Will the HDD die?

[McRat]

For any of you who have played with the new RAMDRIVEs, err... I mean Solid State Drives, you have noticed what a performance gain there is to be had combined with low power consumption. While the price is still high, it won't be for long.

The HDD mfr's are aware, and those who don't have SSD's are adding them quickly to their catalogs. And it's causing HDD prices to fall rapidly. 500gb drives for under $50.

I suppose that's a no-brainer that SSD will replace mechanical drives, but wait. Think about this. CPU's are already heavily cached, they could actually just use the SDD as RAM with a 64bit system.

Programs will be installed differently. You will actually aim the Instruction Pointer right at the "HDD" sector. Run In Place. Computers will come on INSTANTLY. Nothing to load. As far as it knows, it was never turned off. Memory is static, and is interchangeable with Long Term Storage. What we think of as RAM today will be the cache on the CPU. Shutdown and restart will only mean copying the Cache, IP, and stack to RAM, which would take milliseconds.

I give it 5 years, and the line between RAM and LTS will vanish. It will change the very nature of O/S's.

[andrewabc]

SSD are great, I thought they'd be more mainstream by the first of 2010 (back in May 2009), but due to poor prices (they increased between August->January), it was difficult to buy.

Now that prices are dropping, I can see lots more people buying them.

I have 60gb ocz vertex. Bought in October for $200 free shipping CAD. And that was a major sale. Now it is $180 free shipping, and I'm waiting for a sale to drop it to $150 before buying another (to possibly RAID them in future). Although I'll be keeping my eye on other good sales (ex: 30gb for $100 great for web browsing machine, currently ~$115).
Since the Sandforce controller seems to be replacing Indilinx (speed wise), all the Indilinx stock should get good prices soon.
Will be interesting to see how Intel affects the market this fall. Hopefully not the same way it did last fall with an increase in all SSD prices (partly due to them being released 1 month late and higher nand prices).

Take for example if you buy a netbook, it comes with 5400rpm drive that gets 50mb/s read/write. Spend $100 on a 30gb SSD, and quadruple the speed. Of course have to make sure to buy a netbook that has easy access to HDD area. Not many have that, but some do.

Once good 60gb SSD get to $100 price point (early 2011?), I don't know how anyone could stand a 5400rpm drive for the OS/apps in a netbook/laptop.

I'm not exactly sure about CPU cache overtaking SSD spot, it has been mentioned before, but unlikely to happen (reasonable price) for a long time. Just look at how long it took SSD to get mature (from your basic flash memory usb stick stuff, to the current SSD).

[McRat]

I have a high-end notebook. It is configured with a SSD for O/S and applications, then a conventional (huge) HDD for data storage.

I think this will be the norm on the performance notebooks for near future, perhaps even desktops and small servers.

Then somebody will get rid of the SATA connection, and the barrier between RAM and SDD will be erased.

[andrewabc]

Then somebody will get rid of the SATA connection, and the barrier between RAM and SDD will be erased.

They do have PCI-E SSD that get 800mb/s read, 700mb/s write. 512gb model is around $1800.

[ubunterooster]

For any of you who have played with the new RAMDRIVEs, err... I mean Solid State Drives, you have noticed what a performance gain there is to be had combined with low power consumption. While the price is still high, it won't be for long.

The HDD mfr's are aware, and those who don't have SSD's are adding them quickly to their catalogs. And it's causing HDD prices to fall rapidly. 500gb drives for under $50.

I suppose that's a no-brainer that SSD will replace mechanical drives, but wait. Think about this. CPU's are already heavily cached, they could actually just use the SDD as RAM with a 64bit system.

Programs will be installed differently. You will actually aim the Instruction Pointer right at the "HDD" sector. Run In Place. Computers will come on INSTANTLY. Nothing to load. As far as it knows, it was never turned off. Memory is static, and is interchangeable with Long Term Storage. What we think of as RAM today will be the cache on the CPU. Shutdown and restart will only mean copying the Cache, IP, and stack to RAM, which would take milliseconds.

