When will spinning disks become uncommon?

[RealJimmyJames]

I'm specifically thinking of small-form factor desktop machines and laptops. Why are "old school" spinning disk hard drives still the default option when SSD's are faster, quieter and use less energy?

Given that most users have some kind of cloud storage as well, what's the need for terrabytes of storage in an entry level computer? for my use a 250GB SSD would be more than enough. And running the OS from an SSD would speed things up so much more than all the money spent on higher end processors.

I truly don't get it.

[killramos]

Well 4-6 times the price per gb probabaly has nothing to do with it.

Honestly I had a 500gb laptop hard drive in 2008, pretty standard. Now to get a 500gb ssd? That's premium shit and you will pay through the nose for it.

Especially because modern laptops are trending away from even 2.5" form factors to tiny highly dense ssd's.

HDD's will have a place for a long time in terms of mass data.

You say how nice it is to have things load faster from an ssd. Try using a cloud and see how long it takes to even open a ppt file. Cloud is overrated, and besides everyone on the cloud is running on spinning disks anyways.

[BigMass]

I will only backup to spinners. Also use one for a home media server (movies/music). Laptop is M.2 for noise/heat and weight savings.

[benyl]

An SSD has a finite life and will eventually die.

Spinning disks won't go away anytime soon.

[D'z Nutz]

While SSDs are faster, quieter, and uses less energy, the trade off is the more you write to it the more you're wearing it down and you're shortening the life of it. That is why I will not ever buy a laptop with an SSD integrated into the mainboard.

So until they come up with the storage technology that has all the benefits of SSD without the finite life, the spinning disks won't be phased out.

[ZenOps]

Primary storage for my laptop is a Sandisk Ultra Fit 128GB that sticks out 8 mm. Heat is pretty much the only limitation on how small and fast these devices can get.

[Xtrema]

SSD with proper OS support should last the life of machine for most consumers.

In enterprise raid configuration, they are doing all kinds of tricks to prolong the life and reduce write wear.

Here's the some scary stats:

We have been stuck with 8TB spinning disk for quite a few years now and 10TB just arrived. In the SSD realm, we just jumped for 960GB to 3.8TB to 16TB in 2 years with 32TB and 64TB being tested in R&D and should roll out in 2-3 years. There is nothing in the spinning disk side on the horizon that can compare.

So pricing of SSD will drop really fast compared to spinning counterpart unless they artificially keep price up. They predict SSD price will drop 50% by 2018.


Originally posted by RealJimmyJames
Given that most users have some kind of cloud storage as well, what's the need for terrabytes of storage in an entry level computer? for my use a 250GB SSD would be more than enough. And running the OS from an SSD would speed things up so much more than all the money spent on higher end processors.

I truly don't get it.

Content creators and gamers will still need large amount of space as cloud is too slow for workflow.

But if you are talking about normal users, while 250GB is good enough, you may still want to invest in a NAS for photos. Cloud services is great until they change pricing or goes under on you.

[revelations]

What really bothers me is that most laptops, with a single drive, dont come with a 250-500gb SSD as standard.

They are much faster, use about 10-15% less battery, far tougher, lighter and produce less heat. In the real world of the average PC user, the lifespan of an SSD read/write - is trivial to talk about.

It would cost the manufacturers about 50-100$ extra per laptop to do this. I have a stack of 2.5" drives that I have swapped out for clients who bought brand new laptops and all asked the same question.

[suntan]

MemX has 53 laptops that have at least a 256GB SSD, out of 137 models.

[BigMass]

Originally posted by revelations
What really bothers me is that most laptops, with a single drive, dont come with a 250-500gb SSD as standard.

They are much faster, use about 10-15% less battery, far tougher, lighter and produce less heat. In the real world of the average PC user, the lifespan of an SSD read/write - is trivial to talk about.

It would cost the manufacturers about 50-100$ extra per laptop to do this. I have a stack of 2.5" drives that I have swapped out for clients who bought brand new laptops and all asked the same question.

I don't mind swapping out spinners from new laptops. They make a good backup that has all the original drivers and settings ready to go. If the SSD dies, I can be back in business in minutes just swapping the original drive back in. It makes it good for warranty purposes as well where I can just pull my SSD with personal data and put the original drive back in to where it's basically bone stock.

