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.
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 my needs (thanks to changes in internet services).
Sure, it won't be true for everyone. (Editing TIFFs for GIS anyone?) I don't run a Chromebook, but its philosophy is not completely insane for a reason...
It's like storage has differentiated into at least two separate purposes. Main system drive for consumer PCs, formerly an HDD only component, is feasibly replaced by SSDs. At the sizes needed for that, the difference in price per GB is already under a factor of two.[1]
> And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper
Don't be sure about that. Remember that the Thai floods setback HDD prices and made them more expensive for years; they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked. With SSDs dropping, that might deter much more investment into HDDs (and with less demand from HDDs in the first place, there will be fewer of the economies of scale & learning curves that drove previous HDD price decreases - and vice versa for SSDs!).
Why would prices follow Moore's law rather than the laws of supply and demand? If all of a sudden there is an immense supply of drives whose performance and capacity themselves don't follow Moore's law then prices certainly wouldn't either.
If suppliers can deliver hard drives that follow some cube version of Moore's law (temporarily, long term everything seems to S-Curve IMHO), then prices will fall dramatically, even in a time frame less than 5 years.
Are spinnies horse drawn carriages, and Solid States the start of different, new, less mechanically restricted jet age? I think we all know that answer to that question -- maaaybe ;)
The author commented that they've seen a 50% drop in price over the last 8 months (from 20x HDD to 10x HDD), so it's not outside the realms of probability with the increased yields of 3D NAND.
You can see there's about a 10x difference between the two on the logarithmic scale chart. The trend is slightly faster for SSD, but a quick straightedge-on-monitor projection suggests the intercept is closer to 2015, if ever.
Ah zeno's paradox. When the SSD matches the HDD price, in 28.5 months, the HDD will have moved, and so on and so on. Although at some point they'll probably just make many many fewer HDDs so the price will stop moving much.
For any storage experts, will HDD still be preferable for long-term cold storage or are those even currently an unacceptable solution? Seems like cold storage might end up being more important over time. I guess AWS Glacier is <$1 per TB per month which is pretty cheap and can presumably even fall over time. I have no idea what the reliability of these services is though.
Who besides Apple is 'forcing' users to use SSD? Even most of so called 'Ultrabooks' use HDD in order to become cheaper.
If almost no one understands the performance and reliability difference a SSD can give, and almost no one 'enforces' users to buy SSD, how is this technology become cheaper in a so fast rate?
Even if you factor in the performance difference, the cost still doesn't quite work out. On average, I don't think they are ~9x faster (more like 5x). Sure, SSDs max out disk interface speed and effectively have no seek time, but there are few workloads that are heavy on 4k random I/O (like booting and copying small files).
I bought a $50 1TB HDD from Newegg for my gaming desktop (which I of course do not use for gaming) about 6 months ago. I've looked again and they're the same price. It appears SSDs are still hundreds of dollars for the same capacity. I won't be buying an SSD until they're under $100/Tb.
Yup, pretty much. The only bit of news is that SSDs can achieve hard drive densities with 3D NAND, but like the early calls for the demise of all lighting other than LED. That was 10 years ago, its getting closer now. I'm putting in LED can lights in my living room for example. So at some point ...
Exactly. And how long until it achieves parity in the cloud hosting world. Hard drives and memory are so expensive you can buy they outright every other month it seems like.
My need for SSD is rather modest. I have an SSD big enough for the OS and things I use often, and a huge spinning secondary drive for things I rarely access.
In a side-note in the article, the author mentions that Amazon Glacier runs on tape. Although I'm not sure Amazon officially explained the technology, I heard (and read on Wikipedia) that they store data on conventional HDDs, that are however kept "offline".
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 and good, but what's the interface speed of a drive like that? How long to restore a 20+TB backup?
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.
I can't wait. Once I can reasonably replace everything with SSDs I will.
And then I'll never buy spinning rust again.
I dreamed of this eventuality in the 1990s. I didn't know what technology would be used. I never expected EEPROMs would evolve in this direction (now marketed as "FLASH") as they were so fickle and unreliable in those days.
This will allow lots of interesting things.
