On 13/05/2012 4:04 PM, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
> Yousuf Khan wrote:
>>
>> Yeah, but those prices are coming down much faster than they are with
>> hard disks, it shouldn't be more than 5 years before these two are
>> close to price parity in terms of capacity. The SSD is already well
>> beyond price parity in terms of performance.
>>
>> There is a distinct air of a buggy-whip industry floating around the
>> hard disk industry.
>
> Aside from the number of writes, what about long term stability for files
> written to SSD 5 or 10 years ago?

One advantage of an old SSD is that it is still alive for reads even
after death. With an HDD, when it dies -- it dies, for both reads and
writes. But an SSD can still be read after it can no longer be written
to. So it gives you the chance to copy stuff off of it and into a new
drive.

As far as its maximum writes, that seems to be highly dependent on how
frequently you write to the same blocks over and over again. With the
wear-leveling technology in modern SSD controllers, you don't really
write to the same blocks all that frequently, they usually attempt to
write to as many least-recently-used blocks as possible. I don't see a
big problem with write lifetimes as they make it sound like in most
write-ups. For example, I've had my new SSD for less than a month, it's
a 240GB drive, and I've already had about 1.09TB written to it (almost
5x more than its capacity). It's still showing 100% lifetime. Of course
I've attempted to keep the really heavy-duty and frequent write
operations off of it, like the pagefile and file indexer. But other
heavy but infrequent writers like Thunderbird remain on this drive.

Yousuf Khan

On 13/05/2012 7:26 PM, Rod Speed wrote:
> Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote
>> Ant wrote
>>> Yousuf Khan wrote
>>>> Rod Speed wrote
>>>>> Tom Del Rosso <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote
>
>>>>>> What happened to Fujitsu?
>
>>>>> They got out of 3.5" drives a very long time ago now.
>
>>>> I think we're left with just Western Digital and Seagate now? If
>>>> this isn't a sign that we should be moving to SSD's very soon, I
>>>> don't know what is.
>
>>> But SSD sizes are still problematic. We want HUGE sizes! Also,
>>> longevity with data with the limited writes.
>
>> Yeah, but those prices are coming down much faster than they are with
>> hard disks,
>
> Only because they are much newer products, much less mature pricing wise.

Being semi-conductors, flash memory falls in price alongside the
standard Moore's Law miniaturization rate. Hard disks don't follow the
Moore's Law rate, they are much slower in density increases.

>> it shouldn't be more than 5 years before these two are close to price
>> parity in terms of capacity.
>
> Don’t believe it with say the 5TB or 10TB drives which
> should be the best $/TB with hard drives by then.

There are already 500GB SSD's available, vs. 4TB HDD's, which is a
factor of only 8x difference. A few years ago, the difference was more
like 32x. I can see 1TB SSD's aren't too far around the corner (maybe by
next year), but 10TB HDD's are going to be at least 3-5 years away. The
differential is dropping. Also at some point, you're going to run into
the "good-enough" wall, where people simply won't need much more
capacity than they already have. People are already there with many
CPU's, and the size of their RAM, HDD size will similarly stagnate. When
the HDD size stagnates, the SSD will catch up in capacity at least at
the "good-enough" sweet spot.

>> The SSD is already well beyond price parity in terms of performance.
>
> Not when you just want a drive for your PVR where the performance
> of even the green hard drives is all you need performance wise.

Even a PVR can benefit from an SSD. PVR's are mostly limited to two
simultaneous recordings these days with HDD storage. With SSD, they may
be able to increase that upto 10 simultaneous recordings, if network
bandwidth allows them. Even if network bandwidth can't keep up with
that, there will be some usability improvements, such as quicker
restarts for the firmware, and faster and smoother search response
(forward and backwards).

>> There is a distinct air of a buggy-whip industry floating around the
>> hard disk industry.
>
> Fantasy with multiple TB hard drives.

I can see HDD's taking over the spot of current tape-backup operations.
It's already happening actually. Basically archival storage.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote
> Tom Del Rosso wrote
>> Yousuf Khan wrote

>>> Yeah, but those prices are coming down much faster than they are with
>>> hard disks, it shouldn't be more than 5 years before these two are close
>>> to price parity in terms of capacity. The SSD is already well beyond
>>> price parity in terms of performance.

