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HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

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Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#61

Post by kabdib »

qb45 wrote: post #37
rincebrain wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close to 100% of the SSD failures I've seen have not been from being left off for a few years, nor from actual flash media failure, but from firmware bugs or, occasionally, mechanical failure. (I've had very small sample size of SSDs not being powered up for a few years, but the few I have powered up after not powering on for years have had all their data retained. Ask me in another 15 years or so, though.)

Part of what you count as firmware bugs may have been cases of data/firmware corruption caused by unexpected power loss.

That's a firmware bug, then.

I've written a few flash storage systems (small ones, for consumer devices). If your data structures are such that you can't do an atomic commit, you shouldn't be in the marketplace.

Sudden loss of power is not an excuse.

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#62

Post by kabdib »

pcurve wrote: post #9
ericabiz wrote: post #2

As far as I can tell, this doesn't include SSDs. Spinning drive shipments are down -- I say GOOD RIDDANCE! I run a repair shop, and one of the top computer repairs we do is to upgrade a spinning disk to a SSD. A 240GB SSD runs $60-$65 these days, and is perfectly adequate for 99% of users. For that other 1% (which I include myself in) 512GB is adequate for 90% of those. HDD -> SSD is the single most cost-effective up…

is SSD reliable? With no moving parts, it ssd should be more reliable, but that's not apparently the case. What's your experience? Also, have you seen case of SSD data loss due as result of not powering up for couple years?

There are brands of SSD that I will not have in our datacenter (medium scale, several thousand machines). Kingston and OCZ are the ones that I kill on sight. I found some new-in-box drives in a corner a week or two ago, and threw them away. They're poison.

For developer workstations, we get good results from Samsung drives. We run Intel enterprise class drives in servers and they're fine, don't even have to think about them.

We've pretty much stopped buying spinning drives, with a few exceptions where we need lots of capacity and don't care about performance.

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#63

Post by greedo »

ajuc wrote: post #56
creshal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure there's several scenarios that demand huge amounts of storage - e.g. storing HD series, etc - but I'd argue that it isn't mainstream in the greater scheme of things. That was my point; almost nobody is storing HD series anymore because people want to (and in many cases legally are only able to) stream them instead.

> almost nobody is storing HD series anymore They never were. Why would you store a movie on a hard drive after you watched it?

Lots of people use Plex etc for movie playback. Kids love to rewatch movies, as do some movie lovers. I have a copy of many movies in a disk array so that I can watch them anywhere in the house without digging out a disk.

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#64

Post by greedo »

dividual wrote: post #49

Spinning disks still have their uses though. For example, they're ideal for a low-to-moderate amount of disk activity, and they last longer. Just make sure you schedule a daily defragment. Spinning disks are also great for 'cold storage' of files. I wouldn't store anything worthwhile on an SSD though because of their fail-rate. SSDs of course have their use cases too, but there are many trade-offs to using them exclu…

Daily defragmentation on a disk with "low-to-moderate" use? Maybe that's still a Windows thing, but on my Linux systems and OSX I haven't defrag'd in ages. (Actually just once on OSX when I was grasping at straws with a disk issue).

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#65

Post by beachstartup »

m_eiman wrote: post #35
beachstartup wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

get a smaller one for your OS + common apps and a used nvidia gpu from a newer mac. an ssd is a completely different paradigm. it's night and day, even on an old sata bus. this shoudn't even be a question. hdd computers are completely unuseable to me now. i sat down at one the other day and i thought it had crashed and almost rebooted it, but it was just chugging the disk.

Hard to switch GPUs in an iMac, isn't it? I have considered switching out both the HDD and the DVD drive to get space to build a Fusion drive, but I kinda want to keep the DVD drive; it's the only one we have in the house. Hm. Maybe I should build a Fusion drive and add an external optical drive...

not really. it's just a pci card. just make sure you get one with a mac compatible firmware.

