It's a hard drive ahead: Seagate hits the density problem with HAMR, WD infects MAMR with shingles Seagate's next-generation HAMR disk drive will be a drop-in replacement while Western Digital's MAMR drive will not, The Register can reveal. Setting the record straight Current perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) disk drives are running out of areal density improvement prospects. As the magnetic grains that make up their …
You think you can get SSDs for even a tenth of the per TB price that these 20 TB beasts will go for? It will be many years before HDDs cease to be viable, especially for cloud storage providers and lower tier enterprise storage, where price per TB dominates.
Just because they will disappear or at least nearly disappear for consumers doesn't mean they won't play a role in the enterprise world for years to come.
Most enterprises work on a combination of price per TB and price per IOP - when you use this appraoch SSDs are starting to look very attractive.
Also, prices are partly driven by volumes - once SSD volume starts to overtake HDD, princes will start to drop significantly and spinning rust will very quickly be consigned to the same shelf as betamax i.e. a great technology and still in use for some niche edge cases but ultimately doomed to disappear.
Sorry to tell you this, "spinning rust" is not dead. Not everyone has Amazon's budget. Sometimes you need a large amount of storage on a small budget. SSD is not going to fill that need so HDD are going to be around for a long time. MAMR and HAMR will extend that lifespan even longer for large volume storage solutions.
ONLY if you don't mind your data being OFFLINE. If you need ONLINE capacity (meaning you need to store it AND be able to re-acquire it without notice) on the cheap, then it's rust or bust.
Plus tapes stopped being practical as a consumer medium around the turn (I know this personally, having once owned a floppy-bus QIC drive).
A 4TB SATA hard drive retails for around £85-£100 (enterprise drives may be a bit more). Meanwhile a 4TB Samsung SSD (couldn't find 6TB ones) retails for around £700.
If you're fitting banks of these to servers, or even a couple into a home PC for data storage, SSDs at these capacities are still way too expensive. Heck, for the price of a 4TB SSD, I can find 14TB Enterprise class HDDs for cheaper.
SSDs are fantastic as boot drives, but if you just need somewhere to store loads of documents, videos etc, HDDs are perfectly fine and are far more attractive price-wise than SSDs.
I'm not going to be replacing 39TB (61TB raw, 8TB HDD and 3TB HDD arrays) of spinning rust in my NAS with SSDs anytime soon.
For starters, I only need 12 HDD connectors, using the best value 2TB SSD I can see from pcpartpicker would require 30 units, that's 30 connectors, so even not including the drive price itself, I'd have to add more connectors, either add-in SAS/SATA cards or an expander, either way ~$300-$400. There is a 4TB one that is not quite as good $/GB, however that'd reduce the number of units to 15, which would mean maybe skipping adding more ports to my system, the increase in price between 2TB and 4TB would be less than the cost in adding the extra ports, so would be worth the few extra $. But they are still about 2x the price of my 8TB HDDs, or 4x per TB pricing.
Which, I have to admit, is a smaller gap than I expected. Maybe, when it comes time for the next capacity upgrade (2-3 years I estimate when I'll probably want to trash the older 3TB drives entirely and use bigger drvies), the price may have dropped enough it might be worth considering. For the relative simplicity of SSDs (lower power, etc.) I'd probably consider a 2x $/TB of SSD over HDD as worth considering an SSD over a HDD for.
Dear Seagate/WD: PLease keep investing huge amounts of R&D into your technologies.
By the time you have it ready for production SSD will have undercut you(*) and you'll go out of business that much faster
(*) SSD only needs to be 2-3 times the price of spinning rust to "undercut" it. The other advantages (power consumption, density, seek speeds, no susceptability to loud noises, etc etc) mean it's a no-brainer in a data centre for a hyperscaler just as much as for a domestic user (drives this size are write once read-never anyway, as are shingled drives in general)
You do realise there's a significant market for small businesses and individuals to store lots of crap, right? And they don't worry about how fast it is, so long as it's big. I'm included there, for example.
There's also a massive section of businesses who need large capacity data, but not on the Google/Microsoft scale of filling out whole datacentres, where the difference in purchase cost is overwhelmed by the running cost. There's a reason why BackBlaze are spinning platters.
If it ever came to price parity then yes SSD wins. And there's a sliding scale where more and more people and businesses will pay the premium for SSD as that premium shrinks, but at 2-3x it won't kill the spinning drive market.
Even at price parity there are disadvantages in using SSDs as data recovery in case of SSD failure is much harder, so in a so/ho NAS, for example, HDDs would still be preferable
And even not under full load, often enough. I really care about that here, in a solar powered installation. The spinning rust spins down when not in use, for one thing. Powered up, it seems the SSD's get warmer than the rust does, and they are smaller too. A 250gB SSD from Samsung draws more power than a 2.5" 2tB drive from Seagate here.
That's a very good point, and my understanding is that SSD heat scales pretty linearly with capacity, while HDD scales with number of platters, so it's a less direct relationship. And, of course, there's the sipndown option.
(My server is in the attic at home, and I've had to spin up drives when I've felt they've got too cold. About 8 degrees Celcius is a trigger to perform a RAID check.)
I have at least one shingled drive. It's storage (probably backup) so speed's hardly an issue. No problem with reliability either. (Though I seem to remember it's a second replacement. The first two died within a week but was an early adopter so I put that down to teething troubles.) MAMR with shingles (uh) I, of course, have no experience of but I don't see why it should be a problem.
I'm not trying to be a jerk (generally, I achieve that without any effort at all) but I don't see how you can say "no problem with reliability" then in the very next sentence point out that you've had 2 of the drives die in short order already.
That kind of failure rate would not make me trust the 3rd drive - just because it hasn't died yet, doesn't mean much, surely?
Let's hope the recent price decreases in Flash continue. There was a time when HDD days where looking very numbered, with flash only a few generations behind superseding it in both storage volume and price per GB. Then the cartel price fixing started, flash price rocketed and HDD crept up in capacity to keep us all in the past just a little bit longer.
For storage space, SSDs are already king at over 30TB. It's just the artificially inflated $GB that's saved HDDs so far.
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