Are Consumer Hard Drives Headed Into History? 681
Lucas123 writes "With NAND flash fabricators ramping up production, per GB prices of solid state drives are expected to drop by more than half by this time next year to about 50 cents. Even so, consumers still look at three things when purchasing a computer: CPU power, memory size, and drive capacity, giving spinning disk the edge. SSD manufacturers like Samsung and SanDisk have tried but failed to change consumer attitudes toward choosing SSDs for their performance, durability and lower power use. But, with the release of the new MacBook Air (sans hard disk drive), Steve Jobs has joined the marketing push and may have the clout to shift the market away from hard drives, even if they're still an order of magnitude cheaper."
Steve Jobs has clout (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish I wasn't making this up
Then stop making stuff up! ;-)
I think you would feel better about it if you were in a more subjunctive mood.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason there's resistance to SSDs is that they're JUST TOO EXPENSIVE.
I'm still waiting on the long-term failure data. The takes-years-to-collect-real-life data, not the "how many read-write cycles in a laboratory" data.
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I want to know in the real world how long a SSD sitting on a shelf with data will last in general.
General consensus seems to be about 10 years. This data is out there, so I'm not sure why you're still waiting for it...
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:4, Insightful)
No.
In reality, and I wish I wasn't making this up, Apple became the #1 provider of end-user computers in the US *if* you count the iPad.
And McDonald's is the #1 provider of fine cuisine in the US, if you count the Big Mac...
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Funny)
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Speaking as a graduate student who still has a G4 Powerbook, I've loved it but honestly in the past 2 years I've been looking to replace it with something that can actually stream flash videos and show a block of animated gif smilies on a forum reply page without being choppy or using full CPU ... My first choice would be a 13" Macbook Pro, but Apple seems to have left that one useful model on the short bus and gave it a Core 2 Duo while the other pros in the line have decent current-generation chips. I've talked to other friends about it and I know at least 2 other people that would go out and buy a 13" within the next month if only it had a better processor.
The performance difference between a Core 2 Duo and Core i5/i7 is pretty negligible for this use case :P. Even the 1.66Ghz Core Duo in my 4-year-old Mac Mini doesn't choke on web browsing. As I see it, the main advantage to the Core i5/i7 CPUs is that they have an Intel integrated graphics chip on-die that can be used instead of the nVidia graphics in order to conserve battery power.
Mac Minis and web browsing (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, maybe for a very limited set of values of "choke."
I think you'd find the speed increase of my 8-core, 8GB, 3GHz Mac Pro doing web browsing, or one of the new 6- or 12-cores, quite noticeable. Especially when the webmaster of the site being browsed has decided that they're going to dump the processing load on the client.
How do I know? I've got three Mac Minis. One in the music studio, one in the ham shack, and one
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Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Informative)
He's not making up the 20% number...
Source: Study: Mac claims 20 percent US consumer market share [loopinsight.com]
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Then how come Safari (the default browser on a Mac) only has 4-5% share according to web usage statistics?
NPD is a reputable source, but I'd like to see the actual study myself, rather than hearsay.
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Then how come Safari (the default browser on a Mac) only has 4-5% share according to web usage statistics?
NPD is a reputable source, but I'd like to see the actual study myself, rather than hearsay.
Firefox and Chrome. It's the same reason that Internet Explorer browser share is dropping far more rapidly than Windows market share.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you had owned a Dell laptop instead of a MacBook Pro, the thieves wouldn't have even bothered to steal it. =)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Insightful)
How come IE doesn't have 90%+ share? 90%+ of the PCs of the world run Windows ...
See what I did there?
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Funny)
You must be new here. It's sacrilege to run a non-Apple program on a mac when there is an Apple alternative.
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Then how come Safari (the default browser on a Mac) only has 4-5% share according to web usage statistics?
Aside from some using other browsers on Macs, it is also important to recognize that web usage is more a reflection of the installed base than of current sales. (The situation for smartphones was a bit different since there had been an installed base with browsers that saw little use because the experience/functionality was so poor) One has to be pretty careful when drawing conclusions from browser da
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Insightful)
NPD is a reputable source, but I'd like to see the actual study myself, rather than hearsay.
Note that it's 20% of the "consumer retail" market share. That is to say, individual people buying boxed computers from a shop. A rather large percentage of computers on the internet are purchased by companies and either (1) installed at their offices and then used by employees for personal purposes during their breaks or (2) loaned to employees to take home. This happens very rarely with Macs; in my 15 years as an IT consultant I've worked with precisely one company that installed Macs. A smaller, but still nontrivial, percentage of the sales of computers is in markets that aren't typically classified as retail: all those people who either buy components and self build, or buy from local "we sell to trade only, honest" shops, or from computer fairs are probably not included in these stats.
