Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB? | Hacker News Reader

Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB?

arstechnica.com

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It both shock and disgusts me how few laptops sold have SSDs in them. Even today only the very top end and very bottom end ships with SSDs (Netbooks, and Macbook Pros respectively).

Everything in the middle is purely HDD even with SSDs offered widely for the same amount of money if you're willing to lose storage (e.g. 256 GB SSD == 1 TB HDDs).

Come on Asus, Dell, and similar. Start offering SSDs across your entire range. I should get the choice of either a smaller/faster SSD or larger/slower HDD. It isn't a premium feature and hasn't been for a long time.

All Apple notebooks have SSDs now, not just the Pros, and they start at $999 -- not cheap, but not just the "very top end" either...

It actually disgusts you? I think you might want to spend your emotions more cautiously.

I don't quite understand the argument you're really making (a less polite way is to say that you sound unreasonably entitled). "Asus, Dell, and similar" aren't making SSDs. They're buying them. And yes, it is and remains a premium feature.

Entitled? I want to give them money and get a product in return. But the market isn't supplying the product I want.

I can buy it through other supply channels but this small handful of companies are intentionally sitting in innovative new technology so they can sell you it at a massive markup in a limited range of their "premium" products.

For example, just look at the Chromebook. Clearly it is possible to supply at a reasonable price, but yet a MORE expensive, Dell, Asus, or similar wont.

Why do you think that is? Could the implementation maybe, possibly... be harder than you think?

Well it's really not that hard. I mean there are engineers building Mars rovers operating millions of miles away. We can't figure out a durable, light, performance and cost effective laptop yet. But as oppose to complaining, I have plans to make the laptop of my dreams(my start-up project 2 months from now).

How would the laptop of your dreams be like? In a year or so it will be time to start thinking about getting a new one.

I actually have thought of a strategy for that as well ;). The other thing, maybe it might be time to slow down this planned obsolescence garbage and replace it with a more sustainable model.

It's one of the reasons I hope to expect the laptop take off.

Externally HDDs and SSDs are identical. Not sure what "implementation" you're referring to.

They'd just order SSDs from the exact same manufacturers that they're buying HDDs from. They put them in the same holes and attach them to the same connectors and Windows detects them just the same.

All SSD storage isn't created equal. I assume you don't mean the Pixel as an example of the reasonably priced machine. Before that you had the Acer Chromebook with a normal hard drive, and the Samsung ARM Chromebook with a tiny 16GB eMMC drive.

Any eMMC devices I've used in the past have had pitiful throughput, low iops, and random stuttering. Barely good enough for something like a tablet. Not really for a general purpose computer. Now, I haven't seen any detailed benchmarks of disk IO on the ARM Chromebook. Maybe it's got some new advanced controller that's capable of decent performance. But I'd bet that it's still far behind a high quality SATA SSD controller. And that's going to cost real money, and won't be present in a $200 device.

The Chromebook has 16GB of slow flash storage. It can do that because it has a very lightweight OS, and does little with the local storage. My Dell Vostro laptop, in comparison, has a magnetic drive coupled with a 32GB mSATA high-performance flash cache.

So my normal workstation laptop has a simple flash cache double the entire size of the main storage in the Chromebook.

SSDs remain expensive. They are a premium because they simply aren't worth it to many users. I'd love to have boundless, super-performance SSDs in every device but that isn't reasonable.

>>I want to give them money and get a product in return.

Then either your market analysis is better than theirs and you need to convince them starting all the SSD laptops/desktops and scrap all other ones OR fund a laptop which is made just for you because if everybody doesn't want it then Dell and elk are not betting all their money on one horse. As parent commenter said they too buy them SSDs and an SSD makes a laptop costlier and a costlier laptop puts people off especially those who don't know what is XOR gate.

>>look at the Chromebook

When you buy something from Google it's not the end of story. You keep buying from Google. Just like Android which is actually free(OS I mean). But Dell? You bought a laptop, end of story - they will provide you support for an year and that is in laptop's price already. So, a Chromebook and a Dellbook are different in this way too.

It just gives me ennui.

I haven't looked at Asus or Dell, but I've been shopping around for a laptop lately, and almost every one I've looked at has had the option to have SSD or a regular hard drive. Few ship with them by default, but from what I've seen it's a really common option.

The next generation of consoles - at least the PS4 - presumably come with a mechanical harddrive. That honestly surprised and disappointed me a bit, but I'll wait a few years, until I take the plunge anyway.

