Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SSD Prices in a Free Fall

networkcomputing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 336 posts

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#171

Post by mmebane »

fencepost wrote: post #151

I can't comprehend trusting data to a (single) 30TB SSD or even 10TB SSDs given the regularly reported failure modes of "It's not a drive anymore." Perhaps it's because I'm not doing anything where massive storage is a requirement, but having data striped in RAID6 makes me happy. I'd be happy to use SSD for the underlying medium, but I want something that's less prone to single points of failure. Backups are all well…

At least with SSDs, there's much less worry about your RAID 5/6 array self-destructing while it's failing over to a hot spare. With hard drives of that size, I'd only feel comfortable with full mirroring.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#172

Post by mark-r »

dean wrote: post #85
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

But is the 250 GB HDD still in production? I'm guessing that's a fire sale price. I don't think drives still in production ever go below $50.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#173

Post by discodave »

teraflop wrote: post #76
_dark_matter_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 schedu…

You're not wrong, but if you look at the problem that Glacier is trying to solve then it doesn't look so bad:

1. Glacier is competing with tape. So for potential customers, if it's easier to acquire and maintain than your own tape library then that's a win.

2. In the words of James Hamilton the use case for Glacier is referred "jokingly to as Write Only Storage". If you're using Glacier for disaster recovery then paying a one time cost to retrieve a bunch of data pales in in comparison to the potential costs of not being able to recover your data.

3. Is nearline actually superior for the case of "oh shit I need to retrieve everything right now"?

4. AWS already has this cloud storage thingy called S3 and it has reduced redundancy storage if you're looking for something slightly cheaper.

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/08/glacier-engineering...

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#174

Post by timboslice »

dragontamer wrote: post #139
pyrocat wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree to a large extent but I think 80GB is an extreme on the low end. Many modern games (especially MMOs) are 20GB+. Windows 7 alone requires a huge amount of storage. I have a 120GB partition at home (just for OS+programs, not data) and I'm constantly uninstalling steam games in order to install others. If you want a modicum of breathing room, I'd say minimum 200GB.

IIRC, Assassin Creed Unity required 50GB by itself. If Windows takes up 30GB, you pretty much need to wipe out everything just to play Unity on 80GB. I think 256GB to 512GB is the best bet for the standard consumer.

I just got a 250GB Samsung EVO SSD. Filled it up in a matter of weeks by installing some of my favorite games from Steam. I'm looking to add a 500GB to my build, but I should have STARTED with a 500GB.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#175

Post by Daishiman »

fencepost wrote: post #154
brownbat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has shifted. I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or Netflix "stores" my movies. When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all…

Keep in mind that SSD performance tends to degrade as the drive approaches full utilization - even if the actual internal capacity includes margin, you're probably best off avoiding approaching the available capacity. Heck, for the 250GB SSD I put in my primary laptop this past spring I intentionally formatted it to ~80% of the available capacity - that gives me plenty of space (~100GB free after all software & data)…

This is also true for hard drives. Fragmentation and filesystem layout make performance of a 95% full partition on an HDD much slower than a 50% full partition.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#176

Post by rodgerd »

brownbat wrote: post #121
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.

Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has shifted. I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or Netflix "stores" my movies. When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all…

> When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all my needs (thanks to changes in internet services).

You seem like a very atypical use case. You can't be playing any of the modern AAA games, for example.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#177

Post by timboslice »

jlarocco wrote: post #95
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... .

Haven't various companies been hyping memristers for years now? Sounds cool, but I'll believe it when I see it.

I believe the original idea for a memristor came about in 1971 [1]. We still have yet to see it in a physical consumer product. I'm with you - sounds great, but I'll believe it when I see it.

http://www.ufpi.br/subsiteFiles/zurita/arquivos/files/Memris...

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#178

Post by rodgerd »

pixl97 wrote: post #110
rorykoehler wrote: post #101

Having had a failure rate above what I was used to with hdds I'd prefer to see an increase in quality rather than a fall in price. It gets annoying having to replace my os ssd every 18 months or so. My most recent phone's memory also died after 30 months.

Uh, what kind of SSDs are you buying that you're having that kind of failure rate (god please don't say OCZ). I've been using Samsung and Intel SSDs for years now with failure rates below the failure rates of WD drives (and well below Seagate failure rates).

> I've been using Samsung

Don't upgrade the firmware.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#179

Post by rhino369 »

monksy wrote: post #53

Could someone explain the 3d storage innovation to me? Wouldn't stacking flash cells like that be susceptible to interference? (Heat/magnetic or electrical noise?)

Yes it's very susceptible to interference though coupling of the charge on on the floating gate of the cell and through voltage differentials on the interconnect lines during reading and writing.

But 2D NAND storage essentially hit the peak density. The gate is only a few atoms across.

The only way to increase density to build up. They had to go back to larger transistor sizes because of all the interference. IIRC from 15-16nm to about 60nm.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#180

Post by moonbug »

bifrost wrote: post #26

SSD technology still has a reliability hurdle, you can nuke one in a month if you write to it constantly. Spinning media has much longer read/write durability. Until there is parity its still a bit of an arms race for capacity. Hybrid drives are pretty awful so I don't think they'll stick around. I could see Hierarchical Storage Management make a comeback and an entry to the consumer space, but thats been esoteric at…

https://www.nimblestorage.com make what's essentially a flash+disk hybrid HSM-in-a-box. They're very nice, from experience.
Post reply on HN