getting closer and closer to deprecating hard drives. I say hard drives are done for by 2025 even for cold storage. its not just SSDs getting cheaper at a much better rate than HDD. its also that hard drives become more expensive as they lose volume. annual HDD shipments are below 50% of their peak and dropping fast. that means fixed costs have to be amortized over a constantly shrinking volume.
SSDs getting cheaper, HDD getting more expensive there is only one conclusion.
SSD's are not suitable for archive storage, especially if they're taken offline. While there's some flash products (especially NOR flash) that are spec'd to hold data for 10+ years, there's no retention time specs for the dense, multi-voltage-level NAND flash that SSD's use.
I suspect if we did get that info, it would not be very good.
The spec for consumer SSDs is retention for a full year when the write endurance has been exhausted. Fresh NAND rather than worn-out NAND has significantly better retention. It's still not a good choice for offline archival storage, but for more typical incremental backup duty cost is much more of a barrier than retention.
HDD may be dying in consumer space, but it is doing extremely well in Enterprise and Datacenter. The Cost of amortised over shipment completely neglect the cost / GB shipped to these customers. MAMR or now renamed as EMAR still has life to bring 10x capacity improvement. While NAND has reached its die shrinking advantage and will now require die stacking to improve its Cost model. Something which is not quite proven yet, as the higher die stacking hurts yield.
There are also other aspect which NAND currently does not fit the backup, archive, and high capacity volume storage requirement. So to say it is gone in 5 years time is premature.
That is assuming HDD maker execute on their roadmap.
That's my concern as well. It's hard to find reliable information about how long a QLC-based storage device will retain data in an unpowered state. My backup needs are modest enough that a 1TB 2.5" HDD in an external case is good enough to keep a cold copy of everything I care about (actually using less than 200GB of it in total at the moment). While I like the durability of NAND from a shock and vibration tolerance perspective AND responsiveness without noise is nice too, speed isn't that critical in my backups since I have to push everything over USB (2.0 in the case of my oldest laptop) so a hard drive that sits in a drawer for half a year at a time seems like a better option. WIth that said, USB flash drives are selling as backup devices and lots of people buy and use them without problems. During the back-to-school shopping at Walmart, my local store had 64GB USB drives available at less than $8 USD. I picked one up and although it's really slow, it has been working since late August with no problems and I've been using it regularly to sneaker net stuff between computers.'s
I feel that SSDs have been stagnant for a while - 1 TB seems to be at $100 since seemingly forever, and while we got some nice speed improvements on the higher end NVMe drives, I'd like to see some archival/storage drives with high capacity and low price, even if their performance stays at current entry-level SSDs like the Crucial MX500's (SATA) or Intel 660p (NVMe).
I agree that prices of ssd still are stagnant, if i look at what we can buy now for a little less i am not impressed. I was hoping to see the large size enterprise ssd products would start dripping into the consumer market. But untill now its hardly any real progress. True i can get a 1 Tb drive now, but the larger ones are still insanely priced and often only enterprise products with no consumer support or warranty. That does not say i can't use them but i would have suspected the market could have been invaded by larger drives already. I do however have other opinions about ssd drives regarding long time storage on them. Yesterday i started to check the data i put on 10 ssd which some of time had been written to for over ten years ago. They have not been used by me in all that time. After i saw similar threads about they would loose data after a certain period of time. I was curious to see if the drives would have lost the data and how much i could not recover. The result is stunning .... only one of them lost its data. And was being considered not being formatted, ofcourse it was all old useless data but still was a fine test to see how long ssd can keep data on them. Sadly i do not have more of these old enterprise mlc ssd to make a even larger test. Because i would like to see what happens if they are kept even longer so what happens when you store data on them and how long it will take before data gets lost for real. This far 9 out of 10 having all data on the drive for minimal 5 up to 10 year is very good. So how is it possible that these ssd still have the data on them. And did i check them in those 10 year ( yes/no) it would be a very helpfull test
"faster" SSDs is held back by Intels 16 PCI lanes. Every single home intel since 2015 have 16 PCI lanes for graphics and DMI link at 3.8GB/s to the motherboards "fake" PCI lines. PCIe3x4 is 3.8 GB/s and thats why SSDs have been limited to that speed since 2015. And you cant install 2 NVme SSD without sharing bandwith with every single other bus on the PC. That's why slow SATA3 SSDs are at the same price as NVmeSSDs. I dont understand why my Zxxx intel motherboard has 7 PCI slots when 6 of them share 3.8GB/s bandwidth. AMD is a bit better with 24 PCI lanes. With Ryzen3 + X570 16 for graphics and 2x4 for NVme SSD. And here you can get faster SSD because of 8GB/s bandwidth PCI express4. Why cant AMD make a consumer chipset with more PCI lanes? They are starting to act evil since if I want more PCI lanes and PCI express4: I am forced to buy a minimum 24 core AMD. I just want a motherboard that supports a couple of PCI cars + minimum 4 NVme SSDs with full bandwidth. Today we are forced to Cascade lake or Threadripper. Just to segment the market and bleed people who uses computers to other stuff than gaming and prom.
