News HDDs Will Be Extinct by 2028, Says Pure Storage Exec

[bit_user]

for music, I mostly own original cd's of the music, so the audio is crisp and clear when I want to listen to some jpop,

You can rip to FLAC or some other lossless codec. The compression ratio isn't as good as MP3, but at least you don't have to worry about "missing" anything*.

* A few CDs out there use pre-emphasis. To play them properly, you need a ripping program that can do the de-emphasis in software. Of course, same goes for CD player software.

 

[Tac 25]

thanks for that info.

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as for opinion on this thread. Feels like wishful thinking by an exec who wants to make more money. HDD are still reliable for storage. Many of my active games still have their files stored in HDD.

well, I do find SSD more convenient to install because the small size. Only need to find a hole where they can be screwed in. For SSD vs HDD, have four active SSD and three active HDD. The SSD's are the boot drives for my three pc, so hopefuilly they last long. I never completely fill my SSD's, all of them have at least 80 GB of free space.

 

[bit_user]

thanks for that info.

A little more info on pre-emphasis, since you might actually have some of these discs:

If de-emphasis isn't preformed during ripping or playback, the effect is an overly "bright" sound. I think the only CDs I have that use pre-emphasis are some older Japanese ones, so you might as well. I can't say whether you'll notice, on the setup you mentioned. On headphones, the difference might be easier to detect. Some J-Pop naturally has a very "bright" mix, possibly to the point of excess, with emphasis having nothing to do with it.

Mant of my active games still have their files stored in HDD.

10 years ago, I got a PS3 Super Slim (which I've now used a lot more for streaming than I ever used for gaming). I put a 250 GB SSD in it, and even though it was only SATA-2, some game loading times went from like 50 seconds to 8. I'm not sure I would buy an aftermarket upgrade for a PS5 (I'd need to see some clear evidence, first), if I ever get one, but that was one of the best upgrades I've ever done.

That PS3 still works fine, and I'm not sure that would be the case if I'd left the original HDD in there.

 

[Tac 25]

@bit_user

yeah, got several japanese music cd's, all legally purchased at CDJapan.

here are some of them. Pics taken with my camera.

Spoiler

"Play the World" cd by Riko Sasaki. Comes with autograph.

Spoiler

Sacred World

Spoiler

Re:LiGHTs cd. comes with limited sticker.

Spoiler

would they sound just as good if I rip to FLAC and put on SSD?
started collecting around year 2012, and it grew from there.
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I made a little typo error there. Typed Mant instead of Many. What I mean is "Many of my active games still have their files stored in HDD" not "Mant of..

you have a tough ps3, since it's still alive.

anyway, not much more to say. What just worries me about SSD's is after hearing certain people say that they don't last as long as HDD.

 

[bit_user]

yeah, got several japanese music cd's, all legally purchased at CDJapan.

I got some from there, but also amazon.co.jp, some US stores (not counterfeits, BTW), and there used to be this store in Japan that sold used CDs at pretty good prices, especially if you ordered in bulk and were willing to wait 3 weeks for them to get shipped by boat.

would they sound just as good if I rip to FLAC and put on SSD?
started collecting around year 2012, and it grew from there.

The only unknown is if they use pre-emphasis, and I can't give you an easy instruction for figuring out if they do. That's not to say there's not an easy method to find out - I just haven't checked in a long time. That's something you'll have to research yourself, if you really care.

For well more than 99% of CDs out there, ripping to a lossless format like FLAC or lossless WMA should sound identical to playing through your computer's optical drive or indeed a dedicated CD player.

you have a tough ps3, since it's still alive.

Yeah, I credit that SSD. I should probably dust it out, now that you mention it.

I have a 1st gen PS3 that's collecting dust, somewhere. I'd be amazed if its HDD hadn't lost data by now. I hoped to use it for playing PS1 and PS2 games, but never hooked it up after I moved. So, it's only been used a couple times. I also have a Gamecube I never played + a component cable and 4 wavebird controllers that I could probably sell on ebay for a fair bit of money. Needless to say, I'm not much of a gamer.

anyway, not much more to say. What just worries me about SSD's is after hearing certain people say that they don't last as long as HDD.

