I have 50 TB useable in my home server. This requires a total of 6 drives (raidz1) for let’s say $300 each.
Upfront storage = $1800
Power consumption (for the entire server) = $20/month
If we bundle storage into the first year’s cost, it comes out to about $2000.
On the other hand, if you use Backblaze B2, storage alone would cost $3000 per year. If you’re downloading content regularly (media), it adds up pretty damn quickly.
I can get 18TB (Toshiba MG09ACA 512e) for 260€ (tax included) which would put me at usable 90TB.
The cheapest drive starting at 10TB is a DC HC520 12TB SAS for 185€
I've considered building a NAS for years but I don't know why I just don't do it. Maybe its just the fear of the storage noise which increases a lot on high capacity drives.
I made a storage server a few weeks ago. I experimented a bit with various HDDs before choosing, and the difference in noise seemed kinda massive depending on what model you go with. I tested with some Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB and WD Red Pro 20TB, and they were indeed pretty noisy. Clearly too noisy to have in a room where people live. On the other hand, the WD Red Plus (only 14TB max though) are surprisingly quiet. I put 11 of those in a good case (Fractal Define 7), and the whole thing is barely audible. Even with some heavy I/O task going on (e.g. ZFS scrub), you could hardly guess that the server is running over the background noise of my fridge and ventilation.
Not your storage, not your data. Ask Justin Roiland.
Never hurts to keep even a USB key of your most essential files and rotate every 5 years. All cloud storage providers have a single point of failure, which is the organisation that runs them acting in obtuse ways. This won't matter the vast majority of the time, but most people have data they care about enough that they shouldn't be trusting just one company to store it. Doesn't need to contain much, maybe family photos, recovery keys, things of that sort.
I also keep a little bit of cash on hand, not much, but history is full of tales of institutions reliably offering essential services until one day they don't, withdrawals are frozen, and people realise that they're screwed.
Also while the cloud is a great value for giving you geo-redundant internet accessible well secured data at a bargain price when you need maybe ~2TB which is more than most people will ever need, once you get up to around ~200TB both the cost and the speed of accessing cloud data gets to be a problem.
Both Windows and macOS have become impossible to use with HDDs alone. I keep a SFF Windows box with a HDD for testing purposes and I’m constantly shocked by how long simple things like updating software take.
I've had far fewer (read: zero) issue with the dozen or so SSDs I've personally had over the past decade or so. The same is not true for hard drives. Having no moving parts really eliminates a lot of failure modes.
hdd's can mechanically fail, but so can everything, and so it's a no-op. Sdd's can electrically fail or fail silicon burn-in or have firmware time bomb bugs.
But hdd do not flip random bits to dissipation by merely sitting on the shelf unpowered, which despite your extensive one person decade or so experience does happen.
They also don't lose/flip bits from being read many times but never rewritten, and they don't suffer mechanical or electrical wear from sitting unpowered on the shelf.
sdd's are fine, the problem is only that they are marketed as a replacement for hdd's, and so they are used as replacements for hdd's, instead of as 'medium-term non-volatile ram'
Incorrect. It's like saying what it did say, which is that that everything fails, and if one thing has one failure mode, some other thing just has some other failure mode.
The fact that an ssd has much less chance of suffering a mechanical problem is not an important fact, since the problem is loss of data, not the particular mechanism of loss of data.
An ssd certainly loses less data, in the short term, in a laptop. And then when you remove that ssd or store that laptop, as little as 5 years later you can have flipped bits, which is a thing that absolutely does not happen with a decommissioned hdd from a desktop.
The same goes for use in a nas where a given file may get written once and then never re-written but possibly read multiple times, and neighboring cells read multiple times. Over time the ssd loses bits, the hdd does not.
If you think that it's an extraordinary claim that an ssd loses less data than an hdd in the short term in a laptop application, you should indeed give up.
> But hdd do not flip random bits to dissipation by merely sitting on the shelf unpowered,
Yeah, they do. Maybe not as often as a mostly worn-out SSD, but it's not unheard-of.
