HDD Sales Crater, Drop 35% Year-over-Year
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
One of the main reasons is density. You can put 32 E1.S EDSFF SSDs in a single rack unit fairly commonly nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me if some 1U chassis did 40.
There's also reliability. They're not infallible, but it's looking like AFRs for SSDs might be half that of HDDs. That's a big deal.
Of course there's also cost. Prosumer SSDs are about $70-75/TB now, and common PCIe 4.0 U.2/U.3 enterprise and datacenter SSDs are in the $90/TB range. PCIe 5.0 enterprise and datacenter SSDs? "Yikes", is what I'll say. Have fun negotiating with your rep on those. ;) Meanwhile, 7200rpm SATA HDDs can be had for $15/TB. These are retail end-user prices. If you're doing huge volumes as a cloud provider or a huge SAAS business, pricing goes quite a bit lower.
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Where do HDDs still make sense? Sustained transfer operations, nearline storage, and as part of a storage tier where you can intelligently hide the HDDs behind SSDs (lots of solutions for this) and get SSD performance most of the time, and guarantee it where it matters. There's many use cases where they just dominate because of their low cost, and the ability to get the performance required for a lot cheaper.
Though compared to high-end enterprise SSDs, 7200rpm SATA HDDs are actually still fine for power, typically pulling 6-7W per HDD instead of 11-15W for fairly common enterprise SSDs. Some enterprise SSDs (mostly PCIe 5, mostly E3-based form factors) can pull 25W, if not 40W. Remember, enterprise SSDs don't do things like SLC cache much -- they just have a MOUNTAIN of NAND (plus PLP capacitors) you can read/write from in massive parallelization. There's no ingest drop-off as a result, but you do have to power all that NAND.
You forgot 'cold storage'. The data on SSDs will degrade if they are not powered on.
HDDs are quickly Falling off in the consumer space because SSDs are getting cheap enough, power consumption matters (for laptops), form factor matters (again, for laptops), and mobile entirely changed peoples' expectations of system responsiveness.
Even 20 years ago, the number of people (consumers, not businesses) I knew with tape drives was almost none. Today I know of zero.
Capacity HDD SSD
500 GB 47 EUR 36 EUR
1 TB 41 EUR 49 EUR
2 TB 54 EUR 89 EUR
4 TB 77 EUR 264 EUR
8 TB 161 EUR 531 EUR
16 TB 313 EUR none
I still think that an SSD for your boot drive is a no-brainer, but for other data storage HDDs still make sense. If the trend of affordable SSDs keeps up, that view might change in the future.
It essentially backs up the parent poster's data, just lets us navigate across a larger set of data.
When you analyze that trend in light of how many consumer use cases show little or no growth in capacity requirements over time (due to factors like cloud storage and video streaming), it's hard to see any long-term future for hard drives in consumer PCs.
SSDs may have dropped even further. I had to unsubscribe from /r/buildapcsales[1] because I couldn't stop buying the SSD deals that popped up. I wanted to avoid juggling multiple storage drives in this machine, but now all my M.2 slots are full. Stuck one in a cheap USB enclosure to make a damn good flash drive.
QLC drives are starting to approach HDD prices. Here's an extreme example. Two months ago $100 was a good deal for a 2TB QLC drive[2]. Now you can get them (in limited circumstances) for $45[3].
[0]: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#f=2&s...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/111b8n8/ssd_...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/12fv841/ssd_...
My use case is penalty a bit particular, though... It's really just for localized copies of large datasets that exist elsewhere. So it's totally ok if the drive dies, since the data lives somewhere else. I doubt most people have a real need for that much localized data these days.
For example, WD's Q2 financial report [1] shows:
Q1 2023 Cloud Revenue: $1,829M
Q2 2023 Cloud Revenue: $1,224M (down 33%)
Q1 2023 Customer Revenue: $679M
Q2 2023 Customer Revenue: $794M (up 17%)
[1] https://investor.wdc.com/static-files/5c73f7fb-869a-4850-bd2...
SSD only pre-built commercial computer offerings have set back the average computer's ability to do useful work by 15 years. SSD are just too expensive for most people to use for useful amounts of storage (say, family photos+system backups). And even if it's a pre-built desktop the emergence of SSDs has made it somehow acceptable to sell a 1TB HDD in a modern computer. It's scammy.