The one thing you never want to do is leave a SSD powered down too long. The same goes for any kind of solid-state storage (SD cards, USB sticks, etc.). It's more of a problem with newer storage devices - I have an e-reader from 2019 that lost all the books and PDFs I had on it, when I left it unused for like 3-4 months... or maybe closer to 6 months, now that I think about it.

I have old card for my digital cameras that retained data for well more than 5 years, but I wouldn't trust newer devices to do the same. For a SSD that has stuff you care about, I'd make sure it gets a few hours of use every 3 months or so. That's hopefully enough for it to refresh all of the cells. I'm sure you can find better guidance on this, as my information on this subject is neither very recent nor complete.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

We are a small company and we recently switched one of our big storage Nas to a flash Nas. The difference in performance is just incredible.

 

[emike09]

You can already get 8TB Samsung SSD here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089C3TZL9/

current price is $448 USD, down from about $660 roughly 6 months ago iirc

you can also find these same drives on ebay used for good prices as well sometimes.

currently, 4TB SSD's (SATA and M.2) are in the $240 USD ballpark, and 2TB drives are hitting $99. Hopefully in the next several years we might see the 8TB hit the $250 mark, and see more options available on the market too.

Keep in mind, that enterprise SSD's have had 16TB and 30TB capacities for a while now, in the U.2 form factor, but they cost many thousands of dollars even used.

I too look forward to replacing my HDD storage RAID with SSD's

QVO SSDs are far too slow. Better than HDDs, sure. U.2 tried to make it's way into high-end consumer motherboards but fizzled out. I'd love for U.2/3 to become a standard which would drive down those enterprise prices. I'd way rather mount some 2.5" U.2 drives instead of M.2. Better cooling and much more capacity. I secretly wish there were consumer 3.5" drives.

 

[USAFRet]

I secretly wish there were consumer 3.5" drives.

Why?
Have you ever looked into how much space is not taken up inside a typical 2.5" SSD case? Most of that case is there simply for mounting purposes.

 

[bit_user]

Have you ever looked into how much space is not taken up inside a typical 2.5" SSD case? Most of that case is there simply for mounting purposes.

Yeah, and by the time you fill the volume of a 2.5" housing with NAND chips, your SSD is already getting beyond the price range of most consumers.

To use the example of Solidigm D7-P5520, 2.5" is big enough for them to offer a 16 TB model, using 144-layer 3D TLC NAND.

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https://www.solidigm.com/products/data-center/d7/p5520.html​

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With the new QLC generation of drives, we're starting to see 32 TB options in 2.5" U.2 and U.3 form factors.

For datacenter applications, there are the newer EDSFF form factors, the most notable of which is the E1.L form factor (sometimes called "the ruler"), which is the longer one you see here:

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[truerock]

Last things first: you're thinking of home or small office networking, not datacenter. A HDD RAID can max 10 Gigabit network, sure. Not 100 Gigabit, much less 800 Gigabit. But, I didn't even mean bandwidth for its own sake.

The more important, specific problem I'm talking about is how long it takes to rebuild redundancy, after a drive failure. The issue is that the longer it takes to do a rebuild, the greater the probability is that another drive fails in the process. Eventually, the risk of multi-drive failures compounds to the point that the probability of array failures becomes non-negligible.

From what I've gleaned, it seems highly-scalable storage systems have largely moved away from RAID, and towards object storage & replication. You get more aggregate IOPS by decoupling individual drives, and replication mitigates against array-loss. However, the longer it takes to restore redundancy, the more replicas you need. By the time you get to 3 copies, you're paying a very high premium for reliability.

That said, I'm no storage expert, but I know how areal density works (i.e. throughput increases as the sqrt() of capacity), which means rebuild times will continually get worse, the more that HDD capacities scale. We got a 1-time boost with dual-actuator, but it's not obvious that we're going to see 3-actutor drives or more. I also think there are reasons the industry moved away from high-RPM drives and don't expect those to return.

