Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants(anandtech.com) |
Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants(anandtech.com) |
For our next storage expansion it's ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash/SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don't have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.
SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you're not getting the right picture.
I took a look and the NAND chip trend lines, and I predict that by mid 2018, 256gb of NAND (which is enough space for an average consumer) will cost less than a 1tb drive. At that point, all the cheap laptops will drop spinning drives too.
But then you jump to mechanical disks to get above 32 until like you said mid-range where it's all proper SSDs.
A 2TB harddrive is just way to cheap compared to a 2TB SSD, even if they fail and need more power, atleast for archiving or large storage in consumer terms.
Primary storage may switch to SSD though.
Turned out to be a defective batch from manufacturer. SSDs are normally reliable but in my experience are not immune to problems.
I also had a RAID 1 array where both SSDs failed within a couple days of each other (due to wear). That was a rude surprise. They were only six months old.
You know the read and write IPOs. You know when they fail.
Considering I was a college student at the time, it cost me a lot of money to replace my failed Seagate drives (after RMAing them and having failed replacements). I've never bought another Seagate product and never will, regardless of claims that they've improved.
I have no legal experience and I'm thinking completely from the point that the judge would want his job to be easier.
So not everything that came out of Maxtor is terrible, if it means they let you flash HDD FW under Linux now.
The laptop drive thickness is the abnormality for the rest of the storage world.
"[the factory's] closure will significantly reduce the company’s HDD output"
...but a few sentences later:
"the plant no longer makes products"
How can a plant that no longer makes products would reduce the company's output if closed?
If everyone had fiber, sure...
You often hear the trope 'don't mix different disk brands in RAID' wondering if anyone knows if that's true?
Ohhh, I get it, you're now modifying your original post to look like you were aware of enterprise storage. Got it.
Not really. The big driver for cost reduction in SSDs was process shrinks, but the latest processes are actually more expensive per-transistor than older ones so that ship has more-or-less sailed. You've got 3D NAND but that's even more expensive to manufacture so the cost savings are marginal at best. It remains to be seen if XPoint will lead to big savings.
In the short term SSD prices have actually been trending up due to a shortage of NAND flash.
Source: http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm
Usually, big companies don't show up in small claims, so they default, and you can simply file a lien on them and get your money back either by cash or by equipment. You get to literally walk in to their building, with cops by your side, and start taking stuff until the lien is settled. Or you can walk to their bank with the court order, and have it yanked directly from their account. I've done both. It's fun.
That model really had some serious issues at the time.
And tape is not even that competitve. It's like 1/3 the cost of HDDs, and has an 80 second seek time, making it completely unusable for most real time applications (still usable for theatrical movies).
Are they though? I just searched on Amazon and the cheapest LTO6 drive was $1,619.56.
Even just the tapes are $25 or so for "(2.5TB) native to (6.25TB) compressed" whatever that means which I guess is cheaper per TB if you don't worry about the drive.
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Ultrium-6-Drive-Height-Intern...
https://www.amazon.com/Sony-Linear-0-85-Inch-Internal-LTX250...
There's no point storing that on a high-IOPS, always-on medium, like an SSD or even HDD.
Tapes are big, and still make complete sense for backup purposes, especially if you want to maintain latest 10-15 backup copies to choose from.
https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd...
Exception is a flash drive I snapped in half once. Oops.
But overall I prefer SSDs - just mix and match different models/manufacturers/batches in different RAID sets as for HDDs.
The maintenance on enterprise storage is generally a percentage of purchase price. So it's actually cheaper.
>How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year?
4.5 watts idle/8 watts max for a spinning drive vs. 4.5 watts idle/11 watts max for a large capacity SSD (15TB Samsung). The power consumption thing was a much better story comparing 3.5" 15k RPM drives. 7200 RPM drives it's basically a wash unless you're talking about relatively small capacity SSDs.
>How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?
That's really the crux of the issue. SPINNING drives are not dead. FAST spinning drives are dead. 10k/15k drives are going to see the end of their useful life in the modern datacenter far faster than anyone predicted 2 years ago. Outside of legacy systems I would expect sales of 10k RPM drives to fall off a cliff if not completely disappear before the end of 2020.
SSDs are highly transactional workloads like databases or most back-end systems for applications or virtual machines.
You RARELY see the two used for the same type of workload unless someone has money to burn and wants to standardize on SSD and doesn't care about cost. SATA/NL-SAS being used for a workload that should be on SSD generally results in someone getting fired and the original system being forklift replaced.
And NAND has already hit the curve where it isn't going to get cheaper every year. NAND price is actually on the rise. Smaller Node is now actually more expensive, multiple layer are hard to yield.
So relatively speaking the 10x gap between HDD and SSD wont change in the next 5 years or so.
It is cheaper to power (NAND is more energy efficient than an electric motor), it is cheaper to maintain (solid state media does not suffer mechanical failures), and it is cheaper to use (each query on an SSD takes slightly less time than on spinning media).
It's only 10x cheaper if you ignore those facts. Now, how you value those factors may vary. Also, I have been involved in enough purchasing decisions to know that while capex is easy to approve and opex is hard, the initial number is surprisingly important.
It's a 4 to 6x gap [1].
That's the difference between something I can cover from my tax return, to something I won't really even consider. I won't save $6k in power in a year, or 5 to make up the difference, and I don't need the extra speed, to feed media to my htpc.
Also, if (when) a drive fails and you have to resilver 8Tb of data on one of those drives, the slow write speed will kill you.
They are bulkier, but ultimately an SSD is going to need space and servers too.
It's not a competition at this point. SSDs are good if you need low latency or high IOPS, HDDs are good if small delays and low IOPS is acceptable, and tape is good if you don't mind waiting several minutes to get the data.
TCO drops significantly from SSD to HDD, and significantly again from HDD to tape. And a large, modern datacenter will frequently have massive amounts of all three.
Oh, I was thinking about the cheaper Seagate "Archive" drives which have really slow write speed because of that shingled technology.
> Reduced performance for a few days or a week isn't a huge deal for me.
It could be a huge deal when another drive fails during that week while the array is rebuilding. But if you have more hot spares it's no big deal.