Anecdotal evidence, but I've had more SSDs fail on me than HDDs over the years. Although most of the failures were Sandisk SSDs. It really depends on the quality of the drive. e.g. a WD Blue isn't likely to last like a WD Gold enterprise drive. Same with a QLC no name brand versus a Samsung 970 Pro using MLC NAND.
Anecdotally, in 10 years I've had one SSD fail and that was the controller for a WD Blue.
For HDD's, I have one that's managed to live past the 10 year mark, none without a corrupted sector after about 5 years, this is out of a sample size of probably near a hundred for both HDD and SSD, all of them in daily/weekly use.
HDD's basically disappeared in my household besides a NAS (higher storages where speed is not an issue if network bottlenecked, the cost/TB for HDD is still way better).
"what work load do you have the requires a 30 TB HDD and is still usable on said HDD"
The workload of storing data? I mean you don't have to use this as the single OS drive in your laptop but everything these days is pushing the limits of storage. Even home use could benefit from this. AAA games are 100+GB, a rip of a high quality BR is anywhere between 50-100GB, etc. And if you go into enterprise it's that much more important. Backup to disk is a thing especially if you don't want to spend weeks or months restoring from tape. And looking at the label of my own 16TB Samsungs, power consumption might be a thing with a 30TB SSD.
So for most people, they do not work for the back up storage solution.
Sure, you can tailor the work load so the drive never drops out by keeping those writes in small manageable chucks and giving the drive time between writes to catch up.
But you want to transfer your game steam game SSD to your HDD steam folder? We have seen SMR drives fail so hard the system stops seeing them as a valid drive until reboot. Then of course, the data is corrupted for extra enjoyment!
SMR and its stupid derivatives are the end of consumer HDDs. The death of CMR is the death of the consumer hard drive.
SMR makes a drive more suited for sequential workloads, perfect for storing things like your video collection at home, stuffing them in a video surveillance system, or enterprise backups (replacing tape). And when coupled with some NAND it can handle itself decently. Of course less than ideal in your laptop. Your Google search doesn't change this, I work with a lot of SMR drives in RAID with no failure. Things will undoubtedly get better with better firmware and support.
CMR on the other hand has none of those disadvantages. It's just like today's drives but bigger. If the price and power consumption are good they'll still rock. Just because for now SSDs at that capacity cost a lot and consume a lot.
QLC in SSDs was also branded as the end of the world for consumer SSDs due to low reliability, and they're still only half decent as long as the SLC cache is used. Wasn't that bad after all. And these larger spinning drives should arrive on the market a few years before PLC SSDs.
I agree whole hardheartedly. Most people don't seem to think about backing up to HDD. They don't seem to consider that network backups are not even an option with most people not being able to upload at even 10 megabits a second. Moreover, even if you do backup over a network, that data has to be stored somewhere. Chances are it ends up on some HDDs in a datacenter. I can also agree that storage requirements for common tasks are also going up.
SSD will not always last longer. Many hard disks can last decades across petabytes of writes. Even though some NAND can (and will) exceed its designed write envelope, the firmware won't allow it too as no products have adaptive firmware to gauge cell voltage wear and adjust the endurance of the NAND's set usable lifetime. This could change going forward, but likely won't as NAND has consistently become less durable generation after generation, instead relying on increased capacity (thus reduced price) as its competitive crutch.
Of course in applications where high performance is a factor, hard disks will never be competitive, but they have scaled well enough to be acceptable for bulk storage.
I get what you are saying. CMR was radially consistent, while SMR isn't. But it has gotten so much better and will continue to get better. It's really a combination of intelligent algorithms, cache management, and blending NAND technology, which help optimize and hide some of the shortcomings, most of the time.