> They also don't lose/flip bits from being read many times but never rewritten,
Whoever told you about NAND read disturb errors must have done you a disservice by not communicating how hard they are to trigger and how easy they are to recover from. If you are letting this worry influence your purchasing decisions, you're wildly overestimating the scope of this issue. Unless you have some previously unheard-of real workload that is effectively Rowhammer for SSDs.
While spinning rust was destined to lose the majority of the market to flash, I think the hard disk companies accelerated the move with the SMR fiasco. It got me moving more things to SSDs sooner than I had planned.
I have noticed fewer and fewer SMR drives at top capacities lately, but they would be useful for read-dominated workloads provided the ingestion speeds are managed properly (I read somewhere they can be managed at a very low level where you’d be able to write directly to the SMR area for things like replacing a failed RAID unit, where you can write the SMR area at once)
It's crazy to me how many people will buy a computer with 250 GB of total storage and then end up with a series of rube-goldberg'd in slow/fragile external hard drives just to get close to the performance of a "normal" computer.
SSD only pre-built commercial computer offerings have set back the average computer's ability to do useful work by 15 years. SSD are just too expensive for most people to use for useful amounts of storage (say, family photos+system backups). And even if it's a pre-built desktop the emergence of SSDs has made it somehow acceptable to sell a 1TB HDD in a modern computer. It's scammy.
I wouldn't say things were all that much better before, with low end machines shipping with 5400RPM (or even 4200RPM) laptop drives. Those things were so slow that even if their capacities were far more voluminous than the SSDs that ship in modern low end machines, their usefulness was questionable because e.g. sifting through a massive photo collection was miserable even then and would've only gotten worse as average photo filesizes increased.
Base configs should absolutely come at least double the SSD capacity they currently do, though, in everything but maybe bargain bin Chromebooks.
WTF are you going on about? Adding external drives has nothing to do with "performance of a 'normal' computer".
Many people genuinely don't need more than 250GB in their computer; many more will never need more than 1TB. If you're having trouble believing that such users exist, you need a serious reality check about how normal people use their computers. Most people who buy a pre-built computer with 1TB or less of storage are not being meaningfully constrained in their ability to do useful work with that computer.
And regardless of how much storage is in your computer, you need storage that's not in the computer to hold backups. Are you basing your expectations for how much storage a computer should come equipped with on the needs for primary storage and backup/archival storage done in defiance of all common sense and recommendations about where and how to store backups?
In 1990, Moore's Law was still in full swing and every year brought drastic changes to the personal computing landscape. These days, we aren't seeing a lot of entirely new classes of applications driving local data storage needs. We've long since passed the point where text and audio data could add up to enough disk usage to worry about. Video data volume is largely stagnant, because optical discs are basically dead and local storage lost to streaming (in spite of the lower bit rates for streaming). Photos can add up to something on the order of a terabyte if you're prolific and don't use cloud storage for that.
But video games are by far the most common and easy way to burn through hundreds of GB of storage in a consumer PC. Except not every PC user is in to AAA gaming, and all of that storage capacity usage can be freed up quickly and easily when free space starts running low—again aided by cloud storage and fast internet speeds, because games can be re-downloaded with relatively little inconvenience.
Probably the biggest new class of computer applications with heavy data storage needs to crop up in recent years is generative AI. But models like Stable Diffusion are relatively small compared to mainstream consumer storage capacities, and bigger models like GPT-3 and newer are exceed local compute and memory capacity by a far wider margin than they exceed local storage capacity, so they're stuck in the cloud for now.
There are real reasons to expect consumer storage capacity needs to grow more slowly than they did in the 1990s, and there's real evidence that they have been growing more slowly in recent years. Just pointing at a trend from several decades ago without even trying to think through whether it's still relevant is not a useful observation or insight.
I have 35x that original 20mb just in photos stored on my phone. I have 40x that original 20mb in collected health metrics on my phone. While the cloud and automatic data transfer perhaps slow the growth of local consumer device storage, that is more a solution to needing additional storage, but size limitations at the local mobile device form factor creating boundaries.
I pointed out the trend because not three years ago, you could buy the latest model iPhone with 64gb of storage. Today that number is 128gb. So while we have got better at moving transient data off to the cloud, I am not really sure that our data creation or consumption is nearing any peaks.