Also, market share != installed base. Note that if the average Mac user changes their machine every 3 years, while the average PC user only bothers upgrading every 6, that will double the market share of Macs relative to their installed base.
lying with statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
"US consumer retail market" means people walking into a store and buying a piece of hardware, and it's expressed in terms of money, not units, and people spend a lot more for their Macs than for their PCs. It probably also includes iPhone, iPad, and iPod, and accessories sales, since it refers to Apple share, not Mac share. In terms of units, their share is still around 4-5% at most.
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No. Apple sells much more than 20% of >$1,000 PCs (something like 90%).
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The percentage, even being at %20, is still largely irrelevant.
He does not have anything near the clout to do this. Sure Apple is a walled garden, and can even be considered a little bit dickish when it comes to the decision to not include popular-still-needed-hardware on it's products, but it does not have the clout to direct the entire hard drive ma
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Online is retail.
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Then those people should learn the meaning of words and use them correctly so that others know what they are talking about.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not hating. We're just tired of getting a story every time Jobs farts.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, wait a second. No, just no. USB came out in 1996, and the iMac in 1998. PCs didn't have USB "for a few years". USB stuff just happened to start coming out because there were enough computers with USB. I remember 1998, pal. I bought a SCSI scanner then, USB scanners were still unheard of, where I live (Argentina) anyway. And even today, it's still hard to find an USB keyboard here. I was surprised that a local computer store had about 10 different PS/2 keyboards and just one USB. Most motherboards still come with PS2 and serial anyway.
Motherboards DON'T have "that damn space" bullshit you said. For the last 15 years it's been built into a single chip (the super IO), and the ATX connector space has lots of space for the legacy ports. And manufacturers. And here's one you might like: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121388&Tpk=dp55wb [newegg.com]
What's next? Ditching Java apps just because Apple deprecated their JVM? EWWWW legacy? deprecated? Sounds to me like OLD. Who wants old stuff in their shiny new computer? Not me, I have a Mac. It's not a computer, it's a lifestyle, a fashion statement.
Try to stay away out of the RDF, buddy.
Re:Steve Jobs has clout (Score:5, Informative)
You're missing the point. Adding USB wasn't the important factor - removing the other ports was. PCs had USB from a year or two earlier (although only the ones with Widnows 95 OSR 2.1 could actually use it), but they also had serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports. If you bought a new PC in 1998, it came with a PS/2 keyboard, a PS/2 mouse, and typically a parallel printer. It also had two USB ports doing nothing.
This meant that peripheral manufacturers wanting to sell to PC users just kept producing the same old stuff they had been making. Ones wanting to sell to Mac users had to support USB. Once they'd done that, they had a peripheral that also worked with PCs, so it was in their interests to try selling it to PC users as well (tiny marketing cost, potentially a large return). Before 1998, USB stuff in shops was quite rare. After, it was common and for the first year or two most of it used that ugly translucent plastic so that it looked like it was designed for an iMac.
Apple also, accidentally, did something else that spurred the USB peripheral market - they released the iMac with the worst mouse ever designed (and a pretty crappy, but tolerable, keyboard). This meant that a large proportion of people who bought an iMac wanted to buy a new USB mouse.
Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:3, Interesting)
I've got an SSD in my laptop, and I couldn't be happier. Its easily lengthened the life of my laptop by about 2 years.
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Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:5, Funny)
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makes you feel like a 14 year old girl again
Speaking as the parent of two teenage girls, feeling like a 14 year old girl is not a good thing at all.
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:5, Funny)
feeling like a 14 year old girl is not a good thing at all.
Not once I'm through with them.
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You're close. It's actually Cali-speak. It's just missing some commas to indicate the right pauses.
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How's the noise? My sister has a one of those early, pre nvidia macbooks, and is quite miffed at how loud it can be. Does switching to SSD help?
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:5, Informative)
AND saved $$$$.
Just for fun, I just priced a 17" mac laptop (I like my full-sized keyboards). With a 512gig SSD, it's $3,628.00
For the same price, you can buy, not one, not two, not 4, but 6 17" laptops. plus a second 640gig hd for each of them.
So, for the price of ONE 17" mac with half a terabyte of SSD, you get:
On top of that, if one breaks, you would have 5 spares. Plus lots of place to store backups
Think about being able to carry a lan party in one of those large recyclable shopping bags.
And you won't have to just imagine having your own Beowulf cluster.
