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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

#21

Post by phire »

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…

All the high end and mid-range laptops have already dropped the spinning drive (unless they have a secondary drive for bulk storage), the user experience is just so much better. It's only the low-end laptops that still use spinning drives, because even a 1tb is technically cheaper than a reasonably sized SSD.

I took a look and the NAND chip trend lines, and I predict that by mid 2018, 256gb of NAND (which is enough space for an average consumer) will cost less than a 1tb drive. At that point, all the cheap laptops will drop spinning drives too.

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

#22

Post by mcintyre1994 »

phire wrote: post #21
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…

All the high end and mid-range laptops have already dropped the spinning drive (unless they have a secondary drive for bulk storage), the user experience is just so much better. It's only the low-end laptops that still use spinning drives, because even a 1tb is technically cheaper than a reasonably sized SSD. I took a look and the NAND chip trend lines, and I predict that by mid 2018, 256gb of NAND (which is enough s…

Actually the very low end is all 32gb emmc now, I assume those are super cheap and Windows 10 is okayish with that space so the manufacturers went for it.

But then you jump to mechanical disks to get above 32 until like you said mid-range where it's all proper SSDs.

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

#23

Post by Numberwang »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #22
phire wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the high end and mid-range laptops have already dropped the spinning drive (unless they have a secondary drive for bulk storage), the user experience is just so much better. It's only the low-end laptops that still use spinning drives, because even a 1tb is technically cheaper than a reasonably sized SSD. I took a look and the NAND chip trend lines, and I predict that by mid 2018, 256gb of NAND (which is enough s…

Actually the very low end is all 32gb emmc now, I assume those are super cheap and Windows 10 is okayish with that space so the manufacturers went for it. But then you jump to mechanical disks to get above 32 until like you said mid-range where it's all proper SSDs.

I bought one of those for Christmas that only had 16gb. 14 of those were taken up by win10! Win10 ran reasonably well actually, but I switched to lubuntu for the storage.

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

#24

Post by vidarh »

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.

It's not that simple. How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year? How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)? How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?

SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you're not getting the right picture.

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

#25

Post by pkaye »

jzwinck wrote: post #14
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.

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.

I used to write SSD firmware (not Crucial though!) and new code can always be buggy despite our best effort to test it thoroughly. However many of the SSD companies have carried their firmware through multiple generations now and the code has matured during that time so I expect this to be less of an issue. The bigger issue now will be a process shrink resulting in NAND issue that has not been identified before to be properly mitigated by the controller/firmware so I personally when a year for a product to mature before buying it.

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

#26

Post by simooooo »

buzzybee wrote: post #19

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.

Use a ram disk for your browser cache

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

#27

Post by vidarh »

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.

Always mix batches almost regardless of what you buy. HDDs can and do fail like that too. I learned that the almost-hard way back in the day of the IBM Death Star [1], where we had a RAID that started failing, one drive at a time, roughly a week apart. We had reasonably up to date backups, but couldn't afford to take everything offline, so we were biting nails for weeks of continous RAID rebuilds and reduced performance and thankfully everything stayed up and we didn't get any additional failures during any of the rebuilds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar

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

#28

Post by vidarh »

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.

Unless its the controller or firmware that goes bad... I once had three SSDs from the same batch (in different RAID sets, thankfully - we mix and match) go within a week and all had completely garbled SMART data.

But overall I prefer SSDs - just mix and match different models/manufacturers/batches in different RAID sets as for HDDs.

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

#30

Post by gareim »

vidarh wrote: post #24
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.

It's not that simple. How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year? How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)? How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload? SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you're not getting the right picture.

We're talking about a ~10x difference right now. Do your factors sizeably reduce that gap? By how much do you estimate?
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