It's really no different than TLC and QLC NAND, where it just isn't consistent all the time on most drives from beginning to end. But while TLC was terrible initially, it greatly improved through 3D TLC, SLC caching, and now with NVMe, HMB optimizations. QLC performs well when paired with HMB, and incredibly well when paired with Optane (such as the H20) at least for what it is. I don't think it's a compelling alternative to a decent TLC drive that costs a comparable amount of money but QLC could potentially make very cheap large capacity SSD's for WORM and archiving drives, even without the Optane cache, if it even comes down in price.
I don't think that hard drives are in the tape drive space yet. Tape drives are fantastic for archiving large amounts of data and can even be used as a warm storage, but the random access times of a tape drive kill performance even worse than SMR does for hard drives.
But it really looks like if you want anything resembling good performance out of SMR and similar drives, you need every part of the system - including the file system - to be aware of the limitations and re-arrange data and operations to work well.
Thankfully, there are still CMR/PMR hard drives around in 18 TB, so you can get a drive that is large enough for data, cheap enough to be worth it over Flash, and fast enough to not need a specialized system to be useable.
All these hi-cap drives spoken of are seemingly hidden from the general masses. Some of us need them now! We consumers barely see 20tb drives at high prices currently. What's the problem...are they so fragile to not be sold generally and/or unreliable or what?
The HDD manufacturers (like many other industries) first test their products with preferred customers and work with them to fix bugs before releasing to the general market.
I would not be surprised if the reason Seagate doesn't sell their 20TB HAMR HDDs to the general market is because they found an unacceptably high failure rate in their first deployment of HAMR and were forced to go back to R&D.
I think the consumer market is just too tiny for any of the drive companies. The large cloud guys buy an enormous amount of drives. i.e. >100EB of nearline drives are sold per quarter to the cloud. In 2.5" notebook drive equivalents that something like 1/2 million miles when stacked which would stretch to the moon and back - and this number is growing at 40% per year. I don't think any drives will be sold to consumers in a few years.
Because these are kind of useless for most consumer workloads due to how long it would take to get the data back off of them, volume is going to be small compared to enterprise, they'll make sure the drives have a very low failure rate, and why attempt to drive competition if they're getting nice profits currently?
Very good article, thanks. Also good to have you back Anton. AT needed some good articles.
I just hope we can get access to these drives, WD secretly changing specs of SMR disaster. Then now they changed the Helium filling on all drives too, on Red Pro even if you purchase any drives less than 12TB you won't get Helium. Meaning you will have higher temp and higher wear.
With this tech, I would like to get a 30TB drive for affordable cash. This year WD has these prices their site (their shipping QC is trash) we could get 16TB WD Red Pro for $299 that's a solid deal. Same for WD Gold, $299 16TB.
The niche tech is reserved for 16TB and 18TB only, ePMR is out of question for Gold and Red. Gold gets EAMR and Triple Stage Actuator for 16TB+ right now. I'm myself confused now looking at Data Sheets only diff of Red over Gold is higher temp boundaries. The noise is rated same. Also Gold has EAMR and TSA on top of more MTBF as well very few failures.
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Leeea - Friday, June 3, 2022 - link
The demise of good old CMR feels like the final nail in the coffin of non-niche hard drives.I know SSDs killed them, but SMR and all these technologies make hard drives feel like they occupy the space tape drives used to.
Cesar PG - Friday, June 3, 2022 - link
SSD not killed them, how much for a 30 TB SSD? and, Which one will last longer?iranterres - Friday, June 3, 2022 - link
SSDLeeea - Friday, June 3, 2022 - link
SSD will always last longer.and what work load do you have the requires a 30 TB HDD and is still usable on said HDD? Sounds very niche to me.
Golgatha777 - Saturday, June 4, 2022 - link
Anecdotal evidence, but I've had more SSDs fail on me than HDDs over the years. Although most of the failures were Sandisk SSDs. It really depends on the quality of the drive. e.g. a WD Blue isn't likely to last like a WD Gold enterprise drive. Same with a QLC no name brand versus a Samsung 970 Pro using MLC NAND.Lord of the Bored - Saturday, June 11, 2022 - link
Anecdotally, I've never had a flash drive fail, only disks.RSAUser - Tuesday, June 14, 2022 - link
Anecdotally, in 10 years I've had one SSD fail and that was the controller for a WD Blue.For HDD's, I have one that's managed to live past the 10 year mark, none without a corrupted sector after about 5 years, this is out of a sample size of probably near a hundred for both HDD and SSD, all of them in daily/weekly use.