[jacky4566]

You guys know that HDD have finite lives too right? Ignoring enterprise drives. After 3 years on the high end you have 96% Survival Rate (WD & Hitachi) and 75% (Seagate) on the low end.
Just keep a backup of some kind and your doing better than most people.

OP its all about cost. SSD haven't got to the same $/GB as regular hard drive.

[revelations]

Originally posted by suntan
MemX has 53 laptops that have at least a 256GB SSD, out of 137 models.

And these are not tablets? Im talking about lappers in the 14-17" range.

edit:

>=14" laptops
excluding dual drive units
any size SSD

12 units shown and only 3 of those are <1000$.

I have clients bringing me 300$ Acer/Walmart laptops and I turn them into machines that can perform basic web-surfing and emails just as good as a 1000$ unit.

[revelations]

Originally posted by jacky4566
You guys know that HDD have finite lives too right? Ignoring enterprise drives. After 3 years on the high end you have 96% Survival Rate (WD &amp; Hitachi) and 75% (Seagate) on the low end.
Just keep a backup of some kind and your doing better than most people.

OP its all about cost. SSD haven't got to the same $/GB as regular hard drive.

I believe HDDs are generally measured with MTBF as opposed to SSDs which have a limited number of write operations.

[ZenOps]

Side note: I wonder when it will be possible to transfer my brain into a few hundred thousand SSDs.

Live forever electronically?

[01RedDX]

.

[RealJimmyJames]

Yeah, I'm not talking about enterprise situations or anything for backup purposes. I get that consumer SSD's have a shorter lifespan, but compared to the lifespan of most consumer laptops, it's a non-issue.

While we are on the subject, since I can buy an SD card with 128 GB storage space for sixty bucks at full retail markup, why not just run the OS off an integrated one of those? Speed isn't an issue, and as far as I know, they have an acceptable life expectancy.

[killramos]

Umm I don't think you realize quite the magnitude in speed difference between an SD card and a solid state drive. There is a VERY good reason for the price difference. You might as well compare the engine in a car to one in a lawnmower.

If an SD card is 1X, a HDD is 10X, SSD is 50X (obviously there is a bit more to it than that I'm just giving magnitude type examples).

So yea, speed is definitely an issue.

[thetransporter]

I do not think spinning discs are that bad.

I have left a spinning disc computer in the garage acting as a file server, its been online since 2005, on and off. -30 here and there and still works. if it does die it doesn't matter nothing important is on there.

i did convert my car (DC-DC) computer to a SSD drive, running on deep cycle battery. didnt notice a difference in battery life.

also note
i did find a old hard drive from 1992 from the previous owners, still runs, it was stored on top the electric panel, 22 years of cold and heat and electromagnetism didnt destroy it.

[revelations]

Originally posted by thetransporter
I do not think spinning discs are that bad.

I have left a spinning disc computer in the garage acting as a file server, its been online since 2005, on and off. -30 here and there and still works. if it does die it doesn't matter nothing important is on there.

i did convert my car (DC-DC) computer to a SSD drive, running on deep cycle battery. didnt notice a difference in battery life.

also note
i did find a old hard drive from 1992 from the previous owners, still runs, it was stored on top the electric panel, 22 years of cold and heat and electromagnetism didnt destroy it.

My laptop battery showed an immediate 10-15% boost in expected run time on battery - and it was correct.

But as far as that old HDD, did you manage to access the contents?

[ExtraSlow]

Originally posted by killramos
Umm I don't think you realize quite the magnitude in speed difference between an SD card and a solid state drive. There is a VERY good reason for the price difference. You might as well compare the engine in a car to one in a lawnmower.

If an SD card is 1X, a HDD is 10X, SSD is 50X (obviously there is a bit more to it than that I'm just giving magnitude type examples).

So yea, speed is definitely an issue. it seems like you are exaggerating quite a bit.

A really fast SD card is 150 Mb/s and that appears to be close to that of spinning platter hdd, if I'm reading those specs right.
Sample SD card: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX60160

[The_Penguin]

Originally posted by 01RedDX
The low-end consumer market will continue to use HDDs for the foreseeable future, while on the enterprise side, most offsite backup libraries haven't even moved from LTO tapes yet and are just now starting to slowly move over to platters.

Yikes. Haven't used tape for backups in probably 8 years.
That's like using a dial-up modem to access the Internet :)

[Xtrema]

Originally posted by ExtraSlow
it seems like you are exaggerating quite a bit.