At that point, they hopefully come with SSDs by default.

Which is odd as you can install an SSD in the PS3 just fine and while it only offers a minor speed improvement (slow SATA connection) it still works.

Until less educated consumers value SSDs over an e-peen number like raw hard disk capacity, this is not going to change. If you don't know the virtues of SSDs, you'd choose the laptop with more space for your personal photos, videos and music.

A lot of those consumers are buying $400 or $500 laptops. An SSD would probably add $100 directly to the bottom line, unfortunately.

Since people like storing stuff, capacity is often more important than boot speed.

I prefer capacity.

SSDs offer a massively improved computing experience. Boot speed is only a tiny part of that.

It is very hard to quantify exactly why SSDs are so good. You just have to use one for a while and only then try going back to a HDD based system, you'll notice immediately and it will drive you up the wall.

It is just 5ms here, 5ms there, you tab between this and that, and there is lag, you click this and there is lag, etc. With SSDs it is fluid and smooth.

It is like comparing an iPhone to an Android 2.xx device. You could just feel that it wasn't as fluid and smooth and it bugged you.

PS - Yes, Android 4.0 is as fluid and smooth as iPhones. It was just the first example I could think of.

>You just have to use one for a while and only then try going back to a HDD based system, you'll notice immediately and it will drive you up the wall.

I use one every day, work provided laptop has a SSD. It's not that big of a difference. The capacity/price on the other hand is a big difference.

It's speed in general, not just boot speed.

But it isn't speed in general. Most users open several applications and do little actually saving. Most systems now have copious memory, with GBs dedicated to cache. Windows since Vista has started even pre-caching files on a predicted need. Most file system access that does happen ends up being asynchronous.

I love my SSDs in my desktop, but the truth is that it simply doesn't make that big of a difference. Even in I/O heavy apps I quickly learned that the storage was much less of a restriction than I thought it was.

On my most recent purchase I chose a laptop with a magnetic disk (but with a flash cache) because practically the extra cost and reduced storage didn't benefit me. And I'm an educated consumer, and it has nothing to do with "e-peens". So what now?

Last I checked educated consumers don't drive product decisions for products that aren't targeted at educated consumers or for which educated consumers are a minority.

But you're on Hacker News, surely you're only a couple clicks away from throwing your own SSD into your new laptop? That's what I did when I bought a band new non-retina MB Pro a few months ago.

My wife stores a lot of pictures on the HDD. Not a heavy I/O user, but storage one. As such it made sense to buy her a macbook with 1TB of HDD, instead of 256GB for the same money (actually I think it was more expensive).

Should have had her buy a cheap 1 TB external caddy at Amazon for $50. Makes much more sense than ruining a perfectly good laptop (and paying for the privilege).

This is hilarious. "Just buy this other thing and other thing that needs more power and you have to plug in externally and add a a pound or two to your laptop bag instead of getting the internal part that does exactly what you need because I think you 'ruined' your purchase."

I just replaced the HDD in my MacBook with ANOTHER HDD. Did I just ruin your day?

She doesn't need to carry all of her pictures around 24/7. Plus two pounds is a very unrealistic estimate, closer to 0.5 pounds.

Your laptop is ruined because essentially you've chosen to replace one of the largest performance improvements since I've been using computers with more capacity which is light, cheap, and easily obtainable externally.

It is like intentionally replacing your laptop with one from five years ago just because that offered more capacity, it is crazy...

You need an external[1] as well as the internal; so you may as well get a cheap huge external (where capacity is important) and a fast internal (where speed is noticeable).

> You need an external

No you don't, there are backup options that are not external drives. You do however have to carry around extra hardware if your data has to be on it because you picked a smaller, more expensive internal. The performance improvements to a SSD are just not needed by everyone.

Anand Lal Shimpi has done his usual superb job tearing this one down:

http://www.anandtech.com/print/6884/crucial-micron-m500-revi...

As SSD technology improves and prices lower, it's great that consumers can easily upgrade their laptops with a 960GB SSD or perhaps a 480GB mSATA SSD.

Meanwhile, MBP Retina owners have to sit on the sidelines because Apple decided they didn't want to use a standard connector.

"Keep in mind that although the interface is electrically SATA, it is not physically SATA or mSATA or any other standardized interface - this is entirely Apple's own creation."

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6005/apples-new-ssd-its-fast

How does the longevity of SSDs compare to HDs these days?