When I upgraded my laptop from a 1TB HDD to 2TB of flash I thought it’d be easy to fill it. I was wrong. It’s been more than two years since and my next laptop probably won’t have more than 1TB of flash.
If you can't store the data you can't do the task. It doesn't matter how fast your storage is if you can't fit the required files. That's bad performance. Additionally then they have to load over USB3 external HDD or network storage (which is probably over wifi!) and that's awkward and slow in both the physical and digital sense.
My experience is based mostly off doing IT support for mostly non-technical family and friends. By backups I meant OS features that do system file restorations from checkpoints like common in Windows and Apple. It is also common to have these on the same computer. Even if they're stored externally the computer running time machine must have that much local space free. So many of my tech support visits are helping people who run out out the tiny disk space on their affordable model Apple laptops and are no longer able to make time machine back-ups to their external HDD storage till they free the required space.
People commonly run out of 250 GB storage without even doing data intensive hobbies. I don't think my experience is unique.
It absolutely amazes me how many people spent good money on a 128 GB NVMe boot drive that speeds up their initial OS loading a tiny bit... which represents probably a fraction of a percent of the total time spent waiting for disk operations in total, and then spend the entire time working from a slow HDD instead. Like congrats for spending all your budget on your garage door instead of your car.
doesn't surprise me much, boot/resume are part of context switching and it's psychologically very important; you often want the cost of getting in and out as cheap as possible
I don’t know about you but when I switched over from HDD to SSD years back I did some crude measurements and found the time it took to boot into a usable environment went from >= 90 seconds to < 25 seconds.
And it’s not just booting the system that was noticeable. Everything became more responsive. It was like night and day.
I have no problem separating my OS drive from my games/photos/backups. It’s actually what I prefer to do. And I like to see that the operating system isn’t so bloated it can’t fit in 100 GB.
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that the difference between a bog standard SSD (like just a decent USB3 external or whatever vs NVME) is really not that noticeable.
NVMe has been the predominant standard for SSDs for several years now. Even USB "portable SSDs" are almost exclusively using NVMe drives internally now rather than being built around SATA SSDs or SSD controllers that natively speak USB (which is the low-end solution used for thumb drives).
This is something I keep meaning to investigate. If you take a top tier consumer SSD vs a bottom barrel brand, for typical usage patterns, is there any meaningful performance difference? Maybe boot is a few seconds faster? Caching is more intelligent so Chrome starts faster?
I am sure there could be some measurable differences for prosumer users (compiling code, video editing, etc) but my suspicion is that any SSD is good enough for the majority of people.
My expectation is that most desktop users will rarely or never experience a situation where there's a noticeable difference between a fast SSD and a cheap SSD. Storage benchmarks are a lot more sensitive than end-user perceptions of the overall system's responsiveness. Even power users will spend most of their time either not waiting on the storage, or waiting on a storage access pattern that is only moderately faster for a high-end drive. But the metrics that truly matter—responsiveness as perceived by the human user—are also the hardest to accurately measure.
Today's entry-level SSDs are faster in pretty much every way than the top of the line from ten years ago. They're definitely "good enough" for most users.
It really depends on the OS. On Windows everything becomes ridiculously faster. On macOS, it boots up much faster, and the machine is decidedly snappier. On Linux, it boots faster, but unless you are limited by memory (not swapping, but using getting disk cache misses) it’s not a huge deal. I was honestly underwhelmed when I upgraded a Linux box from HDD to SSD a couple years back. The best part was the silence as HDDs are loud.
The QN322 is a garbage-tier drive, equivalent to the QLC-refreshed Crucial P2 that "averaged USB 2.0-like speeds of just 40 MBps after the SLC cache was full."[1] Lots of value drives out there for $10-$30 more than won't perform worse than a mechanical hard drive after exhausting SLC.
That "40 MBps after the SLC cache was full" was measured on a 500GB drive. A 2TB drive would have an SLC cache at least 4x larger and post-cache write speeds around 4x higher—bringing it up to roughly the level of mechanical hard drives and beyond the speed of Gigabit Ethernet.