A really fast SD card is 150 Mb/s and that appears to be close to that of spinning platter hdd, if I'm reading those specs right.
Sample SD card: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX60160

When it comes to performance, you tend to use iops instead of transfer rate.

Any crap SSD will do 20,000 iops, SD card will only do ~1000 iops read and 100iops write.

So while some SD will be better than spinning disk (~140-200iops), it is far behind SSD.


Originally posted by killramos
If an SD card is 1X, a HDD is 1X, SSD is 20X

FTFY, this is a more correct representation.

This is why on Android, when you run apps on SD card, it always goes super slow.


Originally posted by The_Penguin


Yikes. Haven't used tape for backups in probably 8 years.
That's like using a dial-up modem to access the Internet :)

I found most mid to large enterprise still have off site tapes although tapes is no longer the 1st media backup hits any more.

Small shops switched (or should switch) to cloud already.

[benyl]

When an SSD shits the bed, you're fucked. At least with a platter, there is a chance at recovery.

[UndrgroundRider]

Originally posted by benyl
When an SSD shits the bed, you're fucked. At least with a platter, there is a chance at recovery.

That's a poor reason to go with rotational media. Both media types suffer failures that jeopardize data (in addition to all sorts of other possible disaster scenarios). A good backup system is always important, regardless of the underlying storage medium.

[revelations]

A mechanical disc might give you more clues that its about to crash (eg. occasional clicking or magic smoke from the controller board) but thats a really bad reason to stay away from SSD.

Does anyone have personal experience with late model SSDs dying? I've literally dealt with nearly 100 over the last 8 years and not once have I heard of a dead SSD - with the exception of the early-1st gen models from 2008 - where I had one die on me - in Northern Ontario of course.

[UndrgroundRider]

Originally posted by revelations
A mechanical disc might give you more clues that its about to crash (eg. occasional clicking or magic smoke from the controller board) but thats a really bad reason to stay away from SSD.

Does anyone have personal experience with late model SSDs dying? I've literally dealt with nearly 100 over the last 8 years and not once have I heard of a dead SSD - with the exception of the early-1st gen models from 2008 - where I had one die on me - in Northern Ontario of course.

Same experience here. I've had a first gen model die, but nothing as of late (and we abuse the shit out of them). I have a number of machines running 8 SSD's in RAID 0 for ultra-high IOPS databases.

[Mitsu3000gt]

Originally posted by revelations
A mechanical disc might give you more clues that its about to crash (eg. occasional clicking or magic smoke from the controller board) but thats a really bad reason to stay away from SSD.

Does anyone have personal experience with late model SSDs dying? I've literally dealt with nearly 100 over the last 8 years and not once have I heard of a dead SSD - with the exception of the early-1st gen models from 2008 - where I had one die on me - in Northern Ontario of course.

Every time I've thought my SSD was dead over the last 5-6 years it wasn't, and it was something else :rofl: They have been the most reliable storage medium for me by far compared to traditional HDDs. Having no moving parts and shock immunity is also a huge plus.

Decent SSD's these days have well over a Petabyte of TBW before possible failure, which is probably 5-10+ years for most users, or much longer than the ownership of the PC. They have some pretty big warranties too.

[01RedDX]

.

[msommers]

I've had both over the years and nothing has failed. Lucky I guess?

[suntan]

Originally posted by revelations


And these are not tablets? Im talking about lappers in the 14-17&quot; range.

edit:

&gt;=14&quot; laptops
excluding dual drive units
any size SSD

12 units shown and only 3 of those are &lt;1000$.

I have clients bringing me 300$ Acer/Walmart laptops and I turn them into machines that can perform basic web-surfing and emails just as good as a 1000$ unit. LOL you don't need an SSD to watch porn and read emails, even on a $300 machine. And why the fuck are you putting in 500GB SSDs in them then???

[suntan]

We had one Intel SSD fail at the office.

[revelations]

Originally posted by suntan
LOL you don't need an SSD to watch porn and read emails, even on a $300 machine. And why the fuck are you putting in 500GB SSDs in them then???

I don't know if you've ever used a brand new- out of the box, cheap laptop - they are super slow. An SSD instantly wakes up the unit, even before OEM program clutter removal.

Its appalling that for 50-100$ the OEM couldn't have dumped in a 256 SSD into the unit.

Who said anything about 500GB SSDs?

[suntan]

What really bothers me is that most laptops, with a single drive, dont come with a 250-500gb SSD as standard. Hey who wrote that?

