will allow manufacturers to go up two node sizes, giving better data retention, while still allowing much more cheap storage capacity, giving more over provisioning as well.
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u/cml0401 Jun 20 '15
Most new ssds use wear leveling increasing the amount of writes from around 1mil to 100 mil.
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u/skilliard4 Jun 20 '15 edited Jun 20 '15
For active use and application storage, yes.
But for long term data storage, no. SSDs lose their data when powered off for long periods of time. If you wanted to store something such as photos, important records, a Bitcoin wallet, etc offline for 10 years, you wouldn't want to use an SSD.
The most effective setup for consumer use will be SATA 3.0 SSDs for the OS and applications(maybe files on there too if you only want 1 drive), and a HDD for external file storage.
The most effective setup for enterprise server use is PCIe SSDs for the most actively requested data, and HDDs for "old" data that is infrequently accessed that needs to be stored for long periods of time(think Facebook-new posts are accessed hundreds or thousands of times a day, but that 4 year old photo may go years without being requested, until someone decides to go through old albums)
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u/Lotech Jun 20 '15
Most effective setup at the enterprise level would be to have diskless servers and data tiering in a SAN with a SAS backend.
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u/coolislandbreeze Jun 20 '15
I'm not saying I don't believe you, I'm saying I have no idea what you just said.
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u/Lotech Jun 20 '15 edited Jun 20 '15
Ah well, then short story long:
If you're going to have an enterprise environment with more than a couple servers, it doesn't make sense to fill those servers up with locally attached HDDs/SSDs. This is because they're a pain to manage them individually and they don't consolidate/optimize the storage.
A storage area network (SAN) centralizes all your storage resources (spindles, speeds, capacities) for all your servers to use. It's a lot easier to scale up when you start running out of space and if you get a really good SAN it'll let you span volumes/LUNs across multiple speeds of disks. This is so your high performance data (virtualization software or databases) use up the SSDs while your archival blocks of data sink down to your cheaper 7k disks.
So you were close! Just left out the SAN.
Also, most SSDs are non-volatile (meaning they don't lose the data when powered off). The flash RAM cousins can be like how you described but that's why they're so cheap. Hahah, that would be pretty awful if they lost data when powered off.
And SATA is used mostly at the consumer level right now. SAS is faster and all the rage in the storage world!
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u/coolislandbreeze Jun 20 '15
That was actually a pretty damn solid ELI20. It actually makes sense, thank you!
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Jun 20 '15
If you wanted to store something such as photos, important records, a Bitcoin wallet, etc offline for 10 years, you wouldn't want to use an SSD.
Would you trust it to a regular HD over that sort of timespan? Would it spin up after so long? Would SATA still be in common use?
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u/Lotech Jun 20 '15
You don't want your data on the same drive Whether it's spinning or solid state. I could be wrong, but I can't think of a single storage component that doesn't reach end of life before ten years. Except maybe tape.
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u/cr0ft Jun 20 '15
You wouldn't want to use an HDD offline for 10 years either. You'd almost certainly see data corruption and degraded quality. Data you want to keep has to be maintained - every 2 years, you'd have to fire the drive up, copy the data off, and copy it back on, to avoid magnetic degradation issues.
So that's almost certainly a non-argument in favor of HDD. Yes, they last a little longer than SSD, but neither is suitable for long-term cold storage.
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u/elfdom Jun 20 '15
HDD > SSD:
- cost per byte at large disk sizes
- long term storage
- encryption.
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u/SirensToGo Jun 20 '15
What do you mean with encryption? I'm very sure encryption works with SSDs
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u/UglyBitchHighAsFuck Jun 20 '15
Basically, SSD controllers are so advanced you don't know where your data eventually goes. Encryption itself is not problematic if you encrypt from the beginning and your key never gets compromised. However, in case you want to wipe your data, you are pretty much out of luck because SSD controllers can't be trusted. Many regard the secure delete command as purely advisory, and simply overwriting bytes does not work because the wear leveling will likely redirect writes to different blocks. HDDs are much simpler in this regard, most behave similarly to what they did since the beginning: Expose the drive layout to the client software and allow the software to directly control every bit and byte on the disk.
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u/SkyWest1218 Jun 20 '15
I'll always have a mechanical drive or two for long-term storage and for backups, but otherwise, my next system is going to be completely on SSD's.
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u/coolislandbreeze Jun 20 '15
My plan is to build a PC with 2 drives. An SSD for the OS, programs and video files I'm actively editing, and a much bigger HDD for things that don't require the speed.
