Will SSD's replace HDD's?

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Waqas Ahmed, Jun 7, 2015.

  1. Waqas Ahmed

    Waqas Ahmed Nibble Poster

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    Been thinking about this, and personally I don't think so, because flash memory is expensive. And sure, the price is coming down for flash memory, but the price is also coming down for NAND memory too at about the same rate

    Bundle that, with hard drive production in terms of storage, boasting a potential 10TB/hard drive (see: http://www.slashgear.com/hgst-has-a-hard-drive-boasting-10-tb-of-storage-space-13373563/)

    I can't see SSD's replacing hard drives, except perhaps in consumer laptops, or even perhaps business laptops.. As I'm a laptops person, I'd probably invest in a NAS drive as more and more laptops remove their DVD drives (ie: removing the second bay option)

    Your thoughts?
     
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  2. Juelz

    Juelz Gigabyte Poster

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    I suppose they will when they get bigger storage amounts. The are apparently more reliable than HDDs because of them not having moving parts, but still doomed to fail.
     
  3. Waqas Ahmed

    Waqas Ahmed Nibble Poster

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    Perhaps so. I've seen this as well:

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047426/ssds-still-maturing-new-memory-tech-still-10-years-away.html

    2023 or later appears to be the date tbh. I personally have a 120GB SSD just for OS and programs, and the rest of the stuff is on the data drive :)

    This also being said, apparently Amazon STILL use tape drives
     
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  4. dmarsh
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    dmarsh Petabyte Poster

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    SDD's are far better for laptops :-

    1. No moving parts, harder for mechanical failure
    2. Bangs and drops to laptop can't cause the heads to crash into the platter.
    3. No spinning up and down, less power drain on battery.
    4. SSD's are smaller and lighter
    5. SSD's are 10-20x faster than HDD

    You can also go for a hybrid drive if you need extra cheap storage, but as mentioned, I'd prefer USB 3.0 external HDD or a NAS.

    All my laptops only have SSD in them now, decent quality SDD's last 5 years, and to be honest most laptops don't last that long.

    Ultrabooks are the thing now, DVD/CD has been dead for at least two years now in reality, many people don't even fit them to desktops anymore, let alone laptops. USB keys, SD cards and network streaming have made them redundant.

    Using a DVD bay to put an extra HDD in a laptop just makes the above points worse by factor 2.

    You have a heavier, larger, more power hungry, less reliable laptop, something that most people simply don't want.

    Lots people use tape as a backup medium, because its cheap for vast amounts of offline storage, therefore its good for backups. Some places have also invested heavily in robotic tape systems, these systems have ROI / lifetime of 10+ years. Tape itself can last 15-30 years which is better than some HDD's. Disks consume power even while idle, some businesses may backup offline data for 7 years but never access it.
     
    Last edited: Jun 7, 2015
  5. Monkeychops

    Monkeychops Kilobyte Poster

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    As noted above, benefits in a laptop far outweigh the negatives and I wouldn't want to go back to mechanical disk in any of mine. Desktop machines as well fall into that category, the reason people will stick to mechanical disks will largely be cost but that's coming down all the time it seems.

    Running with a 2TB mechanical secondary drive in one of my work laptops for a various reasons, as it's only really used as file storage with a couple of rarely used VMs sat on there it's not too bad. Got my day to day VMs and demo system sat on the SSD to help keep things snappy :)

    Enterprise is where it gets interesting and where my knowledge shrinks massively, I know companies out there sell all flash storage arrays but I'm guessing they are not cheap.

    That'll be for backups and/or archiving though, pros and cons for using tape over disk in that instance. All depends what the requirements are.
     
    Last edited: Jun 7, 2015
  6. Waqas Ahmed

    Waqas Ahmed Nibble Poster

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    Hmmm true I guess, but for portability, people often don't do that! ie: thee xternal storage, unless it's via a NAS drive. Personally, my "new" (used) laptop is heavy, but that's because it's a business laptop and it's designed to be durable; not ultraportable

    What size SSD's are in your laptops? I have two drives in mine. An SSD for boot, and HDD for data. I do intend on getting a NAS one day, and having a laptop that only has the one drive. If any thing, it means better battery I guess....
     
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  7. Waqas Ahmed

    Waqas Ahmed Nibble Poster

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    In enterprise, they do often still use SCSI drives over SSD's, but only because they're cheaper. They're moving to 100% SSD's in the enterprise tbh

    And that's true. They do only use it for backups. They dont use it for any thing else.
     
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  8. JK2447
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    JK2447 Petabyte Poster Administrator Premium Member

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    I think SSD's will replace HDDs yes. They are getting cheaper and are so much faster, HDD's will be legacy technology eventually I think. Moving parts are more likely to fail. Disk sizes are starting to get there now, I think that's all that's stopping SDDs wiping out HDDs at the moment, and cost of course.
     
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  9. Monkeychops

    Monkeychops Kilobyte Poster

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    My current main work laptop is a tank, hate lugging it about esp as the power brick is huge but it's needed to run everything. Used to have a smaller day to day machine but then whenever I needed to run the heavy stuff that meant taking 2 laptops around which was worse!

    That's got a 512GB SSD as main drive then a 2TB drive in the expansion bay in lieu of the DVD writer.

