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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

#31

Post by ksec »

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.

Yes but when you are looking at Petabyte scale system, unless those data are Hot and IOPs are concerned, HDD still wins given it is 10x cheaper.

And NAND has already hit the curve where it isn't going to get cheaper every year. NAND price is actually on the rise. Smaller Node is now actually more expensive, multiple layer are hard to yield.

So relatively speaking the 10x gap between HDD and SSD wont change in the next 5 years or so.

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

#33

Post by leonroy »

vidarh wrote: post #27
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.

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 performa…

Finding different batches can be difficult, especially if like most companies you buy your kit from one or two approved vendors.

You often hear the trope 'don't mix different disk brands in RAID' wondering if anyone knows if that's true?

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

#34

Post by derekp7 »

Numberwang wrote: post #23
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sounds like we could go back to the workflow of pre hard drive systems. Windows on the internal drive, and all user file storage on SD cards.

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

#35

Post by tscs37 »

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…

I think until SSDs can hit the price point of a HDD at same capacity they will probably stay around atleast in consumer space.

A 2TB harddrive is just way to cheap compared to a 2TB SSD, even if they fail and need more power, atleast for archiving or large storage in consumer terms.

Primary storage may switch to SSD though.

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

#36

Post by agumonkey »

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.

Are SSD better per Watt ? I used to see no difference for laptops models in the past years. I didn't check recently though (non sata devices etc).

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

#37

Post by agumonkey »

simooooo wrote: post #26
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

RAM cached profile, dns proxy, makes for really smoother browsing on older machines.

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

#38

Post by aphextron »

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.

You should really get at least a 128gb drive for your OS and frequent applications. They're like $30 on Amazon nowadays. The speed difference is phenomenal - it's the single best upgrade you can make to a desktop PC right now.

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

#39

Post by Namidairo »

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.

Ah yes, the 5200 hours bug. That was fun to read about only a few days after plugging in my Crucial M4.

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

#40

Post by marcofloriano »

tscs37 wrote: post #35
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…

I think until SSDs can hit the price point of a HDD at same capacity they will probably stay around atleast in consumer space. A 2TB harddrive is just way to cheap compared to a 2TB SSD, even if they fail and need more power, atleast for archiving or large storage in consumer terms. Primary storage may switch to SSD though.

I'm with you, but i believe we will see more and more huge user data sets being stored on clouds. So maybe the future will be a hybrid model between SSD local drives (for day to day files) and cloud for mass user storage (like photos, videos, backups, and so on).
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