Imagine a laptop that's got its main RAM backed on a dedicated bit of high speed flash... so it instantly powers off completely and instantly powers back on completely.
Soon, we'll have the massive increase in storage capacity much like we've had a massive increase in compute capacity to the point where you no longer really think about it-- all computers are "fast".
While memristors may eventually become an important part of a balanced electrical component diet, I'd say the hype has failed to pan out. Don't hold your breath. Even if it does eventually manifest, it's going to take longer than you can hold your breath.
Not really. The charges and currents in a flash chip don't interfere with each other for the same reasons that they don't in any other chip. There's a minimum distance you have to keep things apart but luckily it gets smaller every process node. Heat would be a problem if it was like a processor but you're generally only reading from or writing to one part of the chip at a time so heat isn't a particular concern compared to a processor or DRAM.
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.
They are talking as if 3D NAND is free. The maximum of 64 layers is not yet production ready AFAIK. Even the 32 is too expensive, we are talking about 8 or 16 layers coming soon , which when you include two nodes step back you are talking about 2x to 4x improvement. 3D NAND isn't free to manufacture either. When you add up the cost, 3D NAND will be no more then a continuation of SSD falling prices according to its current tends in the coming years.
P.S - It just means it will prolongs the life of NAND and SSD will continue to get faster, higher capacity and cheaper before hitting its limits.
I find great irony in statements like these when the motivation of every party is considered. The idea is that prices are "in a free fall," i.e., they haven't fallen completely yet. But this will encourage people to buy SSDs and drive them in the very free fall of which the article speaks!
Experienced the same principle in my life a few weeks ago - I moved to a place described as "gentrifying." Realized a week into staying there that I was one of those people who was actually contributing to its gentrification! By no means was it gentrified, though.
Flash has had a drop in price because it gained mainstream utility, and therefore serious volume production. It's entirely unclear whether this will continue.
The physics of flash cells is not all that promising: there's certainly no Moore's gravy-train. 3D is a decent tweak, but it's not like 4D is coming next. As flash cells shrink, they become flakier (which might not hurt drive-writes-per-day, but is that the right metric?)
I find it surprising that most people aren't recognizing that SSDs don't even need to come close to price parity to completely replace hard drives. Random access alone makes them so much more valuable, and a good SSD is now worth more than extra memory in terms of increasing the performance of a computer system.
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.
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 best.
[+] [-] discardorama|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brownbat|10 years ago|reply
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 my needs (thanks to changes in internet services).
Sure, it won't be true for everyone. (Editing TIFFs for GIS anyone?) I don't run a Chromebook, but its philosophy is not completely insane for a reason...
It's like storage has differentiated into at least two separate purposes. Main system drive for consumer PCs, formerly an HDD only component, is feasibly replaced by SSDs. At the sizes needed for that, the difference in price per GB is already under a factor of two.[1]
[1] Caviar Blue 80GB @ $0.375/GB; MyDigitalSSD 64GB @ $0.578; Kingston 90GB @ $0.658/GB... https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-drive/#sort=a7&...
[+] [-] white-flame|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|10 years ago|reply
Don't be sure about that. Remember that the Thai floods setback HDD prices and made them more expensive for years; they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked. With SSDs dropping, that might deter much more investment into HDDs (and with less demand from HDDs in the first place, there will be fewer of the economies of scale & learning curves that drove previous HDD price decreases - and vice versa for SSDs!).
[+] [-] benjaminjackman|10 years ago|reply
If suppliers can deliver hard drives that follow some cube version of Moore's law (temporarily, long term everything seems to S-Curve IMHO), then prices will fall dramatically, even in a time frame less than 5 years.
Are spinnies horse drawn carriages, and Solid States the start of different, new, less mechanically restricted jet age? I think we all know that answer to that question -- maaaybe ;)
[+] [-] philjohn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dean|10 years ago|reply
Cheapest new 256 GB SSD on NewEgg: $82.99
[+] [-] jldugger|10 years ago|reply
You can see there's about a 10x difference between the two on the logarithmic scale chart. The trend is slightly faster for SSD, but a quick straightedge-on-monitor projection suggests the intercept is closer to 2015, if ever.