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Ok and how many random 4K write/read IOPs could you get even if you did RAID-1? A few hundred. How many can you get with an SSD? 10,000+. Even if you took all 12 hard drives in your scenario and put them in a RAID configuration you'd still not match the performance of a single SSD. Also no one is saying go out and get a 512GB SSD which is on the bleeding edge of consumer SSD. You can easily find a 64GB SSD for around $125. Also no one needs to buy an Apple notebook.
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:5, Informative)
Um... Small random reads are the primary pattern in desktop usage. Are you a complete idiot? That's the SUBJECT under discussion, not dumb shit like sequential transfer speed. That's only important for marketing people who like big numbers with MB on the end.
No, small random reads are NOT the primary pattern in desktop usage. Almost NO file on your file system is under 4k in size, which is the "chunk" size for most 8mb to 64mb hd caches.
Even DOS didn't have average file sizes that small. And many of today's hard drives also have implemented the elevator algorithm in hardware, so head seek times, especially for small random files, are much less of an issue than they once were.
4 drives with 32mb hardware caches will outperform your sdd in every scenario, including small random writes - especially since, for the same capacity, they can be grossly under-stroked - limited to the outermost few tracks. Understroke a 1TB drive to 32 gigs and its' seek times drop to almost zero. Throw 4 of them into a 4-drive setup as /, /home, /var, and /srv, and you'll beat the 128-gig SDD in small file r/w, and massively beat it in large file r/w.
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No, small random reads are NOT the primary pattern in desktop usage. Almost NO file on your file system is under 4k in size, which is the "chunk" size for most 8mb to 64mb hd caches.
I differ in that respect. Not sure if my use is typical, but here's a dump of the counts for the smallest file sizes in my home directory:
.* --apparent-size -a 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -k 2,2 | head -n 10
~$ du
40006 1
11237 2
6862 3
4831 4
3554 5
2964 6
2783 24
2619 7
2477 8
2229 22
In other words, the highest frequency file size is 1
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you lie about HDD vs SSD random read/writes:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2968/intel-s-x25-v-kingston-s-30gb-ssdnow-v-series-battle-of-the-125-ssds/6 [anandtech.com]
Even the 10K high-end pricey WD Velociraptor has a pathetic 0.8MB/throughput for random writes. Meanwhile a value level Intel SSD gets 35MB/sec throughput for random writes? How do you think putting 4 of those high end HDD together will make then faster than an SSD? The fact is they won't.
Plus if you think an SSD is a waste, why would you even entertain the suggestion of capping a 1TB HDD to 32GB? Do you have an benchmarks proving this is faster and really drops seeks to near zero?
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64 gb SSD won't even hold my operating system
WTF OS do you have? I have Win7 Ultimate here installed and (reaosnably) happy on a 10GB partition. In retrospect, 20GB would have been more appropriate.
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:4, Informative)
Why the hell do you want a half a terabyte of SSD? Because it's the most expensive offering?
RAID 0 and RAID 1 are nowhere near SSD in terms of power consumption, throughput and IOPS.
In today's computing environment, RAM is plentiful, CPU cycles are cheap, storage is abundant yet IOPS will bring even a high end machine to it's knees.
I was migrating some data from an old laptop (2 year old MacBook Pro) to a new one (MacBook Pro with a small SSD). I don't know what it's like on Windows or lInux, but on OS X once you're hitting 500-800 IOPS on a 7.2k hard drive everything slows to a crawl. You CPU utilisation can be idle, your RAM usage can be well within the amount of physical RAM installed yet too many IOPS and you soon can't do much with the machine.
On this new machine, I was copying a mail spool to it (mbox folders) installing software and Spotlight (full text indexing) was running in the background. This machine (a laptop mind you, not a workstation) was pulling in 7500 IOPS and not breaking a sweat - it was quick, responsive and completely usable for interactive tasks.
In order to get 7k IOPS from spinning media, you're talking about Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage arrays costing tens of thousands of dollars.
I, for one, am more than happy to put up with a small boot drive (40-60GB) if it's an SSD and move my bulk storage to spinning media. After that experience I now carry a laptop with a 64GB SSD and a 500GB FireWire external drive for bulk data and I couldn't be happier with that setup. I've even made the boot drive (and apps drive) in my workstation a small SSD, with bulk data on spinning media. I can boot this machine in mere seconds and launch half a dozen apps at login and it just doesn't slow down.
If you haven't used a machine with an SSD in real life, don't knock it until you've tried it.
It used to be that adding more RAM to a machine was the cheapest way to speed it up as just about all machines used to be (more or less) RAM bound. Now it's IOPS and adding an SSD is the cheapest way to have a more responsive machine. Older machines will potentially benefit even more than a newer machine as the relative speedup can be even greater...