In short, the problem you're complaining about wouldn't matter for the drive in question.
Yes, data scrubbing (read only) is still a good idea for SSDs. If data in a marginal memory cell is starting to degrade, reading that data will cause the SSD to notice a correctable error and write a fresh copy of the data. Simply leaving the drive on the shelf would put you at more risk of degradation leading to an error that the drive was not able to correct (though a RAID layer above the individual drives may still be able to recover the data).
Many drives will do some amount of background reading on their own to scan for degraded data. But this isn't visible to the host system and not guaranteed, so it shouldn't be relied upon and doing some extra reads (eg. once a month) is harmless.
I strongly believe QLC SSDs are a great choice for NAS usage, unless it's very frequently modified data. It's still more expensive than hard drives, but the noise, power and performance benefits can be worth it.
The Tom's review of the revised Crucial P2 500GB was a 2-chip and the QN322 2TB also appears to be 2-chip vs 1-chip for smaller capacities of the QN322, so the performance boost from higher capacity won't be there. And the SLC cache size isn't fixed but rather a fraction of the free space. There are also customer reviews of the 2TB on the Microcenter site noting that post-cache writes fall to 40MB/s.
Back when QLC first took over the "value-tier" of the major brands I bought dozens of Inland drives because they were still TLC, making them better performing with higher endurance than other cheap SSDs, but the QN322 is a worst-of-QLC drive. Depending on the week it's only marginally cheaper than better drives — Intel 670p 2TB was $79.99 in-store two weeks ago.
> The Tom's review of the revised Crucial P2 500GB was a 2-chip and the QN322 2TB also appears to be 2-chip vs 1-chip for smaller capacities of the QN322, so the performance boost from higher capacity won't be there.
You need to make the distinction between how many packages of NAND flash are soldered to the PCB, and how many dies of NAND are stacked in one BGA package. A 2TB SSD requires more than two NAND dies because the largest NAND dies in production are in the ballpark of 1-1.33Tbit, so a 2TByte drive would typically have 16 NAND dies in total.
> And the SLC cache size isn't fixed but rather a fraction of the free space.
That doesn't stop a 2TB drive from generally having 4x more SLC cache than a 500GB drive, other things being equal.
The published specs don't tell us how many layers of NAND there are, but they do claim the 2TB is only 1.8X the write performance of the 500GB and 1.125X the 1TB. Not the 4X you'd speculated.
If you have a QN322, feel free to provide benchmark results.
NAND layers is another question entirely: that's about how many layers of memory cells each die has, not about how the dies are packaged together.
And of course the performance specs for the 2TB don't show it being 4x faster than the 500GB model: those specs are for peak performance when using the SLC cache. Consumer SSD specs almost never list post-cache performance.
Phones being 64 or 128GB and no SD card is same level absurdity. What a shitty act. Given how cheap SD cards are it's just such a misservice.
It's indeed getting harder because some phones are literally now eSIM only. Before, there was near no excuse. My last phone's sim caddy had a SSD caddy on the other side, which just takes up so little extra volume & requires so little extra design/features.
I have 4 HDDs in NAS and one 12 TB drive for Time Machine. It’s great to have 4 TB in your MacBook, but it’s so expensive and I personally don’t need to actively have more than 1 TB at any one time (and maybe not even half that), meaning the rest can be offloaded to a NAS.
Can anyone give some insights into what trends are driving this beyond a global drop in PC shipments? For instance, longer-lasting hardware, shift to cloud storage, decline in crypto mining (see reqs https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/features/requirements), other factors?
In my case i just buy used HDDs from the local PC repair shop for pennies, and use them for my long term storage and offsite backups. Shops usually swap people's HDDs out for SSDs to speed up their PC, so they have a ton of ~1tb ones to sell for cheap. I doubt people like myself are impacting the market for HDDs though.
HDD still has a point, but as SSD prices diminish, we'll continue to see it drop off.
One of the main reasons is density. You can put 32 E1.S EDSFF SSDs in a single rack unit fairly commonly nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me if some 1U chassis did 40.
There's also reliability. They're not infallible, but it's looking like AFRs for SSDs might be half that of HDDs. That's a big deal.