I give it 5 years, and the line between RAM and LTS will vanish. It will change the very nature of O/S's.
Wow.

well we will have some non-cached drives for servers and the such but...wow.

[BoneKracker]

You'll be able to get a 3-Terabyte HDD this year.

Show me a 3-Terabyte SDD, and I'll be convinced that HDDs are going away.

[ubunterooster]

I can show you a 1TB ssd



1.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rDTrFjR9L._SL160_AA160_.jpg
OCZ SATA II Colossus Cascade 1 TB Solid State Drive OCZSSD2-1CLSC1T (http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Colossus-Cascade-Solid-OCZSSD2-1CLSC1T/dp/B002O0KYM8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=pc&qid=1273713126&sr=1-1)
Buy new (http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Colossus-Cascade-Solid-OCZSSD2-1CLSC1T/dp/B002O0KYM8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=pc&qid=1273713126&sr=1-1): $3,734.99
2 new (http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B002O0KYM8/ref=sr_1_1_olp?ie=UTF8&s=pc&qid=1273713126&sr=1-1&condition=new) from $3,734.99
In Stock

[McRat]

You'll be able to get a 3-Terabyte HDD this year.

Show me a 3-Terabyte SDD, and I'll be convinced that HDDs are going away.

Wow. 3 terabytes is enough space to store:

Name
Address
Phone #
Email Addy


For every human alive, and have enough left over to do most the dead ones.

First HDD I bought was $425 and held 32meg. It was on sale.

Yes, I suppose for storing movies and home videos, there will always be a use for really big drives as secondary storage.

[Lightstar]

SSD are overpriced, and don't they have a maximum read/write/erase passes?
Like usb flash drives, they have XX ammount of times data can be written.

[BoneKracker]

I can show you a 1TB ssd

Yeah, for about $3 K (or more).

Meanwhile, a 1 TB hdd is $75.

Regardless of whether they exist or not, the cost-effectiveness makes the hdd more suitable for many use cases, and this will continue to be true until sdd prices are so low that making hdds becomes completely unprofitable.

Additionally, sdd technology is going to rapidly evolve. The solid-state drive technology in use five or ten years from now may not even resemble what's in use today, so there may be a period where your $3 K ssd is the "slow cheap storage" selling for $75 while the new spherical-quantum-crystal-laser-hologram-drive is your "fast expensive storage" component.

Technology life cycles overlap and span multiple use cases.

[McRat]

SSD are overpriced, and don't they have a maximum read/write/erase passes?
Like usb flash drives, they have XX ammount of times data can be written.

The prices are pretty high for the fast ones. Figure $700 for a 256gb high speed one. But they are about 5 times faster than the fastest HDD's. Speed kills wallets too.

All media has a service life. Not sure how the two compare. Most people don't know CD's and DVD's have storage life and read cycle life.

[BoneKracker]

Wow. 3 terabytes is enough space to store:

Name
Address
Phone #
Email Addy


For every human alive, and have enough left over to do most the dead ones.

First HDD I bought was $425 and held 32meg. It was on sale.

Yes, I suppose for storing movies and home videos, there will always be a use for really big drives as secondary storage.
Yeah, I was there too. My first PC didn't even have a hard drive (known then as a "Winchester Drive").

And tell me you didn't say, "Whoah!! This thing has a 32 MB hard drive!!" "Holy *$%#! That's *%*&*%^ huge!!!" I'll never need that much space. :P

Am I right?

Computer capacity is like house size -- no matter how much you've got, users and developers eventually manage to need more.

[BoneKracker]

All media has a service life. Not sure how the two compare. Most people don't know CD's and DVD's have storage life and read cycle life.

And the pattern has generally been for storage devices/media to become obsolete long before they fail mechanically.

(I realize people experience hard drive failures, but I've never had one in 27 years of computer use and don't know what people are doing to make that happen to themselves.)

I remember a big debate a couple years back about whether it was worth buying a flash drive (thumb drive) because they had a limited life. Well, the 256 MB thumb drives that were a couple of hundred dollars just a couple years ago are now given away for the advertising value of what's printed on them (like cheap pens). Who cares if it's going to wear out in three years -- it'll probably be obsolete by then.