Won't you be surprised when NAND prices triple like DRAM did beacuse the current oversupply has already been corrected with line shutdowns and investments halted and as soon as the excess clears out there will be a strong price reboumd, just like DRAM did 3 years ago when they fixed their supply issue.
The prices you see right now are an aberation due to mispredicting market growth, 6 months ago there was story after story about NAND producers halting investment and shuttting down nand production lines. Hell samsung alone shut down 3 factories.
If you want cheap drives buy them now, by Jan the prices will be going up as Christmas is likely to clear out excess stock thats depressed prices. I'd expect with the reduced production capacity prices will at least tripple just like dram did.
I just want to know when I can get my 6-8TB SSD for $200. I'd love to replace my mediaserver NAS drives with something more robust. And to be honest, situations like that are ideal (write once read many) since you're just looking to store files for long times and read them.
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azfacea - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
getting closer and closer to deprecating hard drives. I say hard drives are done for by 2025 even for cold storage. its not just SSDs getting cheaper at a much better rate than HDD. its also that hard drives become more expensive as they lose volume. annual HDD shipments are below 50% of their peak and dropping fast. that means fixed costs have to be amortized over a constantly shrinking volume.SSDs getting cheaper, HDD getting more expensive there is only one conclusion.
Scipio Africanus - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Problem there is HDD is still much better for cold storage. HDD can last some years but SSDs can start having bit rot after a few months.azfacea - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
in addition to being flat out wrong, u fail to explain why a controller cant deal with that "once in a few months" ??even more nonsensical than the arguments i heard for why optical drives are here to stay
faydrus - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
SSD's are not suitable for archive storage, especially if they're taken offline. While there's some flash products (especially NOR flash) that are spec'd to hold data for 10+ years, there's no retention time specs for the dense, multi-voltage-level NAND flash that SSD's use.I suspect if we did get that info, it would not be very good.
Billy Tallis - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
The spec for consumer SSDs is retention for a full year when the write endurance has been exhausted. Fresh NAND rather than worn-out NAND has significantly better retention. It's still not a good choice for offline archival storage, but for more typical incremental backup duty cost is much more of a barrier than retention.Dark_wizzie - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
What is duty cost?rpg1966 - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link
Slight edit to make it more understandable:"but for more typical incremental backup duty, the cost is much more of a barrier than retention."
deil - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
your investment per backup. On pricy storage, that need a lot of maintenance is way higher.ksec - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link
>in addition to being flat out wrong,LOL.
HDD may be dying in consumer space, but it is doing extremely well in Enterprise and Datacenter. The Cost of amortised over shipment completely neglect the cost / GB shipped to these customers. MAMR or now renamed as EMAR still has life to bring 10x capacity improvement. While NAND has reached its die shrinking advantage and will now require die stacking to improve its Cost model. Something which is not quite proven yet, as the higher die stacking hurts yield.
There are also other aspect which NAND currently does not fit the backup, archive, and high capacity volume storage requirement. So to say it is gone in 5 years time is premature.
That is assuming HDD maker execute on their roadmap.
8lec - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link
Optical drives are great... Cuz 2 of our cars cannot play anything except CDs. LmaoGreat_Scott - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
SSD endurance isn't the core issue here. Controller failure is very common, and in that case you lose all data with no chance for recovery.HDDs both tend to fail less often and give warning signs before they go, and when they do low-level data recovery is often possible.