Of course there's also cost. Prosumer SSDs are about $70-75/TB now, and common PCIe 4.0 U.2/U.3 enterprise and datacenter SSDs are in the $90/TB range. PCIe 5.0 enterprise and datacenter SSDs? "Yikes", is what I'll say. Have fun negotiating with your rep on those. ;) Meanwhile, 7200rpm SATA HDDs can be had for $15/TB. These are retail end-user prices. If you're doing huge volumes as a cloud provider or a huge SAAS business, pricing goes quite a bit lower.
-- -----
Where do HDDs still make sense? Sustained transfer operations, nearline storage, and as part of a storage tier where you can intelligently hide the HDDs behind SSDs (lots of solutions for this) and get SSD performance most of the time, and guarantee it where it matters. There's many use cases where they just dominate because of their low cost, and the ability to get the performance required for a lot cheaper.
Though compared to high-end enterprise SSDs, 7200rpm SATA HDDs are actually still fine for power, typically pulling 6-7W per HDD instead of 11-15W for fairly common enterprise SSDs. Some enterprise SSDs (mostly PCIe 5, mostly E3-based form factors) can pull 25W, if not 40W. Remember, enterprise SSDs don't do things like SLC cache much -- they just have a MOUNTAIN of NAND (plus PLP capacitors) you can read/write from in massive parallelization. There's no ingest drop-off as a result, but you do have to power all that NAND.
If the TB is less than ~20, then the equation breaks since you have buy the unit in addition to the tape. So, yeah, it depends on use but I would argue on the consumer level most people aren't storing that much data. But I could be wrong.
You don't really need to buy the latest and greatest unit, or buy new, and both the drive and tapes last for an unreasonably long amount of time on tech timescales. It's not just that tapes have the best dollar to gigabyte ratio, they are also the most durable.
I can't help but think that, between entrusting data to a freshly manufactured HDD and tapes run through an affordable used LTO drive of unknown history and wear, that the HDD is the safer bet?
To be fair, I was talking really about enterprise, where the bulk of HDD sales still are -- especially in any meaningful capacity. Moreover, enterprise is where tape lives.
HDDs are quickly Falling off in the consumer space because SSDs are getting cheap enough, power consumption matters (for laptops), form factor matters (again, for laptops), and mobile entirely changed peoples' expectations of system responsiveness.
Even 20 years ago, the number of people (consumers, not businesses) I knew with tape drives was almost none. Today I know of zero.
So it seems like HDDs are still more cost effective for storing larger amounts of data, as long as your workloads permit that, but for smaller capacities SSDs now reign supreme, cost wise. There's also the fact that most of these HDDs that I looked at were 3.5" but SSDs were either 2.5" or of the M.2 variety, which may or may not matter, depending on what you want to put them in.
I still think that an SSD for your boot drive is a no-brainer, but for other data storage HDDs still make sense. If the trend of affordable SSDs keeps up, that view might change in the future.
It's also interesting to look at the trend over time for what capacity the price crossover point is at. Right now, it's around 1TB, but it's been moving steadily upward ever since small SSDs first started to reach "cheap" prices. Hard drive spindle motors, actuators, and clean-room assembly aren't getting cheaper, but every time flash gets denser the capacity of a cheap SSD consisting of a controller and two or four NAND dies gets bigger.
When you analyze that trend in light of how many consumer use cases show little or no growth in capacity requirements over time (due to factors like cloud storage and video streaming), it's hard to see any long-term future for hard drives in consumer PCs.
For the average consumer, 1TB is more than enough storage. All of my photos, videos, and important documents added up comes out to 50GB. Everything else is just programs and games which can easily be deleted and redownloaded.
Even on gigabit, many AAA games are over 100GB these days. That's big enough to get annoying. My personal system has 4.5TB of SSD and 8TB of HDD (Used for backups, etc), and that sometimes doesn't always feel like enough - and I'm not even doing video editing or anything.
No one is playing triple A games on a HDD anymore though. I did the math and found it was about the same speed to redownload from steam as it was to copy a game off the HDD.