>>> There is a distinct air of a buggy-whip industry floating around the
>>> hard disk industry.

>> Aside from the number of writes, what about long term stability for files
>> written to SSD 5 or 10 years ago?

> One advantage of an old SSD is that it is still alive for reads even after
> death.

Depends on how it dies. That isnt how they die on a power failure when
writing.

> With an HDD, when it dies -- it dies, for both reads and writes.

That's just plain wrong too. Quite a bit of the time they just have
some unreallocatable sectors and you can still read the rest fine.

Just had that with a Toshiba that died with just 2 weeks to go with
warranty it was possible to do a final backup before returning it fine.

> But an SSD can still be read after it can no longer be written to.

That's ONLY true if its run out of writes. Which doesn't happen with a hard
drive.

> So it gives you the chance to copy stuff off of it and into a new drive.

So do many failures with hard drives too.

> As far as its maximum writes,

Which hard drives don't have.

> that seems to be highly dependent on how frequently you write to the same
> blocks over and over again.

Wota surprise.

> With the wear-leveling technology in modern SSD controllers, you don't
> really write to the same blocks all that frequently, they usually attempt
> to write to as many least-recently-used blocks as possible.

And you don't have to fart around like that with a hard drive.

> I don't see a big problem with write lifetimes

I do when hard drives don't have any write lifetime.

> as they make it sound like in most write-ups. For example, I've had my new
> SSD for less than a month, it's a 240GB drive,

I'm not silly enough to buy hard drives that small today.

In fact I don't buy hard drives smaller than 2TB today.

> and I've already had about 1.09TB written to it (almost 5x more than its
> capacity). It's still showing 100% lifetime.

And it remains to be seen if that is a lie or not like hard drive
MTBFs always were.

> Of course I've attempted to keep the really heavy-duty and frequent write
> operations off of it, like the pagefile and file indexer.

And that isnt even possible if you don't have a hard drive.

> But other heavy but infrequent writers like Thunderbird remain on this
> drive.

Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote
> Rod Speed wrote
>> Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote
>>> Ant wrote
>>>> Yousuf Khan wrote
>>>>> Rod Speed wrote
>>>>>> Tom Del Rosso <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote

>>>>>>> What happened to Fujitsu?

>>>>>> They got out of 3.5" drives a very long time ago now.

>>>>> I think we're left with just Western Digital and Seagate now? If this
>>>>> isn't a sign that we should be moving to SSD's very soon, I don't know
>>>>> what is.

>>>> But SSD sizes are still problematic. We want HUGE sizes! Also,
>>>> longevity with data with the limited writes.

>>> Yeah, but those prices are coming down much faster than they are with
>>> hard disks,

>> Only because they are much newer products, much less mature pricing wise.

> Being semi-conductors, flash memory falls in price alongside the standard
> Moore's Law miniaturization rate.

Yes.

> Hard disks don't follow the Moore's Law rate, they are much slower in
> density increases.

That’s just plain wrong. And says nothing useful about whether they
will ever be as cheap as hard drives with 10TB drives etc anyway.

>>> it shouldn't be more than 5 years before these two are close to price
>>> parity in terms of capacity.

>> Don’t believe it with say the 5TB or 10TB drives which
>> should be the best $/TB with hard drives by then.

> There are already 500GB SSD's available, vs. 4TB HDD's,

And at MUCH higher $/GB prices.

> which is a factor of only 8x difference. A few years ago, the difference
> was more like 32x. I can see 1TB SSD's aren't too far around the corner
> (maybe by next year),

By which time you are likely to see 6TB hard drives too.

> but 10TB HDD's are going to be at least 3-5 years away.

We'll see... And SSDs will still be MUCH more expensive $/GB
for the largest than with the largest hard drives available too,
which is why those that need the largest sizes for the PVRs etc
will still be using hard drives for that sort of storage.

> The differential is dropping. Also at some point, you're going to run into
> the "good-enough" wall, where people simply won't need much more capacity
> than they already have.