HDD's basically disappeared in my household besides a NAS (higher storages where speed is not an issue if network bottlenecked, the cost/TB for HDD is still way better).
at_clucks - Sunday, June 5, 2022 - link
"what work load do you have the requires a 30 TB HDD and is still usable on said HDD"The workload of storing data? I mean you don't have to use this as the single OS drive in your laptop but everything these days is pushing the limits of storage. Even home use could benefit from this. AAA games are 100+GB, a rip of a high quality BR is anywhere between 50-100GB, etc. And if you go into enterprise it's that much more important. Backup to disk is a thing especially if you don't want to spend weeks or months restoring from tape. And looking at the label of my own 16TB Samsungs, power consumption might be a thing with a 30TB SSD.
Leeea - Sunday, June 5, 2022 - link
So these new technologies, like SMR etc, they kind of make hard drives into write once devices.So yea, in the rather niche case of a stand alone back up drive you indicate, they will work, for a while.
The problems occur when the 2nd write comes in:
https://www.google.com/search?q=smr+raid+fail
So for most people, they do not work for the back up storage solution.
Sure, you can tailor the work load so the drive never drops out by keeping those writes in small manageable chucks and giving the drive time between writes to catch up.
But you want to transfer your game steam game SSD to your HDD steam folder? We have seen SMR drives fail so hard the system stops seeing them as a valid drive until reboot. Then of course, the data is corrupted for extra enjoyment!
SMR and its stupid derivatives are the end of consumer HDDs. The death of CMR is the death of the consumer hard drive.
at_clucks - Sunday, June 5, 2022 - link
SMR makes a drive more suited for sequential workloads, perfect for storing things like your video collection at home, stuffing them in a video surveillance system, or enterprise backups (replacing tape). And when coupled with some NAND it can handle itself decently. Of course less than ideal in your laptop. Your Google search doesn't change this, I work with a lot of SMR drives in RAID with no failure. Things will undoubtedly get better with better firmware and support.CMR on the other hand has none of those disadvantages. It's just like today's drives but bigger. If the price and power consumption are good they'll still rock. Just because for now SSDs at that capacity cost a lot and consume a lot.
QLC in SSDs was also branded as the end of the world for consumer SSDs due to low reliability, and they're still only half decent as long as the SLC cache is used. Wasn't that bad after all. And these larger spinning drives should arrive on the market a few years before PLC SSDs.
ballsystemlord - Monday, June 6, 2022 - link
I agree whole hardheartedly.Most people don't seem to think about backing up to HDD. They don't seem to consider that network backups are not even an option with most people not being able to upload at even 10 megabits a second.
Moreover, even if you do backup over a network, that data has to be stored somewhere. Chances are it ends up on some HDDs in a datacenter.
I can also agree that storage requirements for common tasks are also going up.
twtech - Monday, June 6, 2022 - link
Anything that requires storing a lot of data. Storing a bunch of high-resolution source video footage is one example.Samus - Wednesday, June 22, 2022 - link
SSD will not always last longer. Many hard disks can last decades across petabytes of writes. Even though some NAND can (and will) exceed its designed write envelope, the firmware won't allow it too as no products have adaptive firmware to gauge cell voltage wear and adjust the endurance of the NAND's set usable lifetime. This could change going forward, but likely won't as NAND has consistently become less durable generation after generation, instead relying on increased capacity (thus reduced price) as its competitive crutch.Of course in applications where high performance is a factor, hard disks will never be competitive, but they have scaled well enough to be acceptable for bulk storage.