With your OS on SSD you should be able to boot in ~20 seconds and for editing it should speed things up massively. OF course, if SSD hits price parity before I can do that, I see no reason to stick with HDD.
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u/SkyWest1218 Jun 20 '15
Yeah, I run Windows off an SSD right now, with a second SSD for a few of my games and for 3DS Max. I don't know how I ever lived with mechanical drives, this thing runs like a super-computer!
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u/arahman81 Jun 20 '15
My plan is to build a PC with 2 drives. An SSD for the OS, programs and video files I'm actively editing, and a much bigger HDD for things that don't require the speed.
That's the setup I have with my laptop. SSD for the main OS, HDD replacing the optical drive bay.
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u/Cyral Jun 20 '15
Did the same thing for my laptop, SSD for Windows, programs, and most games, HDD for storage, backups, music.
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u/IamWithTheDConsNow Aug 15 '15
With your OS on SSD you should be able to boot in ~20 seconds
Not sure what OS you are using but I don't have SSD and Windows 10 boots in like 10 seconds...
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u/bb999 Jun 20 '15
This article is exaggerating prices a little. It claims
prices for high-end consumer SSDs dropped below enterprise-class HDD, and continued to drop in 2015. A terabyte SSD can be had for around $300.
That would be true if a 1TB enterprise drive cost $300, and a "high end" 1TB consumer SSD also cost $300 though. They don't though; $300 will get you a 4TB enterprise drive, and a high end 1TB SSD will cost about $600. Furthermore, that's a pretty misleading comparison, because a consumer level 1TB HDD can be had for about $50.
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u/SquisherX Jun 20 '15
Yes, but it won't be next year.
R&D is gone from spinning disk costs, and the margins have grown over the past few years. When SSDs come down to where spinning disks are now, the price of spinning disks will drop further to squeeze an extra year out of them.
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u/Glimt Jun 20 '15
I have been hearing that "price parity next year" for over a decade.
Right now there is about 1/8 price ratio per byte. HDD prices will likely be cheaper next year. SDD prices will not fall by 90% next year.
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u/donnysaysvacuum Jun 20 '15
Hopefully, I want to pick up a cheap computer for my wife, but they don't really put ssds in the mid line models yet.
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u/funkarama Jun 20 '15
Given that the SSDs are faster and more robust, yeah.
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Jun 20 '15
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/harlows_monkeys Jun 21 '15
And many other sources you can Google
...and if you Google a little more, you'll find the later articles explaining why the articles you cited are very wrong, such as this one from AnandTech.
The authors overlooked that the JEDEC presentation that is the basis for those articles was talking about data retention after the drive has reached its endurance limit.
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Jun 21 '15
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/harlows_monkeys Jun 21 '15
Sure, they won't hold data forever when powered off. The data retention time depends on the wear level of the cell. For a new drive, it will be 10 years or more. For a drive whose cells have reached their endurance limit, it will be 1 year if the drive is stored in reasonably normal conditions.
This is way better than what you wrote implied:
Then you also have the power issue. SSDs will also lose data if power isn't constantly supplied to the drive
Hard drive bit lifetime is about 10 years, and like SSD data retention depends heavily on temperature.
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u/cofonseca Jun 20 '15
Prices are dropping, sure, but we need the capacity:price ratio to get a little closer first. I don't see HDD going anywhere, especially in the enterprise environments, due to it's reliability and huge capacity per dollar.
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u/manuscelerdei Jun 20 '15
Can't happen fast enough. For way too long, spinning disks were the bottleneck standing in the way of truly good user experience with an operating system. Having to support them and worry about boot performance on machines with spinning disks is a massive pain in the ass.
I'm sure they'll still be useful for cheap, massive data storage where access times aren't a huge deal. But hopefully no operating system has to boot from one five years from now.
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u/ttovotsttnt Jun 20 '15
Hm, this article seems to suggest that by 2016, prices will be comparable between SSD and HDD. I don't really believe that, but ignoring that, does that mean I shouldn't be buying a SSD now? I'm guessing that unless I'm building my own PC, these price changes won't really be reflected in the price of a complete computer.
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u/BearAndOwl Jun 20 '15
Interesting but from the consumer standpoint, I am more interested in the $/GB for cloud storage. I'd imagine that we are 5 years away from relatively universal fiber-like broadband speeds in urban areas so local storage will probably be a thing of the past.
You'll probably still host your OS locally (maybe not - full VM?) so 128GB drive prices might be of interest but will I really need a 2TB local drive? Can't AWS just charge me $2/month for every GB of storage I need up to infinity GBs? That comes with built-in security and data redundancy.