    Least have some interesting options when they need refreshing, can do a lot of my demos through a cloud based system now and could have a Mac Air or Pro as main machine instead, decisions decisions.

    And I know the products that I look after are all SSD based bar the base model which still uses a mech drive.
     
    Last edited: Jun 7, 2015
  10. dmarsh
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    dmarsh Petabyte Poster

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    My laptops all have professional grade 256 GB SDD's, but they are bit old now.

    Now I'd probably go for 512 GB SSD.

    I still use 1 TB USB 3 MyPassport, but really the main need is for VM's, an you want them running off SSD ideally, so even them HDD is a drawback.

    As soon as I can get a cheap professional grade 1 TB SSD my use of HDD will be for backup only.
     
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  11. Waqas Ahmed

    Waqas Ahmed Nibble Poster

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    Ah fair enough. Tbh, I thought for me, I dont need masses of space. 250GB would be fine, 500GB would be a nice to have, and 1TB hard drives are certainly best value for money (Though 1TB drives would mean that I could do more backups as well) I bought an SSD purely because I knew I was only going to use it for the OS and programs tbh

    Oh forgot, there's also space for movies, songs, yadda yadda. I might pop those on to a NAS drive tbh. Tbh, I noticed that last year, after starting work, I barely needed any space on the hard drive.. Also, I had pretty much almost zero need for say...Microsoft Office..
     
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  12. Kitkatninja
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    For both my work & home laptop, SSDs have replaced the traditional HDD. For both my work & home PCs, SHDDs have replaced the traditional HDD.

    As for things like SANs, NL (10k) HDDs are still the norm, with 7200k disks being there for storage rather than performance, imo. However they have been releasing SANs and NASs with SSDs in them (eg Dell MD3060e Expansion Array with SSDs go from anywhere from £20k to £46k).
     
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  13. SimonD
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    Enterprise Flash Devices (EFD's) are becoming the norm but the price per GB still far outweighs for SSD compared to HD.

    Also worth considering is that you can do far more writes to a normal HD compared to an SSD so you need to consider whether a flash device would work for you over a normal HD based array.

    Don't get me wrong, I love our Pure Storage Flash array, it's performance is simply leaps and bounds far superiour compared to spinning tin, as an example, we had a test where on spinning tin it would take us about 6 hours to deploy 398 VM's, this included OS deployments, DNS\IPAM registrations and application deployment, when we moved to a flash array that deployment time dropped to 40 minutes.

    On a desktop\laptop side of things it's great having both SSD and the use of SSHD's but until greater than 500GB capacity drives become really affordable you're always going to be stuck with larger capacity HD's being required by some people.

    As a user of various home based storage arrays (I have 3 Synology NAS devices) I can't even contemplate moving all that data to SSD simply because the cost of the SSD's required for that far out reach the cost of standard HD's, infact looking at a 2TB SSD (which is the smallest capacity I could use (outside of a caching drive of course) costs over £1500, that's per disk and I would need at least 10 (with another 5 at 1TB capacity for my iSCSI storage)).

    Now let's jump forward 5 years when SSD's are looked on as the HD because we are using holographic storage which has a price point of pence to the GB and I would grab as much storage as I could fit in all of my devices but as we aren't there yet I have to weigh up the cost benefit of SSD over HD for my different use cases.

    As a side note, EFD arrays also cost more than HD arrays, as an example I am aware of a NetApp all flash array that cost over £1.4 Million :o
     
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  14. Vince Polston

    Vince Polston Nibble Poster

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    100% agree with this. I've seen more SSD fail in the past few years than I have seen hard drives. Having said that... I use SSD in everything I own. I'm addicted to the speed. Love the fact that they have come so far down in price.
     
  15. Apexes

    Apexes Gigabyte Poster

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    I've got all of our new hardware that we get shipped with SSD's - done so for the last year now, mostly 128gb, but newer models are now coming with 256gb.

    Can't knock them - not had an issue so far over 3.5k machines (touchwood)
     
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  16. Theprof

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    I think for sure mechanical hard drives will be replaced down the road, even the enterprise grade SAN HDDs. The problem with SSDs at the moment as people already stated:

    1. Cost per GB outweighs traditional HDD
    2. The price of SSD in general is more expensive than the traditional HDD
    3. The life of an SSD is shorter than that of HDD

    With those main issues in mind, at the moment, SSD cannot replace HDD. SSD will continue to be used with HDD for caching tiers or for very critical apps that require very high storage performance. Maybe even for orgs that use AFAs for high performance. And of course consumers in general will most likely opt for an SSD.

    Now, there are various features at the array level (enterprise) that will allow the reduction of GB/$ ratio when compared to traditional HDDs, those features are deduplication, compression, and various other space saving techniques that the array might introduce, but it still does not solve the fundamental issue SSDs introduce today.

    Intel and Micron are currently working on a new class of storage technology called 3D XPoint (pronounced 3D Cross-Point) which will solve some of the challenges that SSD are facing today, such as longevity of the drive and at the same time being supposedly 1000x times faster than todays SSD. Aimed at replacing memory + storage. Sounds ambitious, but definitely interesting non the less.

    So the industry is definitely coming up with clever ways of moving forward and in time, mechanical disks will be replaced, of that I am pretty sure. Even in my household, everyone is running on SSDs and the only thing we use HDDs for is to store data such as backups and various files/folders that are not frequently accessed.
     
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