Why I Will Never Buy a Hard Drive Again

[R_1]

cloud is the deal breaker for me. I would rather deal with broken drives and know my data is mine, rather than have all my data sold by the storage provider.

 

[vagrantprodigy]

I'm going to have to disagree with the author. When I bought drives for my nas recently I spent $40 per 2TB HDD. I ended up with 6 of them for less than the price of 1 SSD. I have much more faith in 6 HDDs raided than a single SSD, not to mention I get much more capacity, and still save a few dollars. One of the drives did die a week or so after arrival (during stress testing), but thanks to warranties, I simply got it replaced.

The no HDD argument might be fine for the super wealthy, or those who have nearly 0 storage requirements, but that isn't the bulk of the readership on this site interested in Storage.

 

[redgarl]

Still needed for data center until lithography push capacity and endurance further.

 

[redgarl]

I have 10 TB of storage in my PC, it would have costed me more than 2000$ in SSD for doing that... and probably 10 drives.

We are not there yet, for maybe 5-10 years.

 

[RememberThe5th]

Only thing that i really dont like about ssd's, is what if the ssd fail and how are you going to recover data? They wear out from read write, but platters on hdd are pretty sturdy and almost most of time you can recover data, unless the head gets stuck to platter and you lose that portion (i might be wrong about this all).

 

[hixbot]

Let me know when I can buy 10tb SSDs to fill my 5 bay NAS, for the same price as current 10tb HDDs.

If you need massive storage, the cloud is to expensive and slow, and SSDs are too expensive. SSD reliability is a tad overstated. In a raid setup, HDD remain the practical choice.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

When you pay $80 for Office 365, you have to ....

And a discussion about hard drives goes into a rant about Office 365?

I can see the rant.... The cloud storage is directly linked to the subscription to 365.

 

[quilciri]

I realize this is an opinion piece, but man, what a tone deaf article.

 

[Crashman]

I had two SSD's in a RAID 1 fail within a week of each other. My hard drive, which I use as DVR storage, is 8 years old and still churning. And it's a notebook drive at that.

 

[androbourne]

Well, you can spend 5x more and purchase the SLC version of SSD. However they are normally used for enterprise due to the cost... but has a longer life span.

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/flash-data-center-advantages,2-744-2.html

I've used consumer grade SSDs in my systems for last few years and yet to have a failure on a MLC grade SSD... and one of those drives in my system is used for Shadow Play that is recording 20GB of data everytime I play games... which is every day.

What manufacture of SSD did you use? I only go with Samsung and they come with a 5 year warranty so...

 

[almarcy]

Punch Paper Tape, on metal media, will save all your gibberish FOREVER at 110.5bit/second. Go physical! Go permanent! Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying... a Teletype ASR is waiting for you to do what you know is right. Be humble, we only pose at terrabytes.

 

[Eximo]

If you play games, don't expect to give up your spinning disks anytime soon. We're only now seeing what kind of sizes high res texture packs require. As 4k adoption grows, 50-100 GB installs are going to be the rule, not the exception. I think Gears of War 3 went from ~8 GB to ~100 GB for 4. While I doubt 5 will make the same jump, if they ever make 6 you might need USAFret's NAS to install it.

Punch Paper Tape, on metal media, will save all your gibberish FOREVER at 110.5bit/second. Go physical! Go permanent! Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying... a Teletype ASR is waiting for you to do what you know is right. Be humble, we only pose at terrabytes.

I still want to buy some M-discs and a compatible burner. Writing computer information into artificial stone pleases me on a silly level.

 

[86sloma]

Good luck with reliability, let's talk in 10 years when you'll have no data on those ssd's and hdd working still great.\
HDD technology is most reliable, so i'll stick with it for my data magazine (i use 3TB hitachi hdd, very reliable) and Samsung 850pro 512GB SSD drive i've bought few months ago (before 512GB capacity i've used samsung 850 pro 256GB, and Crucial 120GB before the 256GB one).
Crucial ssd drive after a year was already showing signs of data reallocation because some of the cells were dead already and it was a pain in the ass to rely on it, so i've went for 256GB Samsung 850pro, and after that 512GB 850pro.
Anyway, my hitachi 3TB HDD is greeat for storing a lot of data, games these days use a lot of space, and since i own over 720 games just on my main steam account then i need a large space to fit it in. Even if i would be offered 3TB SSD for the same price of Hitachi 3TB HDD i'd go with Hitachi HDD (most reliable drives on the market) because i'd rather use the slower HDD and have my data safe there for decades, rather than worry that i'd loose my data on SSD...).
Maybe it's my bad luck, but i've had few pendrives and SSD's that died when i was using it, but HDD's cause less trouble for me in terms of data loss.
Btw, don't bother buying cheap Seagate, WD or Samsung (i guess samsung is not selling HDD's anymore). Hitachi and Toshiba HDD's are the best, also there are few good WD models but those are more expensive than most popular cheap models.