Base configs should absolutely come at least double the SSD capacity they currently do, though, in everything but maybe bargain bin Chromebooks.
Many people genuinely don't need more than 250GB in their computer; many more will never need more than 1TB. If you're having trouble believing that such users exist, you need a serious reality check about how normal people use their computers. Most people who buy a pre-built computer with 1TB or less of storage are not being meaningfully constrained in their ability to do useful work with that computer.
And regardless of how much storage is in your computer, you need storage that's not in the computer to hold backups. Are you basing your expectations for how much storage a computer should come equipped with on the needs for primary storage and backup/archival storage done in defiance of all common sense and recommendations about where and how to store backups?
But video games are by far the most common and easy way to burn through hundreds of GB of storage in a consumer PC. Except not every PC user is in to AAA gaming, and all of that storage capacity usage can be freed up quickly and easily when free space starts running low—again aided by cloud storage and fast internet speeds, because games can be re-downloaded with relatively little inconvenience.
Probably the biggest new class of computer applications with heavy data storage needs to crop up in recent years is generative AI. But models like Stable Diffusion are relatively small compared to mainstream consumer storage capacities, and bigger models like GPT-3 and newer are exceed local compute and memory capacity by a far wider margin than they exceed local storage capacity, so they're stuck in the cloud for now.
There are real reasons to expect consumer storage capacity needs to grow more slowly than they did in the 1990s, and there's real evidence that they have been growing more slowly in recent years. Just pointing at a trend from several decades ago without even trying to think through whether it's still relevant is not a useful observation or insight.
I pointed out the trend because not three years ago, you could buy the latest model iPhone with 64gb of storage. Today that number is 128gb. So while we have got better at moving transient data off to the cloud, I am not really sure that our data creation or consumption is nearing any peaks.
My experience is based mostly off doing IT support for mostly non-technical family and friends. By backups I meant OS features that do system file restorations from checkpoints like common in Windows and Apple. It is also common to have these on the same computer. Even if they're stored externally the computer running time machine must have that much local space free. So many of my tech support visits are helping people who run out out the tiny disk space on their affordable model Apple laptops and are no longer able to make time machine back-ups to their external HDD storage till they free the required space.
People commonly run out of 250 GB storage without even doing data intensive hobbies. I don't think my experience is unique.
And it’s not just booting the system that was noticeable. Everything became more responsive. It was like night and day.
I have no problem separating my OS drive from my games/photos/backups. It’s actually what I prefer to do. And I like to see that the operating system isn’t so bloated it can’t fit in 100 GB.
Today's entry-level SSDs are faster in pretty much every way than the top of the line from ten years ago. They're definitely "good enough" for most users.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/features/crucial-p2-ssd-qlc-fla...
In short, the problem you're complaining about wouldn't matter for the drive in question.
Do we still need things like Data Scrubbing on SSD?
Many drives will do some amount of background reading on their own to scan for degraded data. But this isn't visible to the host system and not guaranteed, so it shouldn't be relied upon and doing some extra reads (eg. once a month) is harmless.
I strongly believe QLC SSDs are a great choice for NAS usage, unless it's very frequently modified data. It's still more expensive than hard drives, but the noise, power and performance benefits can be worth it.
Back when QLC first took over the "value-tier" of the major brands I bought dozens of Inland drives because they were still TLC, making them better performing with higher endurance than other cheap SSDs, but the QN322 is a worst-of-QLC drive. Depending on the week it's only marginally cheaper than better drives — Intel 670p 2TB was $79.99 in-store two weeks ago.
You need to make the distinction between how many packages of NAND flash are soldered to the PCB, and how many dies of NAND are stacked in one BGA package. A 2TB SSD requires more than two NAND dies because the largest NAND dies in production are in the ballpark of 1-1.33Tbit, so a 2TByte drive would typically have 16 NAND dies in total.
> And the SLC cache size isn't fixed but rather a fraction of the free space.
That doesn't stop a 2TB drive from generally having 4x more SLC cache than a 500GB drive, other things being equal.
If you have a QN322, feel free to provide benchmark results.
And of course the performance specs for the 2TB don't show it being 4x faster than the 500GB model: those specs are for peak performance when using the SLC cache. Consumer SSD specs almost never list post-cache performance.