Don’t believe that with PVRs. There will always be plenty that
keep recording more than they get around to watching and
who don’t bother to edit out what they have watched from a
particular evening's recording of one of the channels on a MUX etc.

> People are already there with many CPU's,

Different matter entirely with hard drive storage with PVRs.

> and the size of their RAM,

Different matter entirely with hard drive storage with PVRs.

> HDD size will similarly stagnate.

Don’t believe that, essentially because of PVRs etc.

> When the HDD size stagnates,

Don’t believe that will ever happen with operations like google around.

> the SSD will catch up in capacity at least at the "good-enough" sweet
> spot.

And will still be MUCH more expensive and there
wont be any 'sweet spot' with PVRs and google etc.

>>> The SSD is already well beyond price parity in terms of performance.

>> Not when you just want a drive for your PVR where the performance
>> of even the green hard drives is all you need performance wise.

> Even a PVR can benefit from an SSD.

Nope, not PERFORMANCE WISE they cant.

> PVR's are mostly limited to two simultaneous recordings these days with
> HDD storage.

That is just plain wrong. Mine can do 16 simultaneous
recordings with an eco green slower hard drive.

and I happen to live in an area where there are only
4 free to air transmitters with only 4 channels per mux.
Some places have hundreds of channels per mux.

> With SSD, they may be able to increase that upto 10 simultaneous
> recordings,

I can do that trivially with any eco green hard drive.

I doubt too many would want to record more than 16
channels at once and the hard drive handles that fine anyway.

> if network bandwidth allows them.

It handles hundreds of channels simultaneously fine with digital TV.

> Even if network bandwidth can't keep up with that, there will be some
> usability improvements,

Nope.

> such as quicker restarts for the firmware,

No point in restarting the firmware.

> and faster and smoother search response (forward and backwards).

That’s just plain wrong. Its done from the file
structure and searching is instant even with a
hard drive because the file structure is cached.

>>> There is a distinct air of a buggy-whip industry floating around the
>>> hard disk industry.

>> Fantasy with multiple TB hard drives.

> I can see HDD's taking over the spot of current tape-backup operations.

Hardly anyone uses tape for backup anymore, they use hard drives.

And that’s another example of where its $/TB that
matters so they wont change to SSDs any time soon.

> It's already happening actually. Basically archival storage.

Not with SSDs it aint, because they don’t last
as long as hard drives for archival storage.

Tom Del Rosso wrote:

> Do they have suicidally short sleep time-outs like WD?

http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/

On 05/14/12 12:25 am, Yousuf Khan wrote:

> I can see HDD's taking over the spot of current tape-backup operations.
> It's already happening actually. Basically archival storage.

I was talking this past weekend with a member of my extended family who
works for an organization with huge server farms. Their backups use
humungous (about the size of the living room where we were talking)
robotic tape systems.

Perce

On 05/14/12 01:17 am, Rod Speed wrote:

>> I can see HDD's taking over the spot of current tape-backup operations.
>
> Hardly anyone uses tape for backup anymore, they use hard drives.

I was talking this past weekend with a member of my extended family who
works for an organization with huge server farms. Their backups use
humungous (about the size of the living room where we were talking)
robotic tape systems.

Perce

Rod Speed wrote:
> Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote
>
> > Hard disks don't follow the Moore's Law rate, they are much slower
> > in density increases.
>
> That’s just plain wrong. And says nothing useful about whether they
> will ever be as cheap as hard drives with 10TB drives etc anyway.

Moore's Law isn't in effect anyway. He said transistor count would double
every year, and it did from 1959 to the mid-80's. Then it was every 18
months or 2 years but people still call it Moore's Law.


> Hardly anyone uses tape for backup anymore, they use hard drives.

With one tape drive equal to the price of a server, they use tape where they
have lots of servers.


--

Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.

On 14/05/2012 12:55 AM, Rod Speed wrote:
> Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote
>> One advantage of an old SSD is that it is still alive for reads even
>> after death.
>
> Depends on how it dies. That isnt how they die on a power failure when
> writing.

But that isn't really dying, that's just a power failure. The drive is
still usable afterwards when the power is re-established. Some data
might get corrupted, but the drive will still be usable.