Dolda2000 - Friday, June 3, 2022 - link
Isn't the idea with HAMR/MAMR that they wouldn't feel so niche?Samus - Saturday, June 4, 2022 - link
I get what you are saying. CMR was radially consistent, while SMR isn't. But it has gotten so much better and will continue to get better. It's really a combination of intelligent algorithms, cache management, and blending NAND technology, which help optimize and hide some of the shortcomings, most of the time.It's really no different than TLC and QLC NAND, where it just isn't consistent all the time on most drives from beginning to end. But while TLC was terrible initially, it greatly improved through 3D TLC, SLC caching, and now with NVMe, HMB optimizations. QLC performs well when paired with HMB, and incredibly well when paired with Optane (such as the H20) at least for what it is. I don't think it's a compelling alternative to a decent TLC drive that costs a comparable amount of money but QLC could potentially make very cheap large capacity SSD's for WORM and archiving drives, even without the Optane cache, if it even comes down in price.
MenhirMike - Sunday, June 5, 2022 - link
I don't think that hard drives are in the tape drive space yet. Tape drives are fantastic for archiving large amounts of data and can even be used as a warm storage, but the random access times of a tape drive kill performance even worse than SMR does for hard drives.But it really looks like if you want anything resembling good performance out of SMR and similar drives, you need every part of the system - including the file system - to be aware of the limitations and re-arrange data and operations to work well.
Thankfully, there are still CMR/PMR hard drives around in 18 TB, so you can get a drive that is large enough for data, cheap enough to be worth it over Flash, and fast enough to not need a specialized system to be useable.
iranterres - Friday, June 3, 2022 - link
The capacities are increasing do does performance.readynow - Saturday, June 4, 2022 - link
All these hi-cap drives spoken of are seemingly hidden from the general masses. Some of us need them now! We consumers barely see 20tb drives at high prices currently. What's the problem...are they so fragile to not be sold generally and/or unreliable or what?The Von Matrices - Saturday, June 4, 2022 - link
The HDD manufacturers (like many other industries) first test their products with preferred customers and work with them to fix bugs before releasing to the general market.I would not be surprised if the reason Seagate doesn't sell their 20TB HAMR HDDs to the general market is because they found an unacceptably high failure rate in their first deployment of HAMR and were forced to go back to R&D.
Marko123 - Sunday, June 5, 2022 - link
I think the consumer market is just too tiny for any of the drive companies. The large cloud guys buy an enormous amount of drives. i.e. >100EB of nearline drives are sold per quarter to the cloud. In 2.5" notebook drive equivalents that something like 1/2 million miles when stacked which would stretch to the moon and back - and this number is growing at 40% per year. I don't think any drives will be sold to consumers in a few years.RSAUser - Tuesday, June 14, 2022 - link
Because these are kind of useless for most consumer workloads due to how long it would take to get the data back off of them, volume is going to be small compared to enterprise, they'll make sure the drives have a very low failure rate, and why attempt to drive competition if they're getting nice profits currently?dwillmore - Saturday, June 4, 2022 - link
"A HAMR-based drive requires an all-new right head with a laser to heat"Do you mean "write head"?
Silver5urfer - Sunday, June 5, 2022 - link
Very good article, thanks. Also good to have you back Anton. AT needed some good articles.I just hope we can get access to these drives, WD secretly changing specs of SMR disaster. Then now they changed the Helium filling on all drives too, on Red Pro even if you purchase any drives less than 12TB you won't get Helium. Meaning you will have higher temp and higher wear.
With this tech, I would like to get a 30TB drive for affordable cash. This year WD has these prices their site (their shipping QC is trash) we could get 16TB WD Red Pro for $299 that's a solid deal. Same for WD Gold, $299 16TB.
The niche tech is reserved for 16TB and 18TB only, ePMR is out of question for Gold and Red. Gold gets EAMR and Triple Stage Actuator for 16TB+ right now. I'm myself confused now looking at Data Sheets only diff of Red over Gold is higher temp boundaries. The noise is rated same. Also Gold has EAMR and TSA on top of more MTBF as well very few failures.