 

[androbourne]

Good luck with reliability, let's talk in 10 years when you'll have no data on those ssd's and hdd working still great.\
HDD technology is most reliable, so i'll stick with it for my data magazine (i use 3TB hitachi hdd, very reliable) and Samsung 850pro 512GB SSD drive i've bought few months ago (before 512GB capacity i've used samsung 850 pro 256GB, and Crucial 120GB before the 256GB one).
Crucial ssd drive after a year was already showing signs of data reallocation because some of the cells were dead already and it was a pain in the ass to rely on it, so i've went for 256GB Samsung 850pro, and after that 512GB 850pro.
Anyway, my hitachi 3TB HDD is greeat for storing a lot of data, games these days use a lot of space, and since i own over 720 games just on my main steam account then i need a large space to fit it in. Even if i would be offered 3TB SSD for the same price of Hitachi 3TB HDD i'd go with Hitachi HDD (most reliable drives on the market) because i'd rather use the slower HDD and have my data safe there for decades, rather than worry that i'd loose my data on SSD...).
Maybe it's my bad luck, but i've had few pendrives and SSD's that died when i was using it, but HDD's cause less trouble for me in terms of data loss.
Btw, don't bother buying cheap Seagate, WD or Samsung (i guess samsung is not selling HDD's anymore). Hitachi and Toshiba HDD's are the best, also there are few good WD models but those are more expensive than most popular cheap models.

Yeah not sure I 100% agree with that.

I work in Enterprise environments and can't even begin to tell you how often I'm replacing HHDs in Raids on servers or SANs that have proper cooling and only mediocre usage. I literally just replaced a 15K SAS Enterprise HHD (built for reliability hence why it costs $600 a drive...) and it was only in production for 2 years...

We can not accurately compare this. While in general we are talking about technology vs technology. But the problem here is build quality and parts used in said builds.

This is why you can have a Samsung SSD with a 5 year factory warranty or an Western Digital HHD drive with 5 year warranty... or some other variants of those disks above that only have 1-3 years warranties...

https://support.wdc.com/warranty/warrantypolicy.aspx (just an example)

It's not just about the technology but also the parts. They do extensive testing on their drives to come up with a safe amount of years to mark for warranties on drives due to predictive hardware failures.

So with that in mind I don't really think we can say one is better then the other in terms of lifespan. Especially when the vendors themselves are giving 5 year warranties to both SSD and HHDs at this point.

When we start seeing new technology that vendors are willing to endorse for longer then 5 years... then I'd start backing that in terms of lifespan.

 

[Crashman]

Well, you can spend 5x more and purchase the SLC version of SSD. However they are normally used for enterprise due to the cost... but has a longer life span.

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/flash-data-center-advantages,2-744-2.html

I've used consumer grade SSDs in my systems for last few years and yet to have a failure on a MLC grade SSD... and one of those drives in my system is used for Shadow Play that is recording 20GB of data everytime I play games... which is every day.

What manufacture of SSD did you use? I only go with Samsung and they come with a 5 year warranty so...

They were miss-matched left-over test system drives, an OCZ and a...Crucial probably.
But the DVR drive cycles through tens of gigabytes of data a day, and that data isn't critical, so the cost of replacing the HDD is "more" critical than the data it contains. An HDD is less likely to fail from so many read/write cycles than an MLC SSD, so it looks like I'm stuck with the old-fashioned SSD/HDD combo.

 

[androbourne]

Well, you can spend 5x more and purchase the SLC version of SSD. However they are normally used for enterprise due to the cost... but has a longer life span.

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/flash-data-center-advantages,2-744-2.html

I've used consumer grade SSDs in my systems for last few years and yet to have a failure on a MLC grade SSD... and one of those drives in my system is used for Shadow Play that is recording 20GB of data everytime I play games... which is every day.

What manufacture of SSD did you use? I only go with Samsung and they come with a 5 year warranty so...

