Future of high capacity storage: HDD or SSD?

C

Chimel

Gawd
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Jul 19, 2010
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I see announcements for 12TB HDD drives, and 60-96TB on the SSD side (Seagate, Toshiba in 3.5" form factor).
Are we coming to a point where SSD drives' capacity is overtaking HDD's?
How did SSD drives gain such a hugh capacity advance in so little time?

Actually, half the explanation seems pretty straightforward when comparing HDD and SSD drives in terms of capacity per volume. For instance, density for the HGST He10 10 TB (390 cm³) is 26 GB/cm³, but 3.3 times that at 84 GB/cm³ for the Samsung 850 EVO 4TB (47,5cm³), which means 33 TB are theoretically possible in a single 3.5" SSD drive today. This 3.3 factor might even be higher if it is limited more by price than by technology.

Has anybody tried such capacity/volume HDD vs. SSD comparison before? It's not relevant for drives of the same form factor, but still is for consumer drives.

The real issue is not capacity but price: A 100TB SSD drive would likely be priced around $15-25,000 today.
Until NAND technology gets cheaper, high capacity SSDs will be for enterprises with 'special' needs, our family media centers will stick to HDD for a while, but we might see the end of HDD laptop drives much sooner.
 
I believe the only thing that is holding back SSD is the cost.

Physically, you can store significantly more data within the same physical space with semiconductor, as compared to the more traditional mechanical method. Even with current process technology, SSD can already far surpass HDD in terms of capacity, and I do not foresee any kind of technology that will ever allow HDD to catch up. We just don't see any actual product yet due to cost of SSD.
 
I'd say maybe another 5-ish years or so, and (unless there's a major show stopper), SSDs will be on par, capacity-wise, with hard drives. Another 5 years after that (again, barring a show-stopper), they'll beat out a hard drive on price for equivalent capacity.
 
im too, be patient wait under $500 hahah lol
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Spinners will die eventually as they should.
We don't need that Fred Flintstone technology any more.

Huge SSD drives will be cheap in the near future.

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On top of cost, how practical is it to have >10TB spinning rust that takes several days to rebuild when a drive fails, meaning performance falls way off and the entire RAID set is vulnerable. Even RAID 6 wouldn't be all that safe as two drives could easily fail in a week leaving everything open to data loss.

Even SSDs as we know them, NAND we access through legacy SCSI protocols and a flash translation layer, will be obsolete before we know it. They're a stop gap.
 
Child of Wonder said:
On top of cost, how practical is it to have >10TB spinning rust that takes several days to rebuild when a drive fails, meaning performance falls way off and the entire RAID set is vulnerable. Even RAID 6 wouldn't be all that safe as two drives could easily fail in a week leaving everything open to data loss.

Even SSDs as we know them, NAND we access through legacy SCSI protocols and a flash translation layer, will be obsolete before we know it. They're a stop gap.
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I agree about the rebuild times and that's why I'm pro RAID-10. Its not just cost holding back flash, it needs to be reliable. Toshiba is messing with QLC and basically its so slow that they recommend long term storage with it and what good is flash when its not in use?
 
Cost and wear. I would not want SSDs unless I had enough wear to be able to do crypto erases and support for crypto erasing reserve spaces (OP area). They are a data security/legal nightmare.

PliotronX said:
I agree about the rebuild times and that's why I'm pro RAID-10. Its not just cost holding back flash, it needs to be reliable. Toshiba is messing with QLC and basically its so slow that they recommend long term storage with it and what good is flash when its not in use?
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flash...sorta lasts longer in an off state.....at least on paper. Depends if they fixed the need to have constant power issue. Flash can loose data without power or something weird like that i remember. Maybe it has been fixed.
 
PliotronX said:
I agree about the rebuild times and that's why I'm pro RAID-10. Its not just cost holding back flash, it needs to be reliable. Toshiba is messing with QLC and basically its so slow that they recommend long term storage with it and what good is flash when its not in use?
Click to expand...
QLC is being made for facebook, google and the like where lots of data is write once read many.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
CFlash can loose data without power or something weird like that i remember. Maybe it has been fixed.
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There was a bunch of hullabaloo last year when the news media reported that a Seagate engineer made a presentation about which many understood to mean that SSDs without power would lose data within 7 days. That misunderstanding was debunked.

Even for really long-term cold storage, you still need to power up HDDs every few years, to keep the oil around the ball bearings from drying out, so they are not necessarily better in that category than SSDs.
 
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