Usually, an SSD will by far outlast an HDD. The risk of drive failiures is always quite large with mechanical drives. This of course depends on useage, but with an estimated workload of 10 GiB/day a 256GiB will last for about 70 years[1]. (These numbers are for MLC NAND)

[1] : http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-t...

Also, most of the time, when SSD's fail, they become read-only, which is a far better outcome than a spinner starting to scratch its plates. So even if SSD's had short lifespans it wouldn't be as destructive.

most of the time

All the crashes I've read about on the web were fatal failures with total data loss. I hope it'll get better.

Well, here's one story on the web for you about SSD failure without total data loss: I've had an SSD that just refused to write anymore, but all the data was still readable. All I had to do was buy another SSD, dd the old SSD's data over to it, and go on my merry way.

Same thing happened to me, and at the time I had no idea that that was how SSDs failed - it was my OS disk, and suddenly I couldn't sudo.

Popped in a bootable USB, and had the data copied off and a replacement SSD in within a couple of hours.

I wouldn't depend on that failure mode, but it's a nice feature.

My first, only, and last-until-hell-freezes-over SSD went crazy last week, after a series of bizarre kernel panics that now appear to relate entirely to the SSD (machine is fine after a reinstall). Following a final reboot the Macbook's firmware displayed a "missing startup folder" icon. On flying home I discover that several GB from the start of the drive has gone missing entirely (check out http://i.imgur.com/riK4CBt.gif -- grey is good, black is zero blocks). Never again relying on a disk technology that doesn't respond to a hammer when it's dying.

One data point is a poor basis for decision making.

Right. So I could drop $2-3k on gaining experience from a meaningful sample size, all the while risking more lost business days, or I could just believe all those anecdotes it took me close to half a decade to convince myself to ignore. I've got bigger problems than seek latency, will retry in a couple more years.

Maybe you could try making backups next time?

Would certainly be smarter than banking on the reliability of a single HDD.

Unfortunately you can't back up billable hours, and carrying an entirely separate laptop or disk on the expectation that your main one will fail seems a bit too weird, especially when robust alternatives exist

As an hourly contractor as well, I back up everything to the cloud and have at least two laptops in a 'ready' state. Trusting hardware to work is... brave.

meh. That's what backups are for? Have you ever restored from time machine? In the 5 years I've lost 3 or 4 mechanical drives in my MBP's and only lost the amount of time it took to buy a new HD and restore.

I'm much happier with the day-to-day SSD speeds and I figure if the drive lasts a year or so I'm still on par with my usual HD burn out rate.

If you have a laptop with a optical disk drive, you can remove the drive and replace it with a second hard drive for backups alone. You can even make it a 1.5TB HDD and use something like Time Machine for multiple version backups that backup all the time. That way you don't have to carry anything.

Most of your billable hours would be saved that way. I also have an external HDD connected to my laptop dock that does automatic backups whenever I connect the laptop to it, and I have crashplan for 'offsite' backups. I don't use my second HDD in my laptop as a backup hard drive although.

Isn't total data loss the default for a mechanical drive failure as well?

I don't think this should be counted as a major weakness of SSDs.

First, no. HDD recovery is expensive but possible in many cases.

Secondly, no one say it should be counted as a weakness, the guy above was just pointing out that it's probably not a strength, as someone above claimed.

Expensive SSD recovery is also an option.

Really?

I've had 4 SSD drives fail across 20 desktops and in all cases the data loss has been total. I've never seen, heck or even heard of, an SSD drive go int read only mode.

Is there some special tinkering you need to do to get one to go into read only mode?

they typically eat your data by corrupting their internal state. I hear about this kind of ssd crashes way more often than conventional HDD crashes.

flash wear is a red herring and is dwarfed by these FTL corruptions.

If you're not doing anything crazy with them, you probably won't be able to kill your average MLC/TLC SSD.

Let's say you write 20 GB to your SSD every day. The SSDs mentioned in the article have a lifetime of 72 TB, which means you can write 20 GB daily for more than 10 years. Also, 72 TB is probably a pretty pessimistic estimate.

That being said, if you do anything I/O-intensive (write-heavy databases, anything with lots of small write operations, ...), YMMV. That's why "enterprise" SSDs are still unbelievably expensive - quite often they use SLC technology (though there are more and more server MLCs) and they usually have way more "spare" cells which are used to replace other cells killed by too many writes.

Enterprise quality seems to mean a different quality improvement each time. Is there any realistic point in average heavy desktop users sticking to SLC?