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#66

Post by kdamken »

ericabiz wrote: post #2

As far as I can tell, this doesn't include SSDs. Spinning drive shipments are down -- I say GOOD RIDDANCE! I run a repair shop, and one of the top computer repairs we do is to upgrade a spinning disk to a SSD. A 240GB SSD runs $60-$65 these days, and is perfectly adequate for 99% of users. For that other 1% (which I include myself in) 512GB is adequate for 90% of those. HDD -> SSD is the single most cost-effective up…

I recommend the SSD to all my friends with older macbooks. As a christmas gift I upgraded my girlfriends 2012 macbook to a 512 gb one, and the computer went from barely working/loading anything to feeling like a brand new machine.

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#67

Post by qb45 »

kabdib wrote: post #61
qb45 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of what you count as firmware bugs may have been cases of data/firmware corruption caused by unexpected power loss.

That's a firmware bug, then. I've written a few flash storage systems (small ones, for consumer devices). If your data structures are such that you can't do an atomic commit, you shouldn't be in the marketplace. Sudden loss of power is not an excuse.

There was some widely circulated study few years ago which found that most SSD models they tested had problems on power loss. Some even bricked. They didn't publish concrete names, unfortunately.

But yeah, I agree it's a bug and shouldn't happen. So what :)

edit:

There we go: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast13/fast13...

Some more: http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html

Note that the 320 recommended by the second article had similar issues, supposedly fixed in firmware 4PC10362, but some users reported problems even on that version: https://communities.intel.com/thread/24339?start=15 (many of those complaints look like different problems, but not all).

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#69

Post by jbandela1 »

pcurve wrote: post #9
ericabiz wrote: post #2

As far as I can tell, this doesn't include SSDs. Spinning drive shipments are down -- I say GOOD RIDDANCE! I run a repair shop, and one of the top computer repairs we do is to upgrade a spinning disk to a SSD. A 240GB SSD runs $60-$65 these days, and is perfectly adequate for 99% of users. For that other 1% (which I include myself in) 512GB is adequate for 90% of those. HDD -> SSD is the single most cost-effective up…

is SSD reliable? With no moving parts, it ssd should be more reliable, but that's not apparently the case. What's your experience? Also, have you seen case of SSD data loss due as result of not powering up for couple years?

Personal anecdote, I have had trouble with OCZ. I have had no trouble with Samsung EVO. Now, I go with Samsung EVO for all my drives - they are not much more expensive than the cheap drives and the fact that they just work is worth it to me.

Re: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low

#70

Post by throwaway7767 »

pcurve wrote: post #9
ericabiz wrote: post #2

As far as I can tell, this doesn't include SSDs. Spinning drive shipments are down -- I say GOOD RIDDANCE! I run a repair shop, and one of the top computer repairs we do is to upgrade a spinning disk to a SSD. A 240GB SSD runs $60-$65 these days, and is perfectly adequate for 99% of users. For that other 1% (which I include myself in) 512GB is adequate for 90% of those. HDD -> SSD is the single most cost-effective up…

is SSD reliable? With no moving parts, it ssd should be more reliable, but that's not apparently the case. What's your experience? Also, have you seen case of SSD data loss due as result of not powering up for couple years?

I recently had to RMA a Samsung 840 EVO that was less than 3 years old, and had only seen light usage (but no extended offline time). It just suddenly stopped responding to ATA commands, returning errors. All the SMART attributes were fine and the drive even gave itself a clean bill of health. Distressingly, even as it was returning read/write errors like crazy, the SMART read/write error attributes stayed at 0. It was running the latest firmware. I could not even do an ATA secure erase to reset it to clean condition, as that command returned an error as well.

I sent it out for RMA, they returned it with the work description "firmware upgraded" and no further information. It's the same drive, but it's been zeroed/factory-reset.

I have backups, so I'm not too concerned about losing data, but this episode didn't exactly make me confident in the quality of SSD firmware, especially since samsung is supposed to be one of the better manufacturers out there.

Just one anecdote, make of it what you will. Of course, I've had countless hard drives fail over the years as well, but the failure mode is very different, there's no partial read possible and it just happened all of a sudden with no indication.

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