Jesus, price it out, you're expecting a $300 laptop to have a 256GB SSD??? :nut:

[Mitsu3000gt]

Originally posted by revelations


I don't know if you've ever used a brand new- out of the box, cheap laptop - they are super slow. An SSD instantly wakes up the unit, even before OEM program clutter removal.

Its appalling that for 50-100$ the OEM couldn't have dumped in a 256 SSD into the unit.

Who said anything about 500GB SSDs?

^^ This. An SSD makes a night & day difference even for the most basic of tasks, even if all you do is use internet and email. HDD's are worthless except for storage drives these days IMHO.

You can buy a Samsung EVO 850 250GB SSD for about $100, and lesser ones for far less - I don't know why anyone would ever have their OS & programs on a spinning HDD. The cost difference between a cheap SSD and HDD is almost nothing.

The only reason I can think of for manufacturers putting in HDD's instead of SSD's in systems is because uneducated buyers see 1TB of storage and assume it's better than a lower number.

It's hard to find a laptop under even $1000 without a 500GB or 1TB HDD as the only drive.

[Seth1968]

Originally posted by Mitsu3000gt
The only reason I can think of for manufacturers putting in HDD's instead of SSD's in systems is because uneducated buyers see 1TB of storage and assume it's better than a lower number.

That's it exactly and true for many other products.

[revelations]

Originally posted by suntan
Hey who wrote that?

Jesus, price it out, you're expecting a $300 laptop to have a 256GB SSD??? :nut:

You didnt include that in your quote. But yes I would like to see cheaper laptops come with, at least the option of, a 256-500 GB SSD.

[Seth1968]

Originally posted by revelations


You didnt include that in your quote. But yes I would like to see cheaper laptops come with, at least the option of, a 256-500 GB SSD.

Me too, but I doubt that will happen until there is a concesus reached between the manufactures.

As far as storage size goes, it's rare I have to do a data backup that exceeds 30 or 40 GB's on residential computers. Typical is more like 2 to 10. So even 256 is a heck of a lot more than most people need.

[Mitsu3000gt]

Every time I go looking for laptops to help someone looking to buy, I see one that looks great, maybe it's even on sale, and you start going down the spec list and see that dreaded "1TB HDD" or "500GB HDD" even on $1000+ laptops. You can sometimes swap it out but most people don't want to do that I wouldn't think, especially if they don't know enough about computers to find a laptop themselves.

Also every computer I have ever overhauled for a friend/coworker, they have like 2GB of tiny JPEG photos, a few hundred Kb of word/excel docs, and are using ~5% of their storage space, always on some enormous, slow, spinner drive.

[thetransporter]

Originally posted by revelations


My laptop battery showed an immediate 10-15% boost in expected run time on battery - and it was correct.

But as far as that old HDD, did you manage to access the contents?


autoexec.bat command.com :)

[revelations]

Originally posted by thetransporter



autoexec.bat command.com :)

What, no config.sys ?

[thetransporter]

also note SSD is not always faster, purchased a SSD for a sony notebook machine. it was actually slower, lagging, etc, fresh install.


but if cost is not an issue and you dont mind knowing sometimes SSD does not give many warnings its failing than go for it.


but away from seagate;
but today also had a seagate fail ( no surprise) 160gb.

mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb1 /opt2
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

[ZenOps]

As for untypical SSD types.

SD card speed tends to be limited by wattage. I'm not sure of the exact specs, but it seems to be about 3 watts.

USB 3.x and 4 can go very high in terms of wattage and can provide enough electrical wattage to keep up with other interfaces if necessary.

M.2 is of course much better than SATA and 2.5 inch form factors, of which SSD's of that size are mostly just filler plastic.

[thetransporter]

Originally posted by revelations


What, no config.sys ?

i forgot about that one . it probably did.

[UndrgroundRider]

Originally posted by thetransporter
also note SSD is not always faster, purchased a SSD for a sony notebook machine. it was actually slower, lagging, etc, fresh install.

Something else was going on. It's not a good idea to compare "speed" by guessing how the system is responding. So many services have non-linear disk access, you have no idea what's going on in the background. Was search indexing occurring? How about sxs cache generation? Literally a hundred different things can impact responsiveness between one reboot to the next, even on a fresh install. Best way to benchmark disk access is with a linux live thumb-drive and raw IO bench-marking applications.