Don't forget that most all HDDs at or under 4TB not explicitly 'Pro' or 'Plus' branded are SMR, which means they have to re-write over the old tracks when the data gets dense or sustained, so they completely suck for even the typical HDD use-cases.
The problem with HDDs is that they're not keeping up with Moore's Law. I remember buying an 8TB HDD years ago at nearly the same price as current 8TB HDDs. If there were 32TB and 64TB available now, the argument over HDDs and SSDs would be very different.
So I just bought a 256gb nvme drive for a build, but I've been waiting for large capacity ssds for years...
It seems the ssd market isn't interested in making large drives unless they are dram-less (anything cheap) or have very limited write cycles (eg samsung qvo).
It's more accurate to say that the SSD vendors aren't interested in trying to market consumer drives that cost upwards of $1500, because there really isn't a market for such drives. Plenty of enthusiasts will say they would like an 8+ TB high-end drive, but few people are willing to spend more on their SSD than on their GPU.
The 14TB HGST Ultrastar DC HC530 drives I bought in server builds eighteen months ago (delivered one year ago) have gone down from $330 to $200 in that time period. Pretty amazing. 16-20TB drives are starting to lose their premium as well[0].
SSDs may have dropped even further. I had to unsubscribe from /r/buildapcsales[1] because I couldn't stop buying the SSD deals that popped up. I wanted to avoid juggling multiple storage drives in this machine, but now all my M.2 slots are full. Stuck one in a cheap USB enclosure to make a damn good flash drive.
QLC drives are starting to approach HDD prices. Here's an extreme example. Two months ago $100 was a good deal for a 2TB QLC drive[2]. Now you can get them (in limited circumstances) for $45[3].
If you're willing to get used you can get 14tb for 115 on eBay or 16tb for 160, one hell of a steal for a homelab IMO and it complements having some ssds for fast storage as well for some services
Curiously, I just bought an hdd for the first time in years, after noticing I could get 22TB of storage for $300.
My use case is penalty a bit particular, though... It's really just for localized copies of large datasets that exist elsewhere. So it's totally ok if the drive dies, since the data lives somewhere else. I doubt most people have a real need for that much localized data these days.
I hope the HDD market can survive. I really really appreciate being able to buy a 20TB Exos for $400. SSDs are so absurdly great, but I really like being able to have a nice data-archive. When Covid hit and the whole PC parts market dried up, and the Chia chain thing was happening, there were days where I was thinking I'll never be able to have affordable bulk storage again.
> SDDs can be destroyed by EMP events, whereas HDDs are safe.
Really? Maybe the data on the disk platters will be fine, but an EMP which wipes SSDs could just as easily fry the HDD electronics and firmware flash memory. Your data may well be intact, but you are never seeing it again without some highly specialised data recovery equipment - and will that equipment survive the EMP apocalypse?
We have HAMR coming out which will improve density & cost competitiveness a lot, and there's recent technologies like dRAID which makes the low speed less of an issue, but to me hard drives getting squeezed to death between tape and flash seems like an inevitability.
I'd be surprised to see hard drive sales become obsolete in the next decade, but I wouldn't be shocked to see the technology collapse in two. The market for them in terms of units sold peaked in 2010. Personally I'm just excited about all the cheap drives enterprises are going to offload onto the used market.
I replaced all of my hard drives with 2 large SSDs and haven’t looked back. Sure it cost a bit more but spinning rust just sucks and the cost difference is far smaller now.
Coincidentally, only few hours ago my SSD was saved by HDD! I booted up my PC and went away for a few minutes. Returned only to be welcomed by busy HDD noises. I quickly turned by WTF into resource monitor - and (not)surprise! - PID 4 was munching D:\System Volume Information. That's really annoying, but what really terrified me - the same was happening to SSD C:! I have explicitly turned off defrag, updates and other stuff for it, but still. And I would never spot it because SSDS DON'T MAKE NOISE!!
103 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadUpfront storage = $1800
Power consumption (for the entire server) = $20/month
If we bundle storage into the first year’s cost, it comes out to about $2000.
On the other hand, if you use Backblaze B2, storage alone would cost $3000 per year. If you’re downloading content regularly (media), it adds up pretty damn quickly.