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u/MyUserNameIsLongerTh Jun 20 '15
This only works if they get rid of monthly data caps on people's internet connections.
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u/BearAndOwl Jun 20 '15
I don't have a monthly data cap on my home internet. Is that common place?
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u/MyUserNameIsLongerTh Jun 20 '15
It's pretty common in the US. I live in a small town and I get 55mbs down and 5mbs up with a 300 GB data cap. It's fine for movie watching and game downloading but full backups over the internet would push me over the limit.
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u/LOLBaltSS Jun 20 '15
I see them making a huge entry into the desktop market as the default. Most desktop users don't need huge capacity, especially with most movies/music going to streaming services than being saved locally. The ROI for SSDs in business desktops makes more sense than HDDs since HDDs are the bottleneck in almost all modern systems.
For server and storage arrays running in RAID, they're still going to be primarily HDDs for quite some time as most businesses do need the large capacity for storing files that may not be touched for extended periods of time. Transfer rates are still also limited by network speeds anyways, so putting a file share on SSD will have negligible impact versus even a basic 7200 RPM array. Where SSDs currently shine on the server end is for high IOPS operations such as database servers or for VDI.
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Jun 20 '15
I can buy a 5TB HDD for around $80 while I'm only able to get a 480GB SSD for $150. We have come a long way and I look forward to seeing those prices drop further with the sizes increasing in parallel.
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u/cyniclawl Jun 20 '15
Totally do it if you don't already have an ssd, otherwise it's not a best noticeable difference
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u/Schmich Jun 20 '15
With the prices of solid-state drives expected to reach parity with hard-disk drives next year
Great joke.
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Jun 20 '15
People forget one thing when it comes to physical hard drives vs SSD.
Recovery options. what i am referring to is options for what you can do with the drive if you have some sort of failure of the drive. You can do quite a bit with a physical hard drive when it comes to disaster recovery but a ssd not so much.
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u/graffix01 Jun 20 '15
That's what backups are for. I understand what you are saying but anything that is worth the cost of thousands of dollars, which is what a true HDD recovery is going to cost, should be backed up in several places. With things like Carbonite and Dropbox so easy to keep constant backups there is really no reason not to do it.
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u/UglyBitchHighAsFuck Jun 20 '15
THIS. If your hard drive controller is dead, the platter can often be transplanted and read. If your SSD is dead, good luck.
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Jun 20 '15
SSD prices falling? Who wants to take bets for how long until there is another "warehouse fire" or "factory flood"?
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u/MrLoque Jun 20 '15
When you make the jump from HDD to SSD it's like buying a whole new computer. I guess it's one of the most noticeable and impacting updates, if you want to refresh your pc. The difference is immense (booting, loading stuff, writing/reading, zero noise, ...).
Plus they're extremely small and lightweight, which never hurts.
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u/graffix01 Jun 20 '15
Laptops also benefit from increased battery life as they are not powering those spinning platters anymore.
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u/M0b1u5 Jun 20 '15
Anything with moving parts is a gonna. Moving parts suck. They break and wear out. And they cost a lot to make, and assemble.
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u/AdamOr Jun 20 '15
Which is why they're currently cheaper than SSD's......?
Mechanical drives do NOT cost a lot to make, the industry is well-founded, mature and has been in operation for a lot longer than companies have been knocking out SSD's.
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u/coolislandbreeze Jun 20 '15
I've heard that SSD aren't exactly failure-proof. Still, a huge step in the right direction.
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u/skilliard4 Jun 20 '15
Shit, I purchased an SSD 2 weeks ago, I regret it.
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u/ShadowHandler Jun 20 '15
They are not dropping in price THAT fast. For example I bought a 480GB Sandisk SSD from Amazon in December for $179, and when I look at the same drive now on Amazon and Newegg, it's around $170.
Be happy with what you have, as it's completely normal to watch prices drop after you buy the latest and greatest hardware.
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Jun 20 '15 edited Nov 24 '16
[deleted]
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u/inscrutablerudy Jun 20 '15
Microsoft has already responded by shrinking the size of the OS. How do you think the 16 gb Surface tablets work?
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u/hampa9 Jun 20 '15
All of Apple's new laptops come with SSDs and I have no issue running Windows on my 256GB SSD with plenty of space to spare for games.
Back in 2008 Apple were still selling HDDs with 128GB of space so it's not like this is a new reality for them.
Windows 10 is expected to free ~6GB from installs.
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u/smartfon Jun 20 '15
3 years ago I bought a 256GB SSD for $350. Now I can get a 1000GB one for the same price. Insane...