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Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

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Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#11

Post by Bombthecat »

qyv wrote: post #6
shiftpgdn wrote: post #3

My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don't think mechanical disks are long for this world. 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 wi…

Perhaps this is old information, but do SSD's from the same batch/model not tend to fail all within the same timeframe? A steady stream of failures is probably preferable to a single mass failure.

The benefit of ssd is that you can almost exactly predict when a ssd will fail.

You know the read and write IPOs. You know when they fail.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#12

Post by tw04 »

codebook wrote: post #9
tw04 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it you don't deal with enterprise storage then. 15mm is the size of basically every enterprise 2.5" drive sled. That's the form factor of all 10k RPM 2.5" drives. The only thing the drive you described DOESN'T work with are laptops. Pretty much anything else it's a perfect fit. The laptop drive thickness is the abnormality for the rest of the storage world.

If you go to enterprise storage, then you can get 16TB SSD though. It is not comparable.

What exactly isn't comparable? A 5TB 15mm 2.5" NL-SAS drive is about $250. The "16"TB (it's 15.3TB) SSD you reference is about $10k. The cost per TB of NL-SAS is SIGNIFICANTLY lower, and still absolutely has a place for bulk data storage that doesn't have performance requirements.

Ohhh, I get it, you're now modifying your original post to look like you were aware of enterprise storage. Got it.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#14

Post by jzwinck »

qyv wrote: post #6
shiftpgdn wrote: post #3

My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don't think mechanical disks are long for this world. 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 wi…

Perhaps this is old information, but do SSD's from the same batch/model not tend to fail all within the same timeframe? A steady stream of failures is probably preferable to a single mass failure.

They can. I had a set of Crucial SSDs which all contained the same firmware defect which took them offline after X hours of power-on time.

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.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#15

Post by mathgeek »

Taek wrote: post #10
shiftpgdn wrote: post #3

My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don't think mechanical disks are long for this world. 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 wi…

You can buy HDDs for $20 / TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.

I think back to when HDD's were "getting cheaper" at $1/MB (and every power of 10 since at that same price point) and shrug. While they'll certainly still have their place (similar to tape drives and other storage technology that used to be much more commonplace), there's every reason to expect the PPU of SSD's to continue trending downward.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#16

Post by toomuchtodo »

Taek wrote: post #10
shiftpgdn wrote: post #3

My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don't think mechanical disks are long for this world. 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 wi…

You can buy HDDs for $20 / TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.

Is that TCO? Because unless you're comparing with warranty, power, and human costs, it's not accurate.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#17

Post by PaulKeeble »

Bombthecat wrote: post #11
qyv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this is old information, but do SSD's from the same batch/model not tend to fail all within the same timeframe? A steady stream of failures is probably preferable to a single mass failure.

The benefit of ssd is that you can almost exactly predict when a ssd will fail. You know the read and write IPOs. You know when they fail.

I dont know about that. Every SSD that has failed for me did so quite unexpectedly and prematurely, I haven't yet taken an SSD to its write limit and none of them have survived more than a few years except the very first Intel 80GB gen 1.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#18

Post by ReverseCold »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #17
Bombthecat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit of ssd is that you can almost exactly predict when a ssd will fail. You know the read and write IPOs. You know when they fail.

I dont know about that. Every SSD that has failed for me did so quite unexpectedly and prematurely, I haven't yet taken an SSD to its write limit and none of them have survived more than a few years except the very first Intel 80GB gen 1.

I've never had any storage medium fail on me, and I feel like I do a lot of read/writes.

Exception is a flash drive I snapped in half once. Oops.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#19

Post by buzzybee »

Still using a HDD here. Would like to transition, but holding out for better price/capacity ratios. It's really clear that it's the bottleneck for everyday use at this point; I recently went to 16GB RAM which stopped a lot of Windows swapping behavior, and now the major pain points are bootup, storage-intensive tasks, and bloated web sites.

Re: Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

#20

Post by magila »

mathgeek wrote: post #15
Taek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy HDDs for $20 / TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.

I think back to when HDD's were "getting cheaper" at $1/MB (and every power of 10 since at that same price point) and shrug. While they'll certainly still have their place (similar to tape drives and other storage technology that used to be much more commonplace), there's every reason to expect the PPU of SSD's to continue trending downward.

> there's every reason to expect the PPU of SSD's to continue trending downward

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.

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