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So now, instead of IOPS, your primary goal is sustained throughput. A 4-drive setup gives you the same read/write throughput as an Intel X25 SSD (which claims 4x the throughput of a regular hd, and 2x the throughput of a fast hd, so the math is really simple), but much more bang for the buck.
Re:Spinning disks have left this customer (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess you aren't a developer, if you can get by with only one box.
Compatibility testing, running my own svn/ftp/http/ssh servers (separate from the ones I run on my main machine), keeping personal stuff (email, etc) isolated on one machine, business email on another, these are all valid reasons to have a second computer
Tom, I'd like to introduce you to something that could radically change the way you work:
Virtualization: VMware, VirtualBox...
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It would be pretty pointless putting all your torrented movies/music onto SSD. Leave those on a HD or put them on DVD. SSDs are an advantage where the superior speed is useful. Boot disks etc.
ridiculous story (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ridiculous story (Score:5, Insightful)
have a lot shorter life expectancy than current HDD's
Citation needed.
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What I am basing my assumptions on is where the manufacturer puts its money where its mouth is. Both SDD and HDD's have 3 year warranties.
The MTBF values could be horseshit, but are equal or better on modern SSD's as well.
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3 years? Is that much? My 80GB IDE disk is still chugging along just fine after 8 years.
Re:ridiculous story (Score:5, Informative)
Not true – Intel's current 160GB SSDs, if written continuously at their maximum write speed will last 10 years, that's twice what most hard disks last. Add to that that life span increases linearly with capacity on SSDs, and you're in very very good territory
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We, collectively speaking, long ago decided that storage should be cheap, and anybody who wanted reliability could just buy more and play with redundancy.
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I was under the impression that with the wear leveling algorithms these drives use, and the higher quality chips used for SSDs, the lifetime under typical laptop usage is expected to far exceed a spinning platter drive.
Makes sense, really. Most disk access is reading (booting the OS, opening applications, loading libraries, viewing images/videos, listening to music), and this doesn't wear out the memory cells. Unless you're doing heavy disk work like video editing or serious photography, or running some sor
No kidding (Score:4, Interesting)
In the long term? Yes I'm sure flash, or some other solid state, based storage will replace magnetic disks. It is just plain faster, not to mention other benefits. Our storage subsystem is by far the slowest thing we've got, improvements would be welcome.
In the short term? Hell no. SSDs are useful in special cases, but not for general use and not showing any signs of reaching a crossover soon.
I mean if I wanted to meet my storage needs with SSDs only, I'd have to spend on the order of $10,000. Granted, my needs for storage exceed most users, but still. It costs me all of about $500 to get them met with HDDs. Even if I left backups to magnetic media and just went with SSDs for primary storage I'd still be out about $4000. I could replace every component in my system, including my professional NEC monitor, for less than that.
Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to have SSDs, but they have to come down in price a shitload before they are realistic for the regular desktop. Right now, SSDs have 3 uses:
1) Systems that don't need a lot of storage and space/power are a premium. The Air is a good example. If you can live with 64GB of storage, then flash is ok price wise. Still expensive per GB, but since you have few GBs it isn't bad. If all you are doing is running basic apps then that works fine. You can't hold much media or large games or whatnot, but not all systems need that.
2) Systems where performance beyond what reasonable HDD solutions can offer is needed. Audio production sees this. New virtual instruments are getting extremely complex. Tons and tons of samples played back in heavy layers. You can't load them all in RAM (without amazing amounts of RAM) and they just overload disks when you try to stream it all. SSDs can be useful here. While a $10,000-20,000 fiber channel array would probably do the trick, a $4000 SSD will also do the trick and not only cost less but be easier to deal with.
3) Ultra high end storage solutions that need performance beyond anything HDDs can offer. With databases, you can run in to this. Heck they had SSDs back before they were popular. Expensive, expensive devils, but tons of performance. You need this to reach certain performance levels, no amount of disks can handle the IOPs you need. This is where cost just isn't an issue, performance is.
That's pretty much it. For cheap systems, HDDs reign supreme. They cost less than flash and that is that. For higher end systems, you end up needing more storage than flash can provide at a reasonable cost.
Before we see flash replace HDDs we will probably see augmentation. Intel, Adaptec, LSI, all are supporting SSDs as a cache for HDDs on various RAID controllers. If this comes down to consumer price levels, could be useful. 1TB of storage for $100 and then $100 more for some flash cache would be doable for many people.
It'll be a long time before SSDs are the way most people go, however. It is too bad, I want solid state storage now, but there is a big, BIG price gap that has to be covered.
