News SSDs Will Not Replace Hard Drives For Several Years: Report

[Admin]

A new report from Coughlin Associates predicts that SSDs will not replace hard drives in the next several years. Instead hard drives will continue to hold strong demand due to a predicted recovery in the nearline-storage market.

SSDs Will Not Replace Hard Drives For Several Years: Report : Read more

 

[Nine Layer Nige]

"claiming that hard drives can use less power than SSDs under heavy-enough workloads"
is that due to an SSD getting the job done vastly faster and drawing a higher peak than an HDD which chugs along with a modest power draw? It would be revealing to see the total watts power used over a job's lifetime rather than - perhaps - a peak watts power draw.

 

[JamesJones44]

For cold storage in a datacenter I imagine HDD will be around long past 2028. High performance applications will for sure switch to SSD (most likely have already) but for long term storage HDD still makes more sense on a cost biases.

 

[vehekos]

the cheapest 1Tb SSD already cost the same as the cheapest 1Tb HDD

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Blocks and Files reported on a forecast made by Coughlin Associates estimating that the current rise in SSD sales will have minimal impact on tape and HDD shipments.

I don't think anyone with a brainstem needs to read a report to see that. SSDs just cost too much for capacities exceeding 2TB, a situation not improving since manufacturers are bent on being faster instead of improving cost/GB, and even if they did work towards that achieving the same price density just can't happen until some successor of NAND is put on the market.

 

[eldakka1]

the cheapest 1Tb SSD already cost the same as the cheapest 1Tb HDD

We're talking about bulk storage here.

Compare, say, 10TB HDD (around $200) with 10TB SSD, or 20TB HDD (US$350ish) with 20TB SSD. There's a huge price difference.

Although - at least for QLC - there are 8TB QLCs starting at about US$350 - Samsung 870 QVO. TLC's seem to be more like about US$1k for 8TBs though, and anything bigger (next size up in SSDs after a quick newegg and amazon search) 12TB SSDs are US$1k plus for what looks like QLC drives, with TLC higher than that.

20TB SSDs seem to be US$2k+, about 6x cost of HDDs.

 

[Cyber_Akuma]

Well yeah, until SSDs can match HDDs in price-per-gig there will still always be a place for HDDs. You don't really need SSD's access speeds for many things that tend to take up large amounts of space like video, backup images, photos (photos taken when actual cameras and not phones can take up quite a lot of space), music libraries, etc that HDDs are great for.

And even then, there is the issue of long-term cold storage. NAND can lose it's storage if not powered on every now and then. The time varies greatly, some as short as 6 months (though that's an extreme) to a few years, but I have had several SD cards that I had not used in years erase themselves. HDDs meanwhile I have had ones nearly two decades old still have all their data when I booted them up again. We are rapidly losing options for long term data storage/backups for consumer use lately.

the cheapest 1Tb SSD already cost the same as the cheapest 1Tb HDD

That's because buying something as low-end as a 1TB HDD is horribly price ineffective, once something gets old/obsolete enough like that prices start to go up due to it's lower profit margins. It generally costs an extra $2-5ish for a 2TB model of that same 1TB harddrive. Compare the price of a 4TB NVME however, those are around $170-200 right now. For $180-200 you can get a 10TB HDD. And that is WITH the rapidly dropping SSD prices, 4TB SSDs were nearly double that around a year ago.

Nobody buying a HDD today is buying something as small as 1TB, they are for large amounts of storage that don't need fast access speeds.

 

[bit_user]

"claiming that hard drives can use less power than SSDs under heavy-enough workloads"
is that due to an SSD getting the job done vastly faster and drawing a higher peak than an HDD which chugs along with a modest power draw?

That study didn't seem to account for the lower duty-cycle of SSDs, though. It mainly hinged on the fact that datacenter SSDs burn lots of power, even when they're idling.

The study is somewhat suspect, in both its methodology and the degree of independence of the firm which published it. The article you linked contains the data they used.

 

[bit_user]

the cheapest 1Tb SSD already cost the same as the cheapest 1Tb HDD

Okay, but when you buy a hard drive, you're paying for a sturdy metal case, motor, actuators, spindle, precision bearings, and drive electronics. All of these are fixed overheads, no matter how big the drive is. The main difference between lower and higher-capacity drives is just more platters and heads. So, HDDs scale up better in cost than SSDs.

For SSDs, the main cost is in the NAND chips. That's why their prices are somewhat more linear with capacity, especially towards the upper end of the scale.

Therefore, the better point of comparison is at the high end of the capacity scale, and this is also more relevant for datacenters, as they're buying the big SSDs and HDDs.

 

[hannibal]

a situation not improving since manufacturers are bent on being faster instead of improving cost/GB, and even if they did work towards that achieving the same price density just can't happen until some successor of NAND is put on the market.

Well situation is getting "better" We get "worse and worse" SSD that save more info in the same space.
But the hard drive is mechanical device so the hardware cost is beginning heavy, while in SSD the price is more linear.

 

[kep55]

A new report from Coughlin Associates predicts that SSDs will not replace hard drives in the next several years. Instead hard drives will continue to hold strong demand due to a predicted recovery in the nearline-storage market.

SSDs Will Not Replace Hard Drives For Several Years: Report : Read more

An SSD may save one a few nanoseconds in read/write action but they have one huge drawback. From experience, if a SSD craps out there is pretty much no way to recover the now lost data. If a HDD craps outs, there are numerous tools and shops that can recover most if not all the lost data.

 

[bit_user]

if a SSD craps out there is pretty much no way to recover the now lost data. If a HDD craps outs, there are numerous tools and shops that can recover most if not all the lost data.

In some cases, that's probably due to SSD's self-encrypting capability. Some HDDs might also now support self-encryption, in which case you might also lose an entire drive.

 

[kep55]

In some cases, that's probably due to SSD's self-encrypting capability. Some HDDs might also now support self-encryption, in which case you might also lose an entire drive.

I checked with Samsung about the EVO 850 that had died. Nope, no can save. Several data recovery services said the same thing.

 

[USAFRet]

An SSD may save one a few nanoseconds in read/write action but they have one huge drawback. From experience, if a SSD craps out there is pretty much no way to recover the now lost data. If a HDD craps outs, there are numerous tools and shops that can recover most if not all the lost data.

I checked with Samsung about the EVO 850 that had died. Nope, no can save. Several data recovery services said the same thing.

Interestingly, from my one single "dead SSD" (SanDisk), I was able to recover 100% of the 605GB data that was on it.

How?
A good backup routine, which should be standard practice for anyone who uses a PC.