I don't have one of the drive in question, but unlike you I actually know enough about how these things work to know what performance claims are plausible or not. (See eg. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16681 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16577 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16491 )
It's indeed getting harder because some phones are literally now eSIM only. Before, there was near no excuse. My last phone's sim caddy had a SSD caddy on the other side, which just takes up so little extra volume & requires so little extra design/features.
Coincidentally, only few hours ago my SSD was saved by HDD! I booted up my PC and went away for a few minutes. Returned only to be welcomed by busy HDD noises. I quickly turned by WTF into resource monitor - and (not)surprise! - PID 4 was munching D:\System Volume Information. That's really annoying, but what really terrified me - the same was happening to SSD C:! I have explicitly turned off defrag, updates and other stuff for it, but still. And I would never spot it because SSDS DON'T MAKE NOISE!!
Really? Maybe the data on the disk platters will be fine, but an EMP which wipes SSDs could just as easily fry the HDD electronics and firmware flash memory. Your data may well be intact, but you are never seeing it again without some highly specialised data recovery equipment - and will that equipment survive the EMP apocalypse?
I'd be surprised to see hard drive sales become obsolete in the next decade, but I wouldn't be shocked to see the technology collapse in two. The market for them in terms of units sold peaked in 2010. Personally I'm just excited about all the cheap drives enterprises are going to offload onto the used market.
It seems the ssd market isn't interested in making large drives unless they are dram-less (anything cheap) or have very limited write cycles (eg samsung qvo).
Upfront storage = $1800
Power consumption (for the entire server) = $20/month
If we bundle storage into the first year’s cost, it comes out to about $2000.
On the other hand, if you use Backblaze B2, storage alone would cost $3000 per year. If you’re downloading content regularly (media), it adds up pretty damn quickly.
I've considered building a NAS for years but I don't know why I just don't do it. Maybe its just the fear of the storage noise which increases a lot on high capacity drives.
To be honest, the noise isn’t too bad with a good case. I use a Define R5, but I hear the Meshify also has great noise suppression.
Never hurts to keep even a USB key of your most essential files and rotate every 5 years. All cloud storage providers have a single point of failure, which is the organisation that runs them acting in obtuse ways. This won't matter the vast majority of the time, but most people have data they care about enough that they shouldn't be trusting just one company to store it. Doesn't need to contain much, maybe family photos, recovery keys, things of that sort.
I also keep a little bit of cash on hand, not much, but history is full of tales of institutions reliably offering essential services until one day they don't, withdrawals are frozen, and people realise that they're screwed.
Also while the cloud is a great value for giving you geo-redundant internet accessible well secured data at a bargain price when you need maybe ~2TB which is more than most people will ever need, once you get up to around ~200TB both the cost and the speed of accessing cloud data gets to be a problem.
But hdd do not flip random bits to dissipation by merely sitting on the shelf unpowered, which despite your extensive one person decade or so experience does happen.
They also don't lose/flip bits from being read many times but never rewritten, and they don't suffer mechanical or electrical wear from sitting unpowered on the shelf.
sdd's are fine, the problem is only that they are marketed as a replacement for hdd's, and so they are used as replacements for hdd's, instead of as 'medium-term non-volatile ram'
What?
That's not logical. That's like saying the chance to win any bet, no matter how long the odds, are 50/50, you either win or you lose.
The fact that an ssd has much less chance of suffering a mechanical problem is not an important fact, since the problem is loss of data, not the particular mechanism of loss of data.
An ssd certainly loses less data, in the short term, in a laptop. And then when you remove that ssd or store that laptop, as little as 5 years later you can have flipped bits, which is a thing that absolutely does not happen with a decommissioned hdd from a desktop.
The same goes for use in a nas where a given file may get written once and then never re-written but possibly read multiple times, and neighboring cells read multiple times. Over time the ssd loses bits, the hdd does not.
The advantages of an ssd are just a local maxima.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You haven't provided even ordinary evidence.
Yeah, they do. Maybe not as often as a mostly worn-out SSD, but it's not unheard-of.
> They also don't lose/flip bits from being read many times but never rewritten,
Whoever told you about NAND read disturb errors must have done you a disservice by not communicating how hard they are to trigger and how easy they are to recover from. If you are letting this worry influence your purchasing decisions, you're wildly overestimating the scope of this issue. Unless you have some previously unheard-of real workload that is effectively Rowhammer for SSDs.