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not only the bigger size and lower price that makes HDDs attractive. The worst case random write time, for example, is generally far worse for SSDs, and if you absolutely need to commit within a guaranteed time frame, SSDs might not be an option even if they're much faster on average, and orders of magnitudes faster for random reads.
Don't underestimate the power of a rack of short-stroked 15k rpm drives.
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Not quite:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157-9.html [tomshardware.com]
Yes it does show that 4 short stroked SAS 15K RPM drives are beating out a single SSD by getting 2500 IOPs in the DB test. But those are older SSDs. Compare to newer SSDs in similar/same benchmark:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/corsair-ssd-roundup_6.html#sect0 [xbitlabs.com]
You will see they are bottoming out @ 4K IOPS in worst case scenarios.
Also contrary to what was suggested earlier, short stroking does not make HDD seek time
I tend to hold on to my tech for years... (Score:5, Insightful)
Things like iPods, smart phones, and PDAs are cheaper and easily replaced in whole, but I wouldn't want to face a replacement cost for a laptop.
I would cringe to do secure erases (writing zeroes) to a flash memory drive (solid state drives or Apple's flash "drive" module in the new Airs), knowing I was prematurely killing my storage life. Platter-based disks with sudden motion sensors will still be my huckleberry for a few more years...
Re:I tend to hold on to my tech for years... (Score:5, Informative)
I admit I have never owned an SSD and therefore I might be ignorant. Having said that, to the best of my knowledge SSDs use the same standard connectors (SATA) as spinning hard drives. If/when an SSD fails you should be able to buy either another SSD or a spinning hard drive as a drop-in replacement. This situation is no different and no more proprietary than mechanical drives.
When a question like that is so immediate and obvious, it does occur to me that I have probably misunderstood you. I don't know if maybe laptops are a special case. Can you explain this for me?
That really would be an issue. I'll note that usually a secure erase is more thorough than merely overwriting a file with zeroes. It often involves multiple passes that overwrite it with random data, either exclusively or in conjunction with overwriting it with zeroes. What I don't know is whether that's necessary for an SSD, though I do know it's often done that way for spinning hard drives.
On a desktop you could balance wear-and-tear and the need for secure deletion by having two drives. You could have an SSD with the operating system and applications installed on it for performance and then a larger mechanical drive for data storage. For a laptop that doesn't sound so practical, unfortunately. Perhaps on a laptop you'd want to have a small partition for sensitive data that uses filesystem encryption. That way sensitive data is never written to the device in plaintext and wouldn't need to be overwritten just to protect your data from someone who obtains the drive.
We heard that about CD-Rs, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when CD-Rs were new, we were hearing how they'd last for well over 50 years. Now we're finding that CD-Rs last only 3 to 5 years, and that's when they're stored in conditions that are near-perfect.
It's pointless to take media lifespans measured in decades as anything other than marketing bullshit, especially given that the computer industry itself has only been around for about 65 years.
Only five times more than magnetic... (Score:5, Insightful)
$0.50 per GB is still about five times the cost of a magnetic drive. Put another way, each user has the choice between paying $50 and $250 for the same amount of storage. Does anyone think there is a real competition here?
And of course, that's by next year. How much denser/cheaper will magnetic drives be by then? Please stop with these "year of the flash drive" posts.
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If they only need a modest amount of storage, say 40 GB, it could be cheaper. There's a lower limit on the price that you can buy a magnetic drive for and that's stayed pretty constant.
Re:Only five times more than magnetic... (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you buy any computer on the market with only 40 gig in it anymore?
Look, the only way tiny hard drives make sense is for Grandma who doesn't use computers for anything but email and web surfing. Apple is intent on pushing these people to the cloud with iPads and diskless notebooks, and you could make a good case that the cloud is exactly where some of these people belong.
But that also imposes a network burden and cost that not everyone can afford. Streaming everything is just wrong on so many levels, and doing it today in spite of current rock bottom storage (spinning) prices is crazy - but I digress.
In a corporate world fast booting SSD machines can latch onto the network for all of their storage needs, thats fine, because the corporate net can probably handle the load.
But for the computer savvy home user or small developer, with a significant music collection, a ton of video, photos, and a couple major projects to work on, SSD is not going to cut it at today's prices when compared to spinning disks. Too small. Too expensive. To fragile.
40 Gig? My phone has 40 Gig.
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But they scale down, so you don't actually have to get as much storage in the SSD if you don't need it. Hard drives have a minimum capacity before you don't get any savings by going smaller.
TRIM for Mac OS X? (Score:2)
File under (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, they're headed to history, but that might take another ten years.
Not for quite some time (Score:4, Insightful)
Certain technologies have pretty long shelf lives - Hard Drives are one of those. Tape Backups and CDs are another.