So, by following the one trend I think we can predict with a fair degree of certainty, I do think rebuild times might pose the greatest long-term risk to HDDs' role in scalable storage. There will probably always be a market for HDDs, but the key questions are how quickly it'll shrink, and by how much.

There's another issue that came to light, regarding recent deployments of HAMR drives, and that's sensitivity to vibration. As areal density increases, you'd naturally expect this to become a greater issue, as well:

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https://www.anandtech.com/show/18766/dropbox-shares-hamr-drive-prep-reducing-vibrations​

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It is correct that I have only built datacenter storage systems with network speed up to 10Gb/s ethernet.
I have never built storage on a 100Gb/s network - but, I think I could do it if I had a complete rack of 20TB HDDs configured in multiple RAID5s.

As I said, re-build time is a critical issue when it comes to large RAIDs. I always addressed that issue with enough "mirrored hot-spares" in the RAID to plan for that. Also, as I said, the mirrored RAID at the remote location always has an important role in re-build planning (beyond the primary disaster recovery role).

But, all of this really has nothing to do with the article. The question is when will SSDs replace HDDs. I've built plenty of RAID5 racks with SSDs - but, I saw no particular advantage to doing that... except, at some point, SSDs begin to be better because the use less electricity, less space and create less heat than HDDs per cubic meter per byte.

 

[Firestone]

QVO SSDs are far too slow.

too slow for what?
I seriously doubt that anyone spending $450++ on a high capacity 8TB+ SSD does not have a faster scratch disk already in their system

speed is completely irrelevant when we are talking about the 8TB Samsung SATA SSD. This is not a drive designed for write speeds, this is a drive to store a large amount of data that you just need to read from. And its plenty fast for that.

I already have multiple TB of static unchanging reference data files, AI models, etc., that just need a large volume to hold them, while I do the real compute work reading and writing on another fast disk. Dont care one bit that the Samsung drive is QVO it does not make a lick of difference when the max speed on SATA III is already gonna be about 500-600MB/s.

speed is especially irrelevant when it comes to storage for read tasks, because if you drive is a little "slow", well the worst that happens is that you have to wait a little longer for data to load into memory. But if you dont have enough capacity, there's nothing you can do to mitigate the issue.

no one is suggesting that you would use the Samsung 8TB SATA drive as your primary system disk, but even if you did it would likely still be just fine.

 

[emike09]

too slow for what?
I seriously doubt that anyone spending $450++ on a high capacity 8TB+ SSD does not have a faster scratch disk already in their system

speed is completely irrelevant when we are talking about the 8TB Samsung SATA SSD. This is not a drive designed for write speeds, this is a drive to store a large amount of data that you just need to read from. And its plenty fast for that.

I already have multiple TB of static unchanging reference data files, AI models, etc., that just need a large volume to hold them, while I do the real compute work reading and writing on another fast disk. Dont care one bit that the Samsung drive is QVO it does not make a lick of difference when the max speed on SATA III is already gonna be about 500-600MB/s.

speed is especially irrelevant when it comes to storage for read tasks, because if you drive is a little "slow", well the worst that happens is that you have to wait a little longer for data to load into memory. But if you dont have enough capacity, there's nothing you can do to mitigate the issue.

no one is suggesting that you would use the Samsung 8TB SATA drive as your primary system disk, but even if you did it would likely still be just fine.

Just saying I want to start seeing consumer 8TB NVMe drives. They exist in enterprise in the U.2 format. My HDD array is for movies, photos, and other data that doesn't need speed. Yet my Steam library can take well over 10TB if I had everything downloaded. I don't want that data on any SATA platform.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Just saying I want to start seeing consumer 8TB NVMe drives. They exist in enterprise in the U.2 format. My HDD array is for movies, photos, and other data that doesn't need speed. Yet my Steam library can take well over 10TB if I had everything downloaded. I don't want that data on any SATA platform.

