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Toshiba exec claims hard drives are 7X cheaper than SSDs and will continually evolve for large datacenters
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Haven't hard drives been cheaper per storage amount than SSDs forever? The problem was always that they were slow. I think tape may still be cheaper per storage amount than hard drives, but the speed is abysmal.
Edit: yeah looks like tape is 3x to 4x cheaper than hard drives https://corodata.com/tape-backups-still-used-today
Tape will be around until something better for archival purposes comes around
It lasts significantly longer sitting on the shelf than HDD or SSD by far
I doubt it’s being used for anything other than backups and archiving though
It's criminal that some computers are still sold with mechanical hard drives, but I will still be using them in NAS for years to come. The right technology for the right job.
I only use them in my NAS because I keep ending up with spare ones.
That's where I have a theory about when the hard drive market will collapse. A lot of networked drive setups have 4 drives on RAID 10. With SSDs, those can become 2 drive RAID1, and will be faster. That means SSDs can be 2x the cost to eliminate hard drives as a viable option for a very common use case.
That isn't too far away. Your next NAS upgrade cycle might be with SSDs.
I don't see it in the next upgrade cycle (2 - 5 years). My data needs on a NAS are creeping into 50TB and 100TB at several different installations and unfortunately growing. Gigabit ethernet is my bottleneck not disk i/o.
Yes. SSDs are still excellent for small form factor and speed, but for long term reliable storage in massive volumes, old fasion hard drives are only second to tape storage.
Source: I am in charge of four 1.2PB storage clusters, each consisting of 144 10TB Toshiba drives. The systems write their output to 10TB tapes for data delivery.
Slow is relative.
Are you trying to compile 1GB worth of code or load into memory 4GB of game at startup: absolutelly, they're slow.
Are you serving a compressed 1080p video file from your NAS to your media player over 100Mb/s ethernet: they're more than fast enough. (Or to put things another way, trying to fit your home collection of media files on SSDs in yout NAS is probably not so smart as you can get almost 10x the storage for the same price and the bottleneck in that system isn't the HDD)
You're not going to put a massive production database of a performance criticial system on an HDD but storing "just in case" in one your historic of RAW images files after you've processed them is probably the smart thing to do.
Tapes themselves are cheaper but there's also the upfront cost of the tape drive (we're talking thousands).
Agreed and was looking for this comment.
The medium is cheap but the device to read/write is pricy.
For me, reliability is now the bottleneck.
So many HDs are crapping out after about 5 years. Not saying SSDs are better, but I haven't used any for storage. But it's starting to feel like a subscription plan as I'm rotating hard drives in my server nearly every year now since 2018.
That seems high. Data center drives have a failure rate around 1% per year, even for the worst manufacturer. Not sure how many drives you have or what your workload is like.
Wendel from level 1 techs really likes the multi actuator spinning rust drives. You still wouldn't use them for a boot drive, but they're fast enough to saturate a sata connection, while still being much more dense than ssds. They can achieve 500MB/s sequential speeds, so they're plenty fast for large file access. Most consumers should be using SSD's but if you're dealing with more than a couple terabytes, the best solution isn't as straightforward.
I'd love to see what could be done with current tape storage technology in standard compact cassette format.
There's not much price difference between SSDs and hard drives that are 1 TB or less. Larger than that, hard drives are still much cheaper.