Sure SSDs are getting cheaper, but so are hard drives. Hard drives are now a nickel a GB, half the price of just a year ago. The best SSD prices still look like they're 40x as expensive.
Sure, they'll take over the small drive / low power / slim profile market, especially for expensive hardware (SteveJobsthankyouverymuch). But as we do more with large audio/video/photo files, out appetite for storage is still a 5-10 years away for cost effective SSDs at TODAY's rate of use.
Just look at the usenet. DivX was king, with only hard core nuts going with full DVD rips. Then HD was here and everything was recompressed to 720p x264. Now it's mostly 1080p x264 recodes and straight 26GB AVC rips. Our use is definitely not slowing down, and spinning platters is the only thing that can give us that kind capacity for the foreseeable future.
Money (Score:2)
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s/'at the same or even close'/'at the same price or even close'/
Consumers are also easily wowed by buzzwords... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's invent a buzzword for SSDs like "PowerStream Boost w/ Turbo AI", makes no fucking sense but people will gobble it up even if they have no clue what it really means. Ultimately SSDs just need to be marketed correctly to educate customers that there is a performance improvement and that you do not need the larger hard drive. A lot of consumers could probably even get by with a 64 or 128GB SSD. So just market it as "20,000 Operations Per Second!!!! Thanks to PowerStream Turbo. Stores up to 20,000+ music
In short, NO. (Score:2)
Consumers go for numbers. This one has 1.5TB and this one has 200GB. Well the 1.5TB *MUST* be better, so I"m going to buy that so I can check my mail and surf teh intarwebz.
Additionally, SSD's aren't a panacea yet. Sure they're fast but they do have a finite life and as far as that goes they are best for short term storage rather than long term, and vice versa for hard drives except for the finite life part.
There's my 2 inflated-into-uselessness cents.
Headed off of desktops / laptops, perhaps... (Score:2)
...but I can definitely see hard disks still having a role as external backup or archival storage for years to come. The amount of data (photos, music, video) that people are accumulating will guarantee this!
-MT.
This is silly. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is very much like the blue-ray issue. It's not surprising folks aren't interested in jumping on board because, frankly, there is no real reason to run out and BUY it.
CD's and DVD's had huge adoption because you saw a large improvement on your existing hardware. Bluerays required a new TV to see that improvement - and it was a very expensive TV at the time.
Once people have purchased new TV's (it will probably take another 5-10 years for the older TV's to all fail so that the mom and pops of the world HAVE to go buy a new one) blue-rays will have come way down in price and they'll finally replace the DVD.
Likewise the SSD. I'm sure many other folks are as tired as I am regarding these silly... strike that... STUPID press releases trying to push their sale.
They will be bought when there is a need. There is none at this point, except in very specific applications, like the high-vibration atmosphere at manufacturing plants.
Shame on Slashdot's editors for continuing to run this hokey marketing BS, and shame on the people who continue to send articles like this. It's quite silly, frankly.
Re:This is silly. (Score:4, Funny)
How's your Intel 80386 is going? It's so reliable that it can still work after 20 years!
SSD give a very noticeable performance boost. However, they cost too much right now, so it's a bit hard to justify them.
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SSDs cost about 5x what equivalent size hard drives cost right now, from a brief look at newegg.
So your 4-disk raid will be at 80% of the price of the SSD. And has the minor problem of not actually fitting in your laptop.
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Because they're orders of magnitude faster than spinning disks? Because they use less power? I just put a $120 SSD in my laptop to replace it's 5200rpm spinner which I was only using 40GB of anyway. It's like a new machine...amazing difference.
As for lifespan, I've had an Intel SSD as my boot drive in my desktop for about a year now and SMART is showing it at 98% lifespan remaining. Check back in 49 years t
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Now, for the failure modes. Let us assume your drive can handle 10 000 writes ( a low estimate ). Modern drives use wear leveling to avoid writing to the same sector all the time. Thus for a 100GB drive you would have to write over a thousand terabytes before it would start to fail, and even then the failure is a "soft" failure in the sense that reads are fine, so your OS should be able to tell you that the writes are failing, allowing you to copy down unsaved work to your USB stick, mail it to yourself, save on another drive , whatever.
You're making a false assumption: That the wear leveling will work perfectly, and spread your writes equally over all blocks. This is only the case if you always delete all files on the drive before writing new ones.
In reality, one of three things will happen:
Internal drives maybe, external no (Score:2)
Disk life and data permanence (Score:5, Informative)
Even with the best wear leveling techniques SSDs will not be able to provide the sort of write cycles that a magnetic drive can withstand. This may not be an issue in most consumer use, but the possibility is there that somebody will hear of a friend of a friend's uncle who had his entire life's work (read: porn collection) wiped out. Something doesn't actually have to be a risk for someone to freak out about it and avoid the technology.
