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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

#51

Post by comboy »

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

I don't know how exactly it works under Windows, but at least under Linux such optimizations usually don't pay off much since most used pages are already kept in the RAM anyway.

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

#52

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> the 10x gap between HDD and SSD

It's a 4 to 6x gap [1].

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404258,00.asp

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

#53

Post by ams6110 »

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…

Recently had a small cluster (12 nodes) where close to half the SSDs used for the root filesystems failed in a span of a few months.

Turned out to be a defective batch from manufacturer. SSDs are normally reliable but in my experience are not immune to problems.

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

#54

Post by mathgeek »

magila wrote: post #20
mathgeek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To my point, this is still the same argument that has been made time and time again with regards to storage. Short term upticks are easy to see in historical SSD pricing, even when looking at the longterm trend.

Source: http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm

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

#55

Post by ams6110 »

Taek wrote: post #49
castratikron wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Tapes are still used for enterprise backup, and for hierarchical storage systems (e.g. hot data on SSD, warm data on HDD, cold data migrates to tape eventually).

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

#56

Post by tracker1 »

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.

Funny, the 8TB drives I was looking at for a new NAS in a few months are around $300... I'm still debating between a 4 or 5-drive nas... but lets say, including the cost of the nas device I'm paying around $2k for 24TB of reduntant storage solution. 24TB of ssd storage alone will cost me over $6k, let alone the cost of a more expensive base NAS box, meaning 7-8K. That's upwards of 4X the cost.

That's the difference between something I can cover from my tax return, to something I won't really even consider. I won't save $6k in power in a year, or 5 to make up the difference, and I don't need the extra speed, to feed media to my htpc.

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

#57

Post by ams6110 »

ReverseCold wrote: post #18
PaulKeeble wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never had a failure on any of my personal laptops or PCs. I see it all the time though at work on our servers. I think what an individual considers a lot of read/writes is a drop in the bucket compared to what servers do.

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

#58

Post by tracker1 »

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 had my first Intel 32/40gb fail just outside warranty (originally 1 year iirc). But I was so addicted to the speed difference I kept with them... The price difference isn't bad for laptop/desktop use now. But man, can't even consider it for my nas.

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

#59

Post by tracker1 »

adamconroy wrote: post #32

Not a surprise to me, their HDDs are junk. I've had two burn out in work machines and one personal external burn out. I never buy their gear anymore

I had 10 out of 12 go bad on my freenas box a few years ago, will NEVER buy seagate drives again.

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

#60

Post by rincebrain »

fapjacks wrote: post #2

Couldn't shake that Maxtor curse. Good riddance, I say. I'm involved in the Seagate class action over bad drives, but like many other class actions I've been involved in, I seriously doubt I'll see much of the thousands of dollars I've sunk into drives Seagate sold me knowing they had atrocious failure rates. Perhaps a five or ten dollar consolation check like usual.

Seagate's Linux FW updater still has the string "MaxtorRulesSeagateDrools" baked into it, which rather says a lot about where that particular tool came from.

So not everything that came out of Maxtor is terrible, if it means they let you flash HDD FW under Linux now.

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