Can't think of a reason. SLC is a bit faster at writes, but a lot of new MLC SSDs are able to fully saturate SATA 6Gb/s, so there's really no point in going any faster.

If you're really worried about write endurance, stick to MLCs with a lot of spare cells (I think Intel is a good choice there).

Completely anecdotal and kinda meaningless but I've never had one fail and I've bought 6 drives (ocz and samsung) over last 2 years. Nor have any of my friends/family who own them ever experienced a failure.

My personal failure rate with SSD drives has been close to 50%. I like them, I use them, but I don't trust them!

50% sounds pretty bad. How long did they last? Were you able to recover your data from them?

Must be an OCZ user ;)

I had an Intel 32G X25-V value drive that failed and lost all its data. And then a Corsair drive that failed and I sent it back and they sent a replacement.

I have a bunch of OCZ drives but so far I don't think any of them have failed. Just bought a 'refurb' SATA 2 OCZ for $62/120G.

Never lost any data because I used the SSDs as boot drives, not for data storage.

Details? I've only had one fail about 4 years ago but that was almost straight out of the box so it was bad from the factory.

No, but I have full faith in SSDs for laptops and desktops now. I've never found the need for them a server.

Does anyone know of any large scale operations using them in servers?

Netflix appears to be using SSD instances for their Cassandra deployment on AWS.[1]

Also, more and more hosting providers start offering SSD-based products (e.g. DigitalOcean)

[1]: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/benchmarking-high-perfor...

Facebook, Apple, Google...

DigitalOcean[1] is a ssd-only VM provider, by their numbers they should have a few TB in SSD storage. Not that large, but would be interesting to hear about their experiences.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/

Yes. It would be interesting to read about their experiences as I presume most large SSD deployments would be for databases only.

SSDs in your database server is a wonderful thing.

They're more predictable on lifespan, but hardware errors can always occur.

The main problem is the failure mode (complete). Either you get a bad one or, like most, you don't... but if it breaks, it's completely gone.

I'd like to know how many have experienced a failure after 90 days or whatever the cut-off is so that I can stop worrying so much beyond a certain point.

One thing you should care with consumer SSDs - is always to have a backup battery for power loss. Due to large write cache it's easy to lose a large chunk of file system.

Enterprise SSDs usually have supercapacitors to take care of cache flushing.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?278816-SS...

What power and time are we talking about? Could one high draw cell or AAA battery do it?

...and I'm interested to know what the state of forensic-style software is for SSDs. (Not for recovery; people should have back-ups. But for investigations.)

I just got a SMART error on my gaming machine SSD over the weekend. I'm starting the backup process to external USB drive tonight... just in case.

Look at the warranty, expecting any device to outlast it's warranty is naive.

Longevity has no bearing on the need for backups either, so SSD vs. HDD longevity is irrelevant, in my opinion.

I'm sure some people are just crap hoarders. I've got a 128gb ssd and my data backup size for the last 30 years is about 12Gb including music and photos leaving the disk about 60Gb used.

1Tb? Never shall I fill one.

It's reasonably easy to fill a 16GB card with < 1 yr's worth of mountaineering still photos from a modern digital camera. Documents are small, but images and video, especially at high quality, consume a lot of space.

Are all the photos great? No. Will I know which ones will prove useful in the future? Only approximately. Storage is cheap!

I tend to delete all the shit photos up front. I perhaps end up with 10-15 a trip that get kept (60-90 Mb off my D3100 in jpeg fine).

Storage is cheap but ending up with so much noise you can't see the interesting bits is expensive on time, and that is finite.

I made a page listing that tracks the SSD available from Newegg sorted by price per TB.

http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/ssd/

Ignore the hybrid SSDs and the refurbished drives at the top of the list. The best prices are on 256GB disks. For a 256GB SanDisk drive that is in stock the price is $169.99 or $0.664 per GB.

There is a 960GB Crucial drive for $649.99 or $0.677 per GB.

Does anyone know when Intel is going to come up with a 20nm, ~1TB successor to the 520? I've gotta buy more capacity soon, but i'd feel silly filling up all my bays with older 480GB drives a week before they come out.

With the speed of SSD improvement, if you can afford to sit and wait, do so.

IDF is tomorrow; they should give an SSD roadmap update. My impression is that Intel is getting out of the consumer SSD market.

Is it my imagination, or have prices stalled at $1/GB for a while now? Where's Moore's Law when you need it?

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