SSD Prices in a Free Fall • Hacker News Board

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#81

Post by jegutman » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 6:40 PM UTC

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.

Ah zeno's paradox. When the SSD matches the HDD price, in 28.5 months, the HDD will have moved, and so on and so on. Although at some point they'll probably just make many many fewer HDDs so the price will stop moving much.

For any storage experts, will HDD still be preferable for long-term cold storage or are those even currently an unacceptable solution? Seems like cold storage might end up being more important over time. I guess AWS Glacier is <$1 per TB per month which is pretty cheap and can presumably even fall over time. I have no idea what the reliability of these services is though.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#82

Post by theandrewbailey » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 6:41 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #74

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 curv…

> they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked.

They have. I remember buying 2TB drives a year before (2010). I paid about $200 each. Last year (2014), I bought 4TB drives for $130 each. That's about 3x improvement over 4 years, right?

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#83

Post by astrodust » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

samcheng wrote: post #40

cpr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for this? Just curious.

This problem is overblown. A new SSD should be expected to have 10 years of data retention, according to: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...

The problem has to do with the temperature you write at and the temperature you store it at. If, for some reason, you're writing in a very cold environment and storing in a very hot one the lifespan is diminished. If it's the opposite, you're golden.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#84

Post by jerf » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

peter303 wrote: post #58

HP is working on a memrister based SSD with density of Flash and the speed of transistors http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine... .

While memristors may eventually become an important part of a balanced electrical component diet, I'd say the hype has failed to pan out. Don't hold your breath. Even if it does eventually manifest, it's going to take longer than you can hold your breath.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#85

Post by dean » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 6:43 PM UTC

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.

Cheapest new 250 GB HDD on NewEgg: $34.95

Cheapest new 256 GB SSD on NewEgg: $82.99

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#86

Post by yuhong » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

What I am really interested is when SSDs will be cheap enough to be in common OEM systems.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#87

Post by adventured » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

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?

With the tech we're talking about, there are definitely limits per inch. They'll be able to fit a petabyte in a 2.5" SSD drive case before the SSD sunsets, at a cost of $300. At that time, your 100tb SSD might be $50 to $75.

After SSD, what technology will take us to 100pb drives at $300? Is that even possible, while keeping the small size of the drive? No idea. It's going to require some amazing breakthroughs.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#88

Post by Someone » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

cjensen wrote: post #45

toomuchtodo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False. http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

True, and I've done it! I accidentally used a consumer grade (Crucial M500) in an application where endurance would be reached in less than a month. In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually wr…

"In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-fail."

You call that a catch? I would sell it as a feature. It's way better than "looks OK until t minus 1, can't read or write from time t onwards" or lesser variants of the "try reading everything a few times, and you may get 90% of your data back"

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#89

Post by toomuchtodo » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

codemac wrote: post #66

toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears so. "By packing 32 or 64 times the capacity per die, 3D NAND will allow SSDs to increase capacity well beyond hard drive sizes. SanDisk, for example, plans 8 TB drives this year, and 16 TB drives in 2016. At the same time, vendors across the flash industry are able to back off two process node levels and obtain excellent die yields." Goodnight spinning disk; you've served us well.

I wouldn't count them out, just as much as disk drives were supposed to replace tape for how long now? I bet disks will get even more dense (think 20+ TiB), have better reliability when powered off, and be sold in pallets to large companies mostly. For the consumer market, disk drives are already pretty much dead.

It all really depends on the SSD curve. If SSDs continue their price decline and capacity increases as this article mentions, it'd be difficult for HDDs to compete. Tape costs you no power in storage, but HDDs do unless you're powering them down and spinning them back up (which causes significant wear on the motor). SSDs get you cheap storage and lower power consumption, negating both tape and HDDs simultaneously.

TL;DR SSD advancement set to deprecate HDDs and tape in near future.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#90

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 6:47 PM UTC

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.

Yup, pretty much. The only bit of news is that SSDs can achieve hard drive densities with 3D NAND, but like the early calls for the demise of all lighting other than LED. That was 10 years ago, its getting closer now. I'm putting in LED can lights in my living room for example. So at some point ...