Why don't you want to use SATA?

 

[XDmToter]

I just can't let this go...

Rosemarin went on to claim that replacing HDDs with SSDs could “reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90%.”

Apparently Shawn doesn't know how to use a calculator...
Just look at the spec sheets from a Seagate Exos X20 and a Seagate Nytro 1361.

The 20 TB Exos X20 uses 5.4 Watts at idle.
The 3.84 TB Nytro 1361 uses 2 Watts at idle.

You would need FIVE 3.84 TB drives to get close to the same capacity as ONE 20 TB drive...
2 watts times 5 drives is.... hold on...... let me get my calculator...... Ah, Yes! ..... 10 Watts

Last time I checked 10 > 5.4

Now, let's look at the Max Active power.

Exos X20 = 9.4 Watts
Nytro 1361 = 5.8
5.8 * 5 = 29 WATTS

So, how does switching from a drive that uses 9.4 Watts to 5 drives that use 29 Watts and have Less capacity result in an 80 or 90% power reduction?!?!?!?

 

[bit_user]

Just look at the spec sheets from a Seagate Exos X20 and a Seagate Nytro 1361.

The 20 TB Exos X20 uses 5.4 Watts at idle.
The 3.84 TB Nytro 1361 uses 2 Watts at idle.

You would need FIVE 3.84 TB drives to get close to the same capacity as ONE 20 TB drive...
2 watts times 5 drives is.... hold on...... let me get my calculator...... Ah, Yes! ..... 10 Watts

Why so low-capacity SSD, though? I think most 3D TLC datacenter drives come in capacities of at least up to 16 TB. With the latest generation, the upper limit seems to be about ~30 TB. Given the context, he clearly seems to be talking about datacenter - not consumer.

Granted, the higher-capacity drives tend to burn more power (not surprising, since they need more NAND chips to get there), but it's not linear since you get economies by sharing the same controller.

The 30.7 TiB Micron 9400 claims to idle at just 5 W.

https://www.micron.com/products/ssd/product-lines/9400
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[XDmToter]

Why so low-capacity SSD, though? I think most 3D TLC datacenter drives come in capacities of at least up to 16 TB. With the latest generation, the upper limit seems to be about ~30 TB. Given the context, he clearly seems to be talking about datacenter - not consumer.

Granted, the higher-capacity drives tend to burn more power (not surprising, since they need more NAND chips to get there), but it's not linear since you get economies by sharing the same controller.

The 30.7 TiB Micron 9400 claims to idle at just 5 W.

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https://www.micron.com/products/ssd/product-lines/9400​

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True, but I'm still not seeing evidence of Shawn's claim of "replacing HDDs with SSDs could “reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90%.” The math just doesn't add up. A 5 Watt 30 TB versus a 5.4 Watt 20 TB does Not equal an 80 to 90 percent power reduction any way you stack it.

 

[bit_user]

True, but I'm still not seeing evidence of Shawn's claim of "replacing HDDs with SSDs could “reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90%.” The math just doesn't add up. A 5 Watt 30 TB versus a 5.4 Watt 20 TB does Not equal an 80 to 90 percent power reduction any way you stack it.

The way it's worded sounds to me like it could be forward-looking. So, maybe he's anticipating the power consumption and capacities of SSDs in 5 years.

 

[sitehostplus]

He may not be all that far off.

One of the reasons I abruptly switched to SSD last year was because I read MS was trying to require them for Win 11 and above.

While it was the best upgrade I made in a very long time, I did it in order to not get locked out of future versions of Windows.

 

[USAFRet]

He may not be all that far off.

One of the reasons I abruptly switched to SSD last year was because I read MS was trying to require them for Win 11 and above.

While it was the best upgrade I made in a very long time, I did it in order to not get locked out of future versions of Windows.

Its not "required" for Win 11, but it is a very different experience on an HDD.

I switched to SSD for at least the OS drive in 2013-14, before Win 10.
All SSD not long after.