Originally posted by thetransporter

but if cost is not an issue and you dont mind knowing sometimes SSD does not give many warnings its failing than go for it.


but away from seagate;
but today also had a seagate fail ( no surprise) 160gb.

Seagate doesn't make SSD chips, they just use SandForce chips. If you want to play the brand loyalty game focus on the chipset.


Originally posted by thetransporter
mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb1 /opt2
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

fsck then recover superblock if necessary.

[Xtrema]

Originally posted by 01RedDX
Enterprise SANs are moving to SAS SSDs en masse, if that tells you anything. They can be retrofitted on to legacy SAS backplanes and are good for up to 12Gbps. I'm not aware of any major differences in their failure rates but it's easy enough to expand redundancy if that were the case. In any case, increased speed = increased redundancy. For what it's worth, we're still seeing a lot more failures in the spinning arrays than in SSDs.

Judging by the millions of SSDs already in constant use and growing exponentially, I'd give HDDs another 3-5 years max before they mostly disappear and become a specialized medium, like tapes, used mostly for offsite backups and media diversity.

Spinning disk is starting to make no sense this year in enterprise if you are paying for real estate and power in a medium to large deployment. You can reduce footprint by a factor of 6 (600GB SAS vs 3.8TB SSD). 6 racks into 1 rack? That's $25K saving right there on rack and pdus alone, that's before you start calculating space, power, cooling costs.

As failure rate, my experience is spinning disk is about 5% (not counting major firmware issues) and SSD is 0.8% over 3 years in an array.

After 3 years, most of our SSD life ranges from 70% on the low end to 96% on the high end.

I think <4TB spinning disk will not be offered in the market in 3 years or less. With 8TB-10TB archival stuff lives on for another 5 to 7 years just like how you can still buy LTO4 tapes today.

[thetransporter]

Originally posted by UndrgroundRider


Something else was going on. It's not a good idea to compare &quot;speed&quot; by guessing how the system is responding. So many services have non-linear disk access, you have no idea what's going on in the background. Was search indexing occurring? How about sxs cache generation? Literally a hundred different things can impact responsiveness between one reboot to the next, even on a fresh install. Best way to benchmark disk access is with a linux live thumb-drive and raw IO bench-marking applications.



Seagate doesn't make SSD chips, they just use SandForce chips. If you want to play the brand loyalty game focus on the chipset.



fsck then recover superblock if necessary.

there was no indexing and turned off caching..

seagate= was talking about a spinning drive to show unbias

[thetransporter]

Originally posted by thetransporter


there was no indexing and turned off caching..

seagate= was talking about a spinning drive to show unbias
fdisk was not able to repair
was able to mount drive in windows
and use Recuva and it restored linux files much easier than anything i can imagine

[UndrgroundRider]

Originally posted by thetransporter


there was no indexing and turned off caching..

seagate= was talking about a spinning drive to show unbias

You missed my point entirely. There are literally a thousand different things that can be causing disk access. Go run Process Monitor for a half second and see everything that is going on while your computer is "idling".

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processmonitor.aspx

[thetransporter]

Originally posted by UndrgroundRider


You missed my point entirely. There are literally a thousand different things that can be causing disk access. Go run Process Monitor for a half second and see everything that is going on while your computer is &quot;idling&quot;.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processmonitor.aspx


I totally understood your point regarding SSD., it was useful as well. i checked all processes and subprocesses. (dll files) I even made sure svchost wasnt downloading updates, etc.

[RealJimmyJames]

So the summary of this, aside from some dick-measuring between the IT gurus is that there's no real drawback to running SSD in a consumer application, aside from cost, and that cost difference is rapidly diminishing.

Nice.

[UndrgroundRider]

Yes. Absolutely no drawback for normal end-user stuff.

[pheoxs]

Originally posted by RealJimmyJames
So the summary of this, aside from some dick-measuring between the IT gurus is that there's no real drawback to running SSD in a consumer application, aside from cost, and that cost difference is rapidly diminishing.

Nice.

Yup, every computer I build for people now is an ssd and only if they're going to have a ton of media files or huge games will I add a few tb spinning drive as a backup

[thetransporter]

intel SSD Drive purchased in 2011 , still running, survived 2013 flood as well being submerged. been in garage on and off since them.

"When will spinning disks become uncommon?"

i dont think that will happen, even as they are becoming more unreliable and disposable