They were miss-matched left-over test system drives, an OCZ and a...Crucial probably.
But the DVR drive cycles through tens of gigabytes of data a day, and that data isn't critical, so the cost of replacing the HDD is "more" critical than the data it contains. An HDD is less likely to fail from so many read/write cycles than an MLC SSD, so it looks like I'm stuck with the old-fashioned SSD/HDD combo.

Yeah if thats the case, you dont really have much choice. To go with an SLC drive would cost way more then the data is worth as you already stated.

I personally never had good experience with OCZ. Crucial is pretty good but still always prefer Samsung.

 

[Gerry Allen]

On-line backup is impractical for the vast majority due to extremely slow upload speeds. According to the FCC, more than 70% of households are limited to upload speeds of less than 3 Mbps. That makes the external drive more important.

 

[mathew7]

I have 5 SSDs in 3 systems (excludint tablets with eMMC) and 2 more in PS3+4. But those are in "work" systems. All my important data in on 1 8TB HDD drive that I monthly rsync to another server (which I wanted to be off-site, but never found time to configure it) with 2x4TB HDDs. All encrypted with luks.

The problem with SSD archive: even reading degrades nearby cells - SSD will constantly shuffle data to avoid loosing it.
LinuxConf 2011 Intel presentation (when MLCs were the bad guys):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq4P0ced1wI

 

[logainofhades]

I would rather trust my data on my own physical system, over any cloud service. HDD isn't going away, in my rig, anytime soon.

 

[darkomaledictus]

For NAS backups SSD are still not there. Wake me up when we can get 30 TB+ affordable ssd setup. For the time being its mainly used for OS and game storage.

 

[Malik 722]

You are not alone ,I am too planing on replacing mine hard disks with ssd.

 

[bruceghayes]

Music/Video storage and games are all you really need storage for and you don't need SSD speed for that, so I think most people are going to go with SSD for computing and HDD for cold storage, I would say that is the best way to go, it's what I do.

 

[timothy.atwood]

People still do not get it. For those who really use computers, SSD's are only good for boot drives.

Your NAS still needs high capacity storage. I have 10 12 TB ENTERPRISE hard drives and while EACH cost $399 from Provantage, I have plenty of storage for VM's, Media Files, etc. To get the same in SSD land would be well over $30000. UNTIL the price drops considerably, SSD's will be relegated to laptops, netbooks, minimal home computers, etc. Even steam games can plow through 3 TB without even thinking. That cost is STILL $250 for a Micron 2 TB whereas I can pick of WD Red Drive for $129 for 8 TB and put two of these in a RAID 1 configuration and still be way ahead.

When you buy Office, you now can load on 5 computers. In MANY cases, you can get discounted pricing from work and get the Suite for $10. Regardless, this option is far cheaper than spending $5 to $10 per seat for Office per month. Look at up-times for Office 365, Google Apps, etc as they are not 365 or even 366.

 

[USAFRet]

People still do not get it. For those who really use computers, SSD's are only good for boot drives.

Your NAS still needs high capacity storage. I have 10 12 TB ENTERPRISE hard drives and while EACH cost $399 from Provantage, I have plenty of storage for VM's, Media Files, etc. To get the same in SSD land would be well over $30000. UNTIL the price drops considerably, SSD's will be relegated to laptops, netbooks, minimal home computers, etc. Even steam games can plow through 3 TB without even thinking. That cost is STILL $250 for a Micron 2 TB whereas I can pick of WD Red Drive for $129 for 8 TB and put two of these in a RAID 1 configuration and still be way ahead.

When you buy Office, you now can load on 5 computers. In MANY cases, you can get discounted pricing from work and get the Suite for $10. Regardless, this option is far cheaper than spending $5 to $10 per seat for Office per month. Look at up-times for Office 365, Google Apps, etc as they are not 365 or even 366.

"For those who really use computers, SSD's are only good for boot drives. "
I can't stress how completely wrong that is.
Video/photo/CAD work....all encompassed in "those who really use computers".
Far far more than just the boot drive.

Yes, the NAS box still needs spinning drives. Yours does, mine does.

But my actual PC is SSD only. 5 drives, approx 2TB.

 

[bit_user]

People still do not get it. For those who really use computers, SSD's are only good for boot drives.

I also disagree. For software development, we notice a significant benefit in build times from using SSDs in higher core-count machines.

Another use case: I have also used avidemux to edit video files without transcoding. This is almost a purely I/O-bound operation.