Comment by al_biglan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by al_biglan | Hacker News Reader

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caveat: I'm in the storage/file system industry.

Everyone in the industry is looking at this. There is a great graph out there by one drive manufacturer that overlays $/GB for different HDDs and SSD technologies. For example, 15K and 10K RPM drives no longer are cost effective to produce. You are better going with SSDs. 7.2K will be next and some of the "lower end SSDs" are encroaching on that. 5.4K will likely live a longer time and if you keep "HDD as archive" you might project these drives to be alive in the foreseeable future (then factor in SMR, HAMR, then SMR plus HAMR.... and $/GB gets pretty cheap). After all, if you aren't keeping 100% of your data "in flight" keeping it at rest on a cheaper medium seems a sane thing. (Tape backup systems are _still_ for sale and in use...)

Another interesting back of the envelope to do is look at Fab capacity for SSDs and compare it against HDD capacity sold. How much Fab capacity has to be available to serve the total storage demand? If there is a shortage of Fab plants, then a price premium for SSDs is easier to maintain (and may benefit some flash manufacturers in the short term to keep the price premium in place). Looking at the economics of building enough Fab capacity gets interesting quick.

> (Tape backup systems are _still_ for sale and in use...)

LTO seems to tick a lot of boxes in the archive business. I remember people trying to sell a MAID (massive array of idle disks) some years ago -- something like 100 disks in 4U of space. They came of blades that each held about 8 disks, and there were about 15 of them in a 4U row. With a controller in the middle it meant you could get somewhere in the region of 1000 disks in a rack.

The power consumption would be obscene, but that was fine, as the disks were kept idle, in fact the system could only power about 25% of the disks at once. The idea was you don't need access to the majority of files, and a 10 second latency when you do isn't going to hurt (far faster than tape)

At the same time tape manufacturers were pushing LTO-5 and LTFS, arguing that was the better solution for archive, and after a misstep with LTO6 (launching at 2.5T rather than 3T), LTO7 recovered.

MAID is rumoured to be how AWW Glacier works.

I've actually been wondering why is not possible to make lower-end desktop SSD drives of capacity 1TB (or more) that are "better" then spinning drives.

I have a samsung 950 pro NVMe drive in my development workstation and I can't statute it without a synthetic workload. There are times I need that for work, most times it's over kill.

For example 1TB SSD drive that can do like 300MB/s sustained transfer with 3000 to 5000 iops. So a speed that's magnitude or magnitude and a half less then current consumer SSD drives. But still a magnitude faster then spinning disk. I'm confident that would be more then enough to make most desktop environment work feel just as snappy as a SSD or within an acceptable factional difference.

If you could make this at $100 to $120 price point drives. That's like 1/2 the cost of a low end desktop 1TB SSD drive (like the Toshiba/OCZ) You'd have a hot seller in peoples gaming rigs, mid-range laptops etc.

Obviously I'm missing something here. Why is not happening? Does producing lower end flash (slower) not saving you any money?

Because 128GB piece of second/third grade flash is ~$20, and those go into cheaper SD cards/usb drives. $160 in cheap memory alone.

There are manufacturers playing aggressive race to the bottom, they make drives with neither ram nor even SLC buffer. Mostly JMicron and Silicon Motion controllers, but more and more companies jump on this opportunity like Marvell. Im not even talking about garbage bin chinese "vendors" like kingspec/kingdian/kingrich/ki..you get the picture, I mean SanDisk Z400 or OCZ TL100, proper manufacturers.

At the end of the day those are pretty much USB pendrives with switched PHY, you can expect same prices and performance. That also means drastically lower write endurance, ~20-40TB Total lifespan. ~20GB/day in an age of Windows 10 writing ~1-2GB of logs(you know, so they can upload them to ze cloud, harmless telemetry ..) alone every single day.

Thanks, that was helpful.

Such drives technically existed in the early days of consumer SSDs (2009-2010), but even then, the limitations in speed were due to poor controllers and firmware (certain Jmicron controllers, if anyone remembers).

The slow flash chips that you're talking about probably don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant making a separate product from them. Let's say their lithography produces 5% of slow flash chips. It is probably more cost efficient to sprinkle those chips in existing product lines as spare capacity (all SSDs are overprovisioned, afaik), rather than making a whole separate product line out of them - a product line that will, by definition, be low end and thus have tiny margins.

> be low end and thus have tiny margins.

But high volume, it could be in every laptop under $800 price point. A lot of these guys already make low margin high volume products (like Samsung and TVs) and that's okay.

There's no 'but' here. The fact that it's not happening is pretty good evidence that economics of those drives don't work out.

I also explained why it can't be high volume - there might not be enough actual low speed chips to make high capacity drives in volume.

I'm not sure if you understand the economics, but no sane for-profit company will trade margins for high volume.

Sigh. There's no reason to be be a condescending prick (ad hominem).

Simply asking somebody who works in the industry why it's impractical to segment the market by making slower chips. Maybe it's not possible or they cost the same, but I'm just speculating. Hence wanting to find out and understand.

> I'm not sure if you understand the economics, but no sane for-profit company will trade margins for high volume.

Business don't always get a choice, or do make that choice (based on game theory). In the case of SSD vendors it's a decently competitive market with many vendors (Samsung, Intel, Toshiba, Sandisk, ...). In fact it looks like Samsung is going this route: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/236260-samsung-plants-... . Which they might as well do because they one of the largest producers so it makes sense to put pressure on your competitors if (if you can sustain it).

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