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SSD Prices in a Free Fall

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Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#71

Post by theandrewbailey »

discardorama wrote: post #36

Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350 Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40 Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity. In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.

Even if you factor in the performance difference, the cost still doesn't quite work out. On average, I don't think they are ~9x faster (more like 5x). Sure, SSDs max out disk interface speed and effectively have no seek time, but there are few workloads that are heavy on 4k random I/O (like booting and copying small files).

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#73

Post by hayksaakian »

adventured wrote: post #69
mrfusion wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prices get weird on Amazon. Maybe newegg would yield a better comparison. Also maybe that HDD and that SSD aren't the same level of quality?

It's essentially accurate. For example on Newegg a vanilla 7200 HD from Western Digital, at 1tb, will run you $50. The lowest cost 1tb SSD will run in the mid $300s. A solid 7x difference. In less than two years we'll see consumer retail 1tb SSDs for $150 to $200. What's actually going to happen, more than a violent price plunge pushing 1tb down to $50, is capacity will soar while prices fall more reasonably than the…

Are there technical limits to hard drive capacity?

Is there a point at which they simply cannot get cheaper?

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#74

Post by gwern »

discardorama wrote: post #36

Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350 Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40 Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity. In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.

> And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper

Don't be sure about that. Remember that the Thai floods setback HDD prices and made them more expensive for years; they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked. With SSDs dropping, that might deter much more investment into HDDs (and with less demand from HDDs in the first place, there will be fewer of the economies of scale & learning curves that drove previous HDD price decreases - and vice versa for SSDs!).

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#75

Post by ghaff »

hbbio wrote: post #5

In a side-note in the article, the author mentions that Amazon Glacier runs on tape. Although I'm not sure Amazon officially explained the technology, I heard (and read on Wikipedia) that they store data on conventional HDDs, that are however kept "offline". Has anyone here some more knowledge about that?

Nothing authoritative. The links down-thread are almost all Robin Harris speculating about what it might be based on using various back of the envelope calculations. I'm actually pretty amazed that Amazon has been able to keep even minimal details off the web as far as I can tell.

The closest I've seen to a direct statement from Amazon is: " An Amazon statement sent to Ars says only that "Glacier is built from inexpensive commodity hardware components," and is "designed to be hardware-agnostic, so that savings can be captured as Amazon continues to drive down infrastructure costs."" http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/for-on...

FWIW, Google's competitive Nearline service almost certainly uses disks:

The difference between Google’s Standard Storage and Nearline Storage slices on its public cloud comes down to a software layer, Tom Kershaw, director of product management for Google Cloud Platform, tells The Platform. We also think there might possibly be extra physical distance between the devices hosting the Nearline Storage and servers residing in the Google datacenters and network links that expose Cloud Platform services to the outside Internet. The Nearline Storage could also be running on slightly older equipment that is heavier on the disk drives but that is not beyond its technical or economic life.

http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/16/why-the-coldest-storag...

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#76

Post by teraflop »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #8
hbbio wrote: post #5

In a side-note in the article, the author mentions that Amazon Glacier runs on tape. Although I'm not sure Amazon officially explained the technology, I heard (and read on Wikipedia) that they store data on conventional HDDs, that are however kept "offline". Has anyone here some more knowledge about that?

Yes please. I was also intrigued by this statement. I was under the impression that Amazon never told what the "secret sauce" was behind Glacier. Looking at Wikipedia now, it seems there are still multiple contending theories. Also, is it true that the service is not very popular? Are people here using it or similar?

The big sticking point with Glacier is that the cost model for retrievals is complicated and unintuitive. There's a two-step process where you have to first retrieve data and then download it, and you're billed based on the peak retrieval rate in a month, not the total amount downloaded. It's not so bad now that they let you set a retrieval policy to limit your throughput, but before that, you had to carefully schedule your retrievals in order to avoid unexpected costs.

