Disk Drives?
Are those things still around?
New disk drive maker? No such luck
The cloud and Big Data and Hadoop feature strongly in this week’s round-up of storage news, along with channel news. And, just for a moment, we thought we’d found a new disk drive manufacturer. But no, it was all tosh. Barracuda is offering a Web Security Service using Zscaler’s cloud security service. Zscaler can use …
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Friday 17th March 2017 13:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Disk Drives?
They will be for a few years more. SATA and SAS can be saturated by sequential reads from spinning rust, so for big chunky workloads in data and analytics there's no benefit to SSDs. Some of my customers are now at cost parity for SSDs for disks <=2TB but for anything bigger HDDs are still your go-to if you don't have a random IO profile.
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Friday 17th March 2017 18:11 GMT Crazy Operations Guy
Re: Disk Drives?
Quite useful for Disk-to-disk backups, archiving, log storage, or really anything else where you need a massive bit-bucket, but don't need performance. Spinning rust also excels in high-endurance with read/write durability being between 100 and 1000 times as much as SSD (Although the numbers aren't exactly 1:1 since SSDs have built-in failure mechanisms whereas HDDs do not).
Although, lately, I've been tinkering around with some 90-Bay (3.5") / 4U storage enclosures. Filled it up with 8 TB 7.2k RPM disk drivers and I'm getting amazing performance off of them. The sequential read testing bottlenecks the PCIe bus on the storage head (2x 8-lane of PICe 3.0 RAID cards) and the External SAS interfaces (4x 12 Gbps).
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Friday 17th March 2017 23:18 GMT Peter2
Re: Disk Drives?
At the time of writing, a 3.5" 1TB HDD costs £40 and a 2.5" 500GB SSD costs about £150.
HDD's are going to be with us in semi mainstream use until SSD storage prices drop to somewhere near the same price. I think that's likely to be at least another five years.
Even after then, my guess is that HDD's will end up cornering the high capacity storage market and will survive there until or unless SSD storage prices come down enough to finish them off.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