>> With an HDD, when it dies -- it dies, for both reads and writes.
>
> That's just plain wrong too. Quite a bit of the time they just have
> some unreallocatable sectors and you can still read the rest fine.
>
> Just had that with a Toshiba that died with just 2 weeks to go with
> warranty it was possible to do a final backup before returning it fine.

But that's not the definition of dying either. Dying means becoming
unusable. A lot of bad sectors is just a major error, but still not
dead: but it may be enough to get warranty replacement, sure. Dead is
when for example the controller dies, or the spindle seizes up.

>> As far as its maximum writes,
>
> Which hard drives don't have.

But a hard drive will usually run out of reads and writes at the same time.

>> I don't see a big problem with write lifetimes
>
> I do when hard drives don't have any write lifetime.

No, HDD's just have an overall lifetime.

>> as they make it sound like in most write-ups. For example, I've had my
>> new SSD for less than a month, it's a 240GB drive,
>
> I'm not silly enough to buy hard drives that small today.

More than big enough for an operating system drive. You can still use
big hard drives for data drives. That's what I'm doing. Even when I was
using an HDD for my operating system drive, I had it partitioned down to
200GB for the OS, and the remaining for data. Keeping the OS partition
small allows for much easier backup and restore of the OS.

> In fact I don't buy hard drives smaller than 2TB today.

Good for you.

>> and I've already had about 1.09TB written to it (almost 5x more than
>> its capacity). It's still showing 100% lifetime.
>
> And it remains to be seen if that is a lie or not like hard drive
> MTBFs always were.

It's a separate SMART value only available in SSD's. There's no reason
to believe that SSD's don't know exactly how much is being written to
them, based on block sizes and number of blocks written. It's also safe
to assume that the SSD's controller knows exactly which blocks are no
longer writeable, so it may update the SSD lifetime value based on the
number of unwriteable blocks accumulated.

>> Of course I've attempted to keep the really heavy-duty and frequent
>> write operations off of it, like the pagefile and file indexer.
>
> And that isnt even possible if you don't have a hard drive.

Sure, but even when I had a boot hard drive, I used to keep the pagefile
on other hard drives. But a lot of people also keep their pagefiles on
the SSD.

Yousuf Khan

On 14/05/2012 1:17 AM, Rod Speed wrote:
> Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote
>> which is a factor of only 8x difference. A few years ago, the
>> difference was more like 32x. I can see 1TB SSD's aren't too far
>> around the corner (maybe by next year),
>
> By which time you are likely to see 6TB hard drives too.

Which actually just proves my point. If 1TB SSD's are to be met by 6TB
HDD's, then the capacity differential will only be 6X, which is a
smaller differential. If the differential started out at 32X and is now
around 8X, and then it'll be 6X, the trend is obvious, the SSD is
catching upto the HDD in capacity.

>> When the HDD size stagnates,
>
> Don’t believe that will ever happen with operations like google around.

That's hardly a home usage scenario, that's an enterprise usage
scenario. In fact, it's operations like Google that might reduce the
need for internal storage capacity at home. They are the companies
developing cloud storage, which might make large capacities at home
unnecessary.

>> if network bandwidth allows them.
>
> It handles hundreds of channels simultaneously fine with digital TV.

With digital tv, you aren't getting all channels broadcast to you all of
the time, just the ones that you're watching or recording.

>> and faster and smoother search response (forward and backwards).
>
> That’s just plain wrong. Its done from the file
> structure and searching is instant even with a
> hard drive because the file structure is cached.

Searching forwards is easy, but searching backwards has always been jerky.

>> I can see HDD's taking over the spot of current tape-backup operations.
>
> Hardly anyone uses tape for backup anymore, they use hard drives.

Never worked in a data server centre have you? When you're backing up
petabytes of data, you're using tape right now. We're talking about
robotic tape libraries equipped with multiple DLT or LTO tape drives.

>> It's already happening actually. Basically archival storage.
>
> Not with SSDs it aint, because they don’t last
> as long as hard drives for archival storage.

I was talking about HDD's taking over from tape.

Yousuf Khan