This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Person with vested interest in X says X will continue to proliferate. More at 11
Also, for some extra context:
Could have said more at 10 (X) 😁
on X (the artist formerly known as Twitter)
Stupid elon
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.
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).
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.
My 8TB Seagate failed a week ago and I was looking into new drives. The cheapest HDD was around 25 EUR per TB (for the 18TB ones) and the cheapest SSD were under 50 EUR per TB. No idea where this "7 times cheaper" comes, maybe from 2015.
I ended up buying a 4TB Crucial MX500 with 4TB for 208 EUR (barely enough for my data, but with some cleanup it will hold a year for sure).
Not only it's faster, it's smaller (fits in the NUC), it's quieter and it consumes much less electricity. I don't think I will ever buy an HDD ever again. Maybe for surveillance recording?
Hamr drives and for data center use. Consumer ssds are made very poorly and even premium drives like a Samsung pro won't hold up in a data center environment. Hard drives on the other hand are basically only data center versions now.
No idea where this "7 times cheaper" comes
Probably from back when Toshiba was relevant
$200 for a refurbished 20TB drive on Newegg
The new ones were on sale for $270 so around $10-15 per TB. The best I can find is $40-50 per TB for SSD. Certainly not 7times more expensive but more like 3-5.
Yea, you can't compare consumer to business. Very different. Article is talking about datacenters, which don't typically rely on consumer grade products.
Maybe regional differences. I've been looking for 3 days last week and have found anything under 20 EUR per TB, more like 25 for non-sketchy sites. For new drives, I'd never buy a refurbished again. SSDs are similarly priced, around 50 per TB for brand named ones.
I bought 18 TB seagate exos x18 drives for about $400 AUD each this year. What price are 18TB SSDs at?
Around AUD $4500
Mr Toshiba needs to fix his numbers!
I mean, with stuff like ZFS, it's a little hard to justify the outlay for all solid-state disk storage when I can build out a large storage array using HDD's and use one mid-size SSD for ZIL and then L2ARC to provide read/write speedups. Who actually cares what the underlying storage mechanism is as long as the dataset is backed up and the performance is good?
This is my thing. I have about 122TB of spinning metal (with the same as an offsite backup) with SSDs as ZIL and L2ARC. And it's awesome. HDDs I think will genuinely be important for for the foreseeable future.
Power consumption, noise, durability...
As a newb I hope one day in my journey, I can look back at this and say "I finally understand this." Til then thank you, magic man
Don't let your dreams be dreams, I didn't know Jack shit about nas and just built my own with an old pc, I tried truenas but ended up paying for unraid, it was just easier for my needs.
I admin a datacenter and hard drives are never going anywhere. Same with tapes.
I work tech support for a NAS company and the ratio of HDDs to SSDs is roughly 85-15. Sometimes people use SSDs for stuff that requires low latency, but most commonly they're used as a cache for HDDs in my experience.
Not much point in using SSDs in a NAS if it's there just for holding your files
Lower power usage and smaller and maaaaaaaaybe better reliability. I’d probably do it if it was cost competitive… but it’s not yet.
If the NAS supports tiered storage, you benefit from high I/O performance for things like video editing.
My home storage is a NAS connected over 10GbE, I never bothered trying to play games off of it, but I'll bet they'd run great. Read & write over the network at 10 gigabit is faster on a machine with (separate) RAID arrays of SSDs and HDDs than internal SATA3 connectivity which is kind of bonkers for a home user. Plus that has virtual machines and cloud backups running on the NAS side.
Work for one of the largest and we literally finished phasing out tape this year lol.
In favor of what? Spinning rust, or some other media for archival backups?
It’s going to the cloud. Soon as we find a way to store data in water
Microsoft has already proven that underwater data centers are viable - they just need to scale up now
Project Natick Phase 2 - https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
Use HDDs for linear read/write (files) and SSDs for IOPS (databases)
And yet, at my local microcenter, I couldn't find a hard drive cheaper than an ssd of the same size.
Toshiba's estimates feel reasonable. While the price difference is slowly narrowing compared to the widening performance and form factor gap, it'll certainly continue to be a slow death. The current price ratio would need to be inverted before it makes sense to drop hdds entirely. And even then tapes will still be around forever.
With investments in storage tech being so diverted away from HDD technologies I wonder how much further capacity will get. We're already at the point where disks have many platters and HAMR is finally going to be delivered after decades of "coming soon". It feels like, much akin to processor fab, we're approaching a wall.