[+] [-] mrfusion|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jegutman|10 years ago|reply
For any storage experts, will HDD still be preferable for long-term cold storage or are those even currently an unacceptable solution? Seems like cold storage might end up being more important over time. I guess AWS Glacier is <$1 per TB per month which is pretty cheap and can presumably even fall over time. I have no idea what the reliability of these services is though.
[+] [-] duaneb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedrorijo91|10 years ago|reply
If almost no one understands the performance and reliability difference a SSD can give, and almost no one 'enforces' users to buy SSD, how is this technology become cheaper in a so fast rate?
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjd2385|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukeschlather|10 years ago|reply
And judging from the reliability figures I'm hearing, it's more like a 1/10 multiplier and SSDs already outpace HDDs in value.
[+] [-] bcheung|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TimSchumann|10 years ago|reply
Doesn't sound as crazy when you think about it in that way.
[+] [-] WalterBright|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ecio78|10 years ago|reply
(sources: HP partner quote for the SAS disk, quick textchat with friend in HP for SSD)
[+] [-] ycken|10 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Notebook-2-5-Inch-Internal-PH2...
Expecting 60% drop is not that crazy.
[+] [-] awwducks|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antome|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbbio|10 years ago|reply
Has anyone here some more knowledge about that?
[+] [-] fencepost|10 years ago|reply
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 and good, but what's the interface speed of a drive like that? How long to restore a 20+TB backup?
[+] [-] mmebane|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MCRed|10 years ago|reply
And then I'll never buy spinning rust again.
I dreamed of this eventuality in the 1990s. I didn't know what technology would be used. I never expected EEPROMs would evolve in this direction (now marketed as "FLASH") as they were so fickle and unreliable in those days.
This will allow lots of interesting things.
Imagine a laptop that's got its main RAM backed on a dedicated bit of high speed flash... so it instantly powers off completely and instantly powers back on completely.
Soon, we'll have the massive increase in storage capacity much like we've had a massive increase in compute capacity to the point where you no longer really think about it-- all computers are "fast".
[+] [-] wmf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] STRiDEX|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter303|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ad_hominem|10 years ago|reply
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machi...
[+] [-] jerf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlarocco|10 years ago|reply
Sounds cool, but I'll believe it when I see it.
[+] [-] monksy|10 years ago|reply
Wouldn't stacking flash cells like that be susceptible to interference? (Heat/magnetic or electrical noise?)
[+] [-] Symmetry|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unfasten|10 years ago|reply
Here are the two articles I remember:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb... (goes on for a few pages after this one)
http://anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/3 (This is mostly about how 3D NAND benefits TLC)
[+] [-] rhino369|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Teckla|10 years ago|reply
Not to mention the iPad.
The original iPad came out over 5 years ago with 16 GB of storage. Entry level iPads still have 16 GB of storage.
Given that iOS has gotten bigger and retina iPads made a lot of apps bigger, entry level iPad storage has actually regressed considerably.
Pretty confusing, given that flash prices have gone down considerably in 5 years.
I guess you don't bank $200 billion by being generous to your customers.
[+] [-] ksec|10 years ago|reply
P.S - It just means it will prolongs the life of NAND and SSD will continue to get faster, higher capacity and cheaper before hitting its limits.
[+] [-] bwy|10 years ago|reply
Experienced the same principle in my life a few weeks ago - I moved to a place described as "gentrifying." Realized a week into staying there that I was one of those people who was actually contributing to its gentrification! By no means was it gentrified, though.
[+] [-] pacquiao882|10 years ago|reply
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_h...
[+] [-] sneak|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markhahn|10 years ago|reply
The physics of flash cells is not all that promising: there's certainly no Moore's gravy-train. 3D is a decent tweak, but it's not like 4D is coming next. As flash cells shrink, they become flakier (which might not hurt drive-writes-per-day, but is that the right metric?)
[+] [-] yuhong|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Turbo_hedgehog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghshephard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorykoehler|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abandonliberty|10 years ago|reply
If you want to ensure data is safe you need to run a raid 1 or online backup service.
[+] [-] bifrost|10 years ago|reply
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 best.