[McRat]

Yeah, I was there too. My first PC didn't even have a hard drive (known then as a "Winchester Drive").

And tell me you didn't say, "Whoah!! This thing has a 32 MB hard drive!!" "Holy *$%#! That's *%*&*%^ huge!!!" I'll never need that much space. :P

Am I right?

Computer capacity is like house size -- no matter how much you've got, users and developers eventually manage to need more.

Absolutely FREAKIN HUGE!!!. But AutoCAD was under 1 meg, a mouse driver was 2k, and Lotus 123 was 114,000 bytes. DOS 3.x was about 1,100k including all utilities? 32 megabytes was stupid big.

[Paqman]

SSD are overpriced, and don't they have a maximum read/write/erase passes?
Like usb flash drives, they have XX ammount of times data can be written.

In practical terms, so do all drives. Rotating hard drives aren't exactly reliable. They're the least reliable components in your PC, in fact.

[BoneKracker]

I don't know about that. I'd say laptop batteries are.

Optical drives, power supplies, and graphics cards are pretty unreliable too. Anything that moves or handles a lot of power is prone to failure over time.

I've got a nine-year old machine (a Power Macintosh) that has been running almost constantly since I bought it, with the original hard drive. The funniest part is that original hard drive is an IBM Deskstar, one of the most notorious hdds in history (a.k.a. "DeathStar").

[McRat]

The most common cause of HDD failures that I've seen have been software/firmware related. Actual media failure is rare.

I have a 120mb HDD that has been in constant use for ~20 years. It's in a Zeos computer that is a data-logger for a piece of lab equipment. It was one of the first 80486-33DX computers out there. I recently retired an IBM PS2 computer (Microchannel) that was even earlier design, with a 40mb drive.

But then again, I have 8" floppy drive computers still working every day using Zilog Z80 chips. 2 of them left.

I don't think they make them like that anymore. The Zeos weighs about 30lb, and the Mitutoyo Z80 machines are about 75lb each.

But that is not normal. None of the computers I've bought ten years ago are running today. If it had Windows on it, it ended up getting replaced a few times. 1980-1990 was the era of the durable computer. Today we live in the era of the throwaway. Seriously, they make you pay $10 when you get a new computer so they will save a place for it at the county dump.

[blueturtl]

Surely SSD will make inroads, especially in low-power portable devices.

Conventional hard-disks will be more tempting in the desktop market for a long time though due to price.

Let's say you buy a 1 TB SSD. It costs more than a regular hard drive would, but gives better performance and reliability.

Then again for the same price you can buy multiple regular hard-drives and set up a RAID array which diminishes the performance and reliability issues AND you'll get more capacity at the same time.

Just thinking out loud. :)

[andrewabc]

SSD are overpriced, and don't they have a maximum read/write/erase passes?
Like usb flash drives, they have XX ammount of times data can be written.

Overpriced? From a pure $/GB yes. But if you compare speeds, you are getting more IOPS per $ than HDD.

The limited # of write passes is not really an issue anymore. If you know you are going to be constantly writing data (say 50gb a day) then you would need a SLC. For everyday use it is unlikely that anyone will see the unit fail due to # of writes for several years (at least until after warranty expires, which is 3 years).

Go to System->Admin->Disk Utility->Benchmark results (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1468995) post your results and compare with SSD results.

I have a 7 year old usb flash drive that still works.

What most people do is get SSD for OS/apps, and any data store on a HDD. That way you get fast speeds, and lots of room to store data.
No one is suggestion you throw out a 1tb hard drive and buy a SSD. Keep the HDD you currently have and just use the SSD for os/apps.

[Frogs Hair]

The HDD will be around for a long time , there are too many machines in buisness, factories , schools ect... that use them . I think the the down time and cost make the SSD impractical at this time.

[CharlesA]

Agreed. I'll be sticking to hard drives for the time being, unless I use an SSD for the OS drive on a HTPC, for example, where I can get away with having a 20 or 30GB main drive.