As far as I can tell, Google's new nearline storage offering is superior to Glacier in nearly every way. The retrieval is much faster, and the retrieval costs are a flat rate per gigabyte that's equal to what Glacier gives you in the best case. Only drawback is the lack of a free tier.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#77

Post by white-flame »

discardorama wrote: post #36

Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350 Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40 Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity. In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.

Let's look at the sweet spots, because that's really what many people will buy:

  Best $/GB HDD on pricewatch.com: $0.024/GB for 2TB at $48.95
  Best $/GB SSD on pricewatch.com: $0.387/GB for 240GB at $92.95
That's a 16x price increase, not 10x.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#78

Post by dragontamer »

hayksaakian wrote: post #73
adventured wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's essentially accurate. For example on Newegg a vanilla 7200 HD from Western Digital, at 1tb, will run you $50. The lowest cost 1tb SSD will run in the mid $300s. A solid 7x difference. In less than two years we'll see consumer retail 1tb SSDs for $150 to $200. What's actually going to happen, more than a violent price plunge pushing 1tb down to $50, is capacity will soar while prices fall more reasonably than the…

Are there technical limits to hard drive capacity? Is there a point at which they simply cannot get cheaper?

Yes and no?

Those new "shingled" Hard Drives are 8TB and pretty cheap. However, the hard drives have severe reductions in speed and are really only for archival purposes. IIRC, there's a path for 10TB, 16TB and beyond if you're willing to put up with the weaknesses of shingled hard drives.

Granted, SSDs are moving from MLC(2-bits per cell) to TLC (3-bits per cell) which reduce speed significantly without actually selling any "more" hardware. So both sides are "cheating" extra capacity out of the same hardware.

If you want to keep the same high-quality specs that the 4tb hard drives have (speed, reliability, etc. etc.), I don't think there's a valid upgrade path at the moment. There's some research to push the capacities beyond that while retaining the speed of current hard drives, but they're not ready for commercial use yet.

But the same is true for SSDs. 16nm MLC Flash might turn to 10nm or 8nm as process technology improves... but that's maybe a 2x to 4x improvment in capacity. TLC gives another 50% boost.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#79

Post by Someone »

JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #15
hbbio wrote: post #5

In a side-note in the article, the author mentions that Amazon Glacier runs on tape. Although I'm not sure Amazon officially explained the technology, I heard (and read on Wikipedia) that they store data on conventional HDDs, that are however kept "offline". Has anyone here some more knowledge about that?

I'm probably explaining something most everyone here already knows, but: I don't know what Glacier uses, but the "offline" storage is much the same how mainframes use tape - disk based files (datasets in mainframe speak) are migrated to tape after a given amount of time to decrease storage costs. These datasets needs to be recalled back to disk to be used again. This is nearly identical to how Glacier operates with S…

You're referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_storage_managem.... AFAIK, most systems work at the file level, but if you address space is large enough, you could implement this as a virtual memory system that swaps RAM to disk, disk to slower disk, slower disk to tape, tapes to tapes stored offline, etc.

I don't know what Amazon uses, either, but I expect Glacier data to be pushed out to some layer that doesn't need power while idle at all, heavily checksummed and also replicated across the globe. The relatively heavy prices tag for accessing it probably is there to keep contention on some relatively thin pipe low. For example, if they use blue ray, they may have only a few readers online for every 100 or 1000 customers, both to keep prices low and to differentiate Glacier more from their other products.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#80

Post by astrodust »

discardorama wrote: post #63
philjohn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author commented that they've seen a 50% drop in price over the last 8 months (from 20x HDD to 10x HDD), so it's not outside the realms of probability with the increased yields of 3D NAND.

I doubt the 50% figure. Just as a test: I looked at the price history for a random 256GB SSD (from Crucial). The highest price in the last year? $115. The current price? $99. Not nearly a 50% drop. Link: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-C...

The prices at the high end have been imploding faster than at the low end.
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