On the other end of the spectrum of usage scenarios: If the disk is not accessed and rewritten occasionally the issue of disappearing data comes up. In a NAND cell the data may be stored by as few as 100 electrons which are trapped in the floating gate of the transistor. Over the years imperfections in the insulation layers or quantum tunneling through the insulation layers (some of which are merely a few atoms thick) results in the electrons escaping and the cell eventually becoming unreadable. The target minimum data retention time for NAND flash is 10 years, but just due to the absurd number of individual transistors in a SSD some data will be lost before that time period. Suboptimal storage temperatures combined with smaller cell sizes and multi-level-cell NAND flash designs tend to make this effect worse.
SSDs may find a home in specialized situations where the pros outweigh the cons, like laptops, but I doubt they will ever displace magnetic hard drives in most applications.
Re:Disk life and data permanence (Score:5, Interesting)
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From a prior discussion here it appears that the retention time will decrease significantly with the newer MLC cells. Rather than 100K rewrite cycles, the 30nm 2-bit/cells are expected to have no more than 3K rewrite cycles; 3-bit/cell chips will have less than 0.5K. http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/HONSHI/20090528/170920/ [nikkeibp.co.jp]
It's been the cost (Score:2)
We often deploy SSD's in our POS terminals and recommend SSD for clients who have busy checkout lanes and performance matters. However, in servers we're still HDD because they are well known and proven technology. SSD's have been on the market long enough that they are starting to prove themselves.
But at home, I much rather have the 1TB HDD drive rather than 128MB SSD for the same price. Same thing in my laptop. I much rather have the extra storage space for the money than performance.
It's not a question of switching... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you looking at the wrong metric? (Score:2)
Hard drives may still be much cheaper in terms of $/GB, but that is only the important number for geeks who actually care about big drives.
The important number for the mass market is the minimum price for a new drive of minimally usable size (call it 32-64 GB for now, it's drifting up, but not terribly quickly by the standards of exponential tech progression). And I suspect that SSDs will surpass HDDs in that metric fairly soon. A hard drive has a certain amount of unavoidable manufacturing complexity and
Fine for a large part of the market... (Score:2)
Yeah, the price differential will be there, but it won't be that big. Another aspect, at Fry's this morning I noticed that disk drives smaller than 250GB are getting harder to find at least at pseudo-retail.
So, most real people/families could get along fine with SSD based systems, particularly if they have a box on their network
That's supposed to be cheap? (Score:2)
50 cents per gb is cheap?
I'm no math genius, but wouldn't that make 1TB be about $500? The absolute hugest spinning-platter harddrive, the just-announced Western Digital Green 3TB drive costs less than HALF that ($239 at newegg) for three times the storage, and a 1tb can be had for $60.
Until SSD prices get much, MUCH closer to that range, and until someone can reassure me that they'll last for several years of heavy use, the only way I'll use one in my desktop is an OS-only-quick-boot drive.
Yeah, it might b
Price per gigabyte isn't really the issue (Score:3, Insightful)
It's simply absolute price for a reasonable amount of storage, which these days is around 250GB. Sure I can pop in multi-TB drives for less money, and I do on the machines that need that kind of storage. But the vast majority of machines out in the world don't really need terrabytes of storage. If you don't actually need the storage then it doesn't really matter whether the drive you have installed is 250G or 2TB.
The comments regarding a SSD's ability to extend the life of older computer hardware, and even brand spanking new computer hardware, are right on the mark. How meaningful is one or two hundred extra dollars if your laptop is nice and responsive with the latest memory-hogging software for another year or two because you popped in that SSD? Not very meaningful at all.
So if the question is when will SSDs really start to take off in the consumer world as more than just a niche item? It will be when the price point for that 250G SSD drive drops to something reasonable, like $100 or so. That price point is not actually that far off.
In terms of durability I gotta laugh at anyone who thinks a hard drive is more durable than a SSD. Hard drives last maybe 5 years. I don't think any of my HDs have lasted more than 7 or so years without accumulating serious enough errors to warrant replacement. There is one key difference... it is possible to recover critical data off a HD many years later whereas data stored in flash is gone once it goes bad (and even that might not be true any more with HD densities getting so high). But those sorts of recovery services (where the HD cannot even be powered up any more without destroying it) cost a lot of $$ and I don't think your average consumer would ever use something like that.
