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Comment by forscha | Hacker News Reader

Is the hdd demise indeed expected so quickly?

Think about the market dynamics. Not just the 3D technology they are talking about, which brings parity within range, imagine what you would do if you were an SSD maker and this was on the horizon.

You'd rush to reach parity because as soon as that happens there's no reason to buy an HD over an SSD. So you're going to want to cut prices as fast as possible so that when the market switches over-- which will be a HUGE tipping point for the industry-- you can get as much market share as you can. Even taking a loss now on a reliable drive may get you customers for life who you can profit from later.

I think the transition is going to be extremely dramatic and it's a huge opportunity in this industry. I think we'll be seeing HD makers switching over their product lines to have more and more flash, and more and more flash drives, while re-positioning hard drives to very particular environments where they have an advantage (I'm not sure where these are)

But this is going to be a tornado of a market and some people are going to be come very rich as a result.

It appears so.

"By packing 32 or 64 times the capacity per die, 3D NAND will allow SSDs to increase capacity well beyond hard drive sizes. SanDisk, for example, plans 8 TB drives this year, and 16 TB drives in 2016. At the same time, vendors across the flash industry are able to back off two process node levels and obtain excellent die yields."

Goodnight spinning disk; you've served us well.

They already seem so clunky and primitive!

Time to join the ranks of his FDD and CD-ROM buddies

And we just got 10TB spinning disks on the market! Can't wait for the price to fall down for big SSD storage!

/me does the happy dance

an ssd is the best hardware upgrade I've had in the last 5 years

Once you get used to it, try using a computer with spinning rust and it will just feel glacial

who doesn't need multi-tb ssds in their laptop?

I wouldn't count them out, just as much as disk drives were supposed to replace tape for how long now?

I bet disks will get even more dense (think 20+ TiB), have better reliability when powered off, and be sold in pallets to large companies mostly.

For the consumer market, disk drives are already pretty much dead.

It all really depends on the SSD curve. If SSDs continue their price decline and capacity increases as this article mentions, it'd be difficult for HDDs to compete. Tape costs you no power in storage, but HDDs do unless you're powering them down and spinning them back up (which causes significant wear on the motor). SSDs get you cheap storage and lower power consumption, negating both tape and HDDs simultaneously.

TL;DR SSD advancement set to deprecate HDDs and tape in near future.

> (which causes significant wear on the motor)

[citation needed]

Copan and many other companies did really well powering down drives.

I have no doubt that we will see devices that big. The question is will anyone buy them. So its really a question of cost. HD's will be dead next year if I can buy a 10TB SSD for $300.. If it costs $4000, i'm sure HD's will last another couple years.

SSDs need to be powered up fairly often to maintain data integrity. So, they're great for the drives in computers, but for external or backup drives--which might only be powered up occasionally, spinning magnetic disks will still be a better choice for a while, it seems.

edit: maybe not. Bringing this article up from samcheng's post below:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...

Do you have a source for this? Just curious.

https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24

The title is pure irony ("SSD Storage - Ignorance of Technology is No Excuse"). See an another link posted here. Also from personal experience I have had no problem with an SSD that wasn't powered for 7 days.

The author of that piece is actually somewhat confused about how SSDs work. Data retention is a matter of the charge store leaking. An SSD doesn't have any means of refreshing that charge on it's own, the same timer is there whether the drive is on or off. And in fact it will lose data faster if the drive is on since then the drive temperature will be higher. Luckily this sort of data loss isn't a big deal in practice for the reasons outlined elsewhere in this thread.

This problem is overblown. A new SSD should be expected to have 10 years of data retention, according to:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...

The problem has to do with the temperature you write at and the temperature you store it at. If, for some reason, you're writing in a very cold environment and storing in a very hot one the lifespan is diminished. If it's the opposite, you're golden.

Seems pretty plausible that we could create an SSD that would power up on a timer then couldn't we? Am I missing something?

Backup drives stored in a vault probably don't have access to electricity.

Because that's a plausible, common use case.

Uh, where do you store your backups? Because having them in a safe deposit box is a very common option (amongst those people who actually do backups)

> Likewise, DVD-type archive storage will need a magic trick or two to remain in the race. A terabyte of DVDs will cost more than a terabyte SSD and that isn’t including the DVD library unit.

The article thinks that SSDs will be used for archives.

Maybe not.

http://www.itworld.com/article/2921047/hardware/no-you-wont-...

Note that that "proof" is not proof at all. Ignoring that it's anecdotal evidence on the sample of one, the author didn't have the checksum of the data on his SSD and didn't try to recompute it, he just tried to boot the computer with the SSD after being turned off for some time and then installed the new OS.

Note that the older the SSD (from the technology standpoint) the better retention is to be expected as the miniaturization of the data cells (which sinks the costs and increases the capacity) significantly lowers the chances for the retention. So his old SSD can behave better than the new one. And some lost bits don't mean that he can't boot, as long as it's just on the places that don't change the behavior.

More anecdotal evidence.

I have two very old SSD. They are the 4 and 16 GB SSD of the early EEEPC 900 Linux version https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Asus_Eee_PC#Eee_900_series

Needless to say, that netbook stays shut down for months but it still works when I turn it on. It survived many summers at 30 C. I don't know which kind of SSD it contains but being from 2008 it shouldn't be anything too fancy.

As I've said, the older SSD (technologically) and the lower capacity it has the better retention is expected. My 256 MB USB stick also still works, but one I've bought much later, 16 GB, died after only one summer of being not used. And that anecdote too really doesn't prove anything. The worst events are when just a few bits are changed and you don't recognize. Then a few bits more are changed... etc

How do SSDs refresh their cells? Is that just a normal write as with DRAM?

Wonder if you can refresh SSDs without having that go towards the write counter.

I think that we'll just see magnetic disks go away, and tapes pick up the long-term storage market. Pretty much nothing happens when you drop a box of tapes.

pmontra and Bill_Dimm (edit: and cjensen!) post contradictory blogspammish articles (through no fault of their own - what else is out there?) which both reference the same JEDEC slideshow which has popped up a few times in the last few months.

This is an important enough topic that I wish a better reference existed.

So what if they have to be brought up once in a while? Who cares? They use so little power, that's really not an issue to bring the drive online, even frequently.

Not entreprise grade but consummer, and totally anecdotal, but I've bought a 500 GB Samsung EVO 840 SSD for less than 200€ a month ago. Given the specs (performance and capacity) of that drive and my previous experience about a year and a half ago buying a 120 GB SSD, I expected to pay maybe twice that ?

Even if the price fall slows down a bit, we're quickly getting to a point where I don't see why you would buy a SSD at home for anything other than your consummer NAS or similar. Anyone who tried a SSD surely isn't willing to go back to HDD for anything other than their "archive/storage" drive. And if this article prediction is true, soon even that will be taken by SSD.

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