PeachNCream - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
That's my concern as well. It's hard to find reliable information about how long a QLC-based storage device will retain data in an unpowered state. My backup needs are modest enough that a 1TB 2.5" HDD in an external case is good enough to keep a cold copy of everything I care about (actually using less than 200GB of it in total at the moment). While I like the durability of NAND from a shock and vibration tolerance perspective AND responsiveness without noise is nice too, speed isn't that critical in my backups since I have to push everything over USB (2.0 in the case of my oldest laptop) so a hard drive that sits in a drawer for half a year at a time seems like a better option. WIth that said, USB flash drives are selling as backup devices and lots of people buy and use them without problems. During the back-to-school shopping at Walmart, my local store had 64GB USB drives available at less than $8 USD. I picked one up and although it's really slow, it has been working since late August with no problems and I've been using it regularly to sneaker net stuff between computers.'sScipio Africanus - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
For cold storage needs, just go HDD honestly. There's no point is an SSD as you can read from above comments.MenhirMike - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
I feel that SSDs have been stagnant for a while - 1 TB seems to be at $100 since seemingly forever, and while we got some nice speed improvements on the higher end NVMe drives, I'd like to see some archival/storage drives with high capacity and low price, even if their performance stays at current entry-level SSDs like the Crucial MX500's (SATA) or Intel 660p (NVMe).bronan - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link
I agree that prices of ssd still are stagnant, if i look at what we can buy now for a little less i am not impressed. I was hoping to see the large size enterprise ssd products would start dripping into the consumer market. But untill now its hardly any real progress. True i can get a 1 Tb drive now, but the larger ones are still insanely priced and often only enterprise products with no consumer support or warranty. That does not say i can't use them but i would have suspected the market could have been invaded by larger drives already.I do however have other opinions about ssd drives regarding long time storage on them.
Yesterday i started to check the data i put on 10 ssd which some of time had been written to for over ten years ago. They have not been used by me in all that time. After i saw similar threads about they would loose data after a certain period of time. I was curious to see if the drives would have lost the data and how much i could not recover. The result is stunning .... only one of them lost its data. And was being considered not being formatted, ofcourse it was all old useless data but still was a fine test to see how long ssd can keep data on them. Sadly i do not have more of these old enterprise mlc ssd to make a even larger test. Because i would like to see what happens if they are kept even longer so what happens when you store data on them and how long it will take before data gets lost for real. This far 9 out of 10 having all data on the drive for minimal 5 up to 10 year is very good. So how is it possible that these ssd still have the data on them. And did i check them in those 10 year ( yes/no) it would be a very helpfull test
shompa - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
"faster" SSDs is held back by Intels 16 PCI lanes. Every single home intel since 2015 have 16 PCI lanes for graphics and DMI link at 3.8GB/s to the motherboards "fake" PCI lines. PCIe3x4 is 3.8 GB/s and thats why SSDs have been limited to that speed since 2015. And you cant install 2 NVme SSD without sharing bandwith with every single other bus on the PC. That's why slow SATA3 SSDs are at the same price as NVmeSSDs. I dont understand why my Zxxx intel motherboard has 7 PCI slots when 6 of them share 3.8GB/s bandwidth. AMD is a bit better with 24 PCI lanes. With Ryzen3 + X570 16 for graphics and 2x4 for NVme SSD. And here you can get faster SSD because of 8GB/s bandwidth PCI express4. Why cant AMD make a consumer chipset with more PCI lanes? They are starting to act evil since if I want more PCI lanes and PCI express4: I am forced to buy a minimum 24 core AMD. I just want a motherboard that supports a couple of PCI cars + minimum 4 NVme SSDs with full bandwidth. Today we are forced to Cascade lake or Threadripper. Just to segment the market and bleed people who uses computers to other stuff than gaming and prom.rahvin - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link
Won't you be surprised when NAND prices triple like DRAM did beacuse the current oversupply has already been corrected with line shutdowns and investments halted and as soon as the excess clears out there will be a strong price reboumd, just like DRAM did 3 years ago when they fixed their supply issue.The prices you see right now are an aberation due to mispredicting market growth, 6 months ago there was story after story about NAND producers halting investment and shuttting down nand production lines. Hell samsung alone shut down 3 factories.
If you want cheap drives buy them now, by Jan the prices will be going up as Christmas is likely to clear out excess stock thats depressed prices. I'd expect with the reduced production capacity prices will at least tripple just like dram did.
bill.rookard - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
I just want to know when I can get my 6-8TB SSD for $200. I'd love to replace my mediaserver NAS drives with something more robust. And to be honest, situations like that are ideal (write once read many) since you're just looking to store files for long times and read them.naryfa - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
I don't know... Is it only me? I still try to buy MLC drives whenever I can. When I see QLC it just bothers my lower intestines.