Even a little Intel 40G SSD has a 35TB vendor-specified durability. When configured properly along with the OS that durability rises in excess of 200TB, and that's for the cheaper MLC flash. I have around 10 of the 40G SSDs installed and their durability is riding the 200TB mark based on the wear values returned from SMART over the last 8 months or so. The higher capacity SSDs have higher durabilities. With nominal use (which is 99% of the use cases) we are still talking 10 years plus for a small SSD.
I'm not sure who these people are complaining about SSDs failing on them... maybe they should post the vendors they bought them from along with the actual model. I haven't had a single one of my Intels fail and I'm hitting some of them pretty damn hard. I have not seen any performance drop-off with my SSDs either and, besides, a thrashing HD can only do 2MB/sec or so, even a SSD with a moderate performance dropoff is still going to do an order of magnitude better than a HD with a fragmented filesystem. When it comes right down to it if a performance drop-off is a problem for you, just copy the raw storage off the SSD and then back onto it. Poof, problem solved for another year or three.
TRIM is not really needed. In fact, it can be a liability performance-wise since it isn't a NCQ-capable command. All you really need to do is partition a fresh drive a bit smaller than its rated capacity and you get 95% of the benefit of TRIM without having to deal with it. If you have 120G SSD then create a 110G partition. Congratulations, you now have 95% of what TRIM would get you. It's funny how the rabble keeps screaming the TRIM mantra but it isn't that spectacular a feature.
-Matt
Hybrid SSDs are the Near Term Future (Score:3, Interesting)
Hopelessly Biased Anecdotal Comment... (Score:3, Insightful)
I recently bought an SSD for my laptop, from Corsair. Many people seem to have had a problem with the drive, from it disappearing from the BIOS through to massive data corruption (me, yay).
Yes, it's a sample of 1. But I won't be going near SSD for a hell of a long time - Corsair refuse to admit to a problem, despite them having phased out the model very quickly. SSD has potential, but not at current prices, with their current life-span and failure / fault rates.
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Re:SSD's die more than HD's (Score:5, Insightful)
So from a sample size of 1, you can conclusively prove that SSDs are less reliable than hard drives?
He described his personal experience ("I have had the opposite experience"). He made no claim that it was a representative sample. He did not claim to have proven anything.
... sheesh. Trigger-happy much?
I know that some people make claims they have no ability to back up and pretend they are universal truths. But the GP didn't do that. So
Occasionally manufacturers do make defective products. It's just not possible to have quality control that is 100% perfect on all counts. Assuming his personal experience was not a quality-control issue, it's not possible to ensure that no damage occurred during shipping after the drive left the factory. In other words, shit happens and what he's saying is not some terribly unbelievable story. I would hope that such a product which fails after only 2 months would be covered by warranty. That's the only relevant information the GP did not share with us.
If the manufacturer of his failing SSD offers no reasonable warranty because they are unwilling to stand behind the quality of its products, I'd like to know what company it is so I can avoid buying from them.
Re:The MacBook Air is a poor example to choose her (Score:5, Informative)
In the MacBook Air, the SSD chips are soldered to the logic board. It is not like there is a choice on what kind of drive can be installed. When 64GB isn't enough, there is no way to upgrade. When the SSD gets a fault, there is no drive to swap out - it would be time for a new logic board. With NAND Flash having a finite lifetime, soldering the SSDs to the logic board is a prime example of planned obsolescence. When the SSD dies (when, not if), there is only Apple to turn to, so Apple effectively has vendor lock-in as well, but we have come to expect that from Apple.
No, the SSD's are on a removable board. See http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A1370-Teardown/3745/1 [ifixit.com] (It's the thing that comes off from above the RAM)
Re:The MacBook Air is a poor example to choose her (Score:5, Informative)
The RAM is soldered in
Let me just repeat that, in case it hasn't quite sunk in yet.
The RAM is soldered in/ If you buy it with 2GB, you can't upgrade it. If you buy it with 4 GB, you can't upgrade it.
However, you can upgrade the SSD.
source [eweek.com]
Of course, it comes with a paltry 1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo (soldered in, naturally) or a 1.6 GHz C2D.
Oh, I see that my new talking points have come in from Apple.
You don't need a faster processor because it's still faster than an Atom.
You don't need to upgrade the RAM, because virtual memory on an SSD is so much faster.
Thanks, Apple! My Fanboy subscription still pays dividends!
Re:Show me the price of 3 TB of SSD. (Score:4, Informative)
What ever happened to the hybrid drives that were supposed to be the practical solution...
Seagate Momentus XT drives are available at your favorite computer part reseller in 250GB, 320GB and 500GB flavors.
See also: Wikipedia - Hybrid drive [wikipedia.org] and Seagate's Momentus XT landing page [seagate.com].
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