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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

#41

Post by jmiserez »

Namidairo wrote: post #39
jzwinck wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I went through 3 different Crucial M4s, all replaced under warranty due to unrecoverable read errors and subsequent data loss.

That model really had some serious issues at the time.

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

#42

Post by bogomipz »

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.

That is not true. If your content has a really long tail then you also likely also have a tiered storage where hot content is stored in the page cache and NAND(near storage) and much less frequently accessed is on HDD(far storage.)

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

#44

Post by brianwawok »

agumonkey wrote: post #36
vidarh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

No spinning parts. They do use less energy but not enough to make them more expensive TCO to SSD.

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

#45

Post by castratikron »

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.

You are correct in that hard drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit of storage than solid state drives. Then again, tape drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit storage than hard drives. When was the last time you saw a tape drive?

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

#46

Post by LeifCarrotson »

ksec wrote: post #31
vidarh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nex…

It is not 10x cheaper, it is only cheaper to purchase initially.

It is cheaper to power (NAND is more energy efficient than an electric motor), it is cheaper to maintain (solid state media does not suffer mechanical failures), and it is cheaper to use (each query on an SSD takes slightly less time than on spinning media).

It's only 10x cheaper if you ignore those facts. Now, how you value those factors may vary. Also, I have been involved in enough purchasing decisions to know that while capex is easy to approve and opex is hard, the initial number is surprisingly important.

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

#47

Post by Tsiklon »

castratikron wrote: post #45
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.

You are correct in that hard drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit of storage than solid state drives. Then again, tape drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit storage than hard drives. When was the last time you saw a tape drive?

... under my desk.

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

#48

Post by tim333 »

castratikron wrote: post #45
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.

You are correct in that hard drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit of storage than solid state drives. Then again, tape drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit storage than hard drives. When was the last time you saw a tape drive?

>tape drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper

Are they though? I just searched on Amazon and the cheapest LTO6 drive was $1,619.56.

Even just the tapes are $25 or so for "(2.5TB) native to (6.25TB) compressed" whatever that means which I guess is cheaper per TB if you don't worry about the drive.

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Ultrium-6-Drive-Height-Intern...

https://www.amazon.com/Sony-Linear-0-85-Inch-Internal-LTX250...

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

#49

Post by Taek »

castratikron wrote: post #45
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.

You are correct in that hard drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit of storage than solid state drives. Then again, tape drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit storage than hard drives. When was the last time you saw a tape drive?

The tape industry is still billions of dollars per year. Enterprises still buy tape all the time, and tape technology is still iterating.

And tape is not even that competitve. It's like 1/3 the cost of HDDs, and has an 80 second seek time, making it completely unusable for most real time applications (still usable for theatrical movies).

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

#50

Post by hyperbovine »

castratikron wrote: post #45
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.

You are correct in that hard drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit of storage than solid state drives. Then again, tape drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit storage than hard drives. When was the last time you saw a tape drive?

Two days ago, when I toured a datacenter.
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