I've considered building a NAS for years but I don't know why I just don't do it. Maybe its just the fear of the storage noise which increases a lot on high capacity drives.
To be honest, the noise isn’t too bad with a good case. I use a Define R5, but I hear the Meshify also has great noise suppression.
Never hurts to keep even a USB key of your most essential files and rotate every 5 years. All cloud storage providers have a single point of failure, which is the organisation that runs them acting in obtuse ways. This won't matter the vast majority of the time, but most people have data they care about enough that they shouldn't be trusting just one company to store it. Doesn't need to contain much, maybe family photos, recovery keys, things of that sort.
I also keep a little bit of cash on hand, not much, but history is full of tales of institutions reliably offering essential services until one day they don't, withdrawals are frozen, and people realise that they're screwed.
Also while the cloud is a great value for giving you geo-redundant internet accessible well secured data at a bargain price when you need maybe ~2TB which is more than most people will ever need, once you get up to around ~200TB both the cost and the speed of accessing cloud data gets to be a problem.
But hdd do not flip random bits to dissipation by merely sitting on the shelf unpowered, which despite your extensive one person decade or so experience does happen.
They also don't lose/flip bits from being read many times but never rewritten, and they don't suffer mechanical or electrical wear from sitting unpowered on the shelf.
sdd's are fine, the problem is only that they are marketed as a replacement for hdd's, and so they are used as replacements for hdd's, instead of as 'medium-term non-volatile ram'
What?
That's not logical. That's like saying the chance to win any bet, no matter how long the odds, are 50/50, you either win or you lose.
The fact that an ssd has much less chance of suffering a mechanical problem is not an important fact, since the problem is loss of data, not the particular mechanism of loss of data.
An ssd certainly loses less data, in the short term, in a laptop. And then when you remove that ssd or store that laptop, as little as 5 years later you can have flipped bits, which is a thing that absolutely does not happen with a decommissioned hdd from a desktop.
The same goes for use in a nas where a given file may get written once and then never re-written but possibly read multiple times, and neighboring cells read multiple times. Over time the ssd loses bits, the hdd does not.
The advantages of an ssd are just a local maxima.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You haven't provided even ordinary evidence.
Yeah, they do. Maybe not as often as a mostly worn-out SSD, but it's not unheard-of.
> They also don't lose/flip bits from being read many times but never rewritten,
Whoever told you about NAND read disturb errors must have done you a disservice by not communicating how hard they are to trigger and how easy they are to recover from. If you are letting this worry influence your purchasing decisions, you're wildly overestimating the scope of this issue. Unless you have some previously unheard-of real workload that is effectively Rowhammer for SSDs.
SSD only pre-built commercial computer offerings have set back the average computer's ability to do useful work by 15 years. SSD are just too expensive for most people to use for useful amounts of storage (say, family photos+system backups). And even if it's a pre-built desktop the emergence of SSDs has made it somehow acceptable to sell a 1TB HDD in a modern computer. It's scammy.
Base configs should absolutely come at least double the SSD capacity they currently do, though, in everything but maybe bargain bin Chromebooks.
Many people genuinely don't need more than 250GB in their computer; many more will never need more than 1TB. If you're having trouble believing that such users exist, you need a serious reality check about how normal people use their computers. Most people who buy a pre-built computer with 1TB or less of storage are not being meaningfully constrained in their ability to do useful work with that computer.
And regardless of how much storage is in your computer, you need storage that's not in the computer to hold backups. Are you basing your expectations for how much storage a computer should come equipped with on the needs for primary storage and backup/archival storage done in defiance of all common sense and recommendations about where and how to store backups?
But video games are by far the most common and easy way to burn through hundreds of GB of storage in a consumer PC. Except not every PC user is in to AAA gaming, and all of that storage capacity usage can be freed up quickly and easily when free space starts running low—again aided by cloud storage and fast internet speeds, because games can be re-downloaded with relatively little inconvenience.
Probably the biggest new class of computer applications with heavy data storage needs to crop up in recent years is generative AI. But models like Stable Diffusion are relatively small compared to mainstream consumer storage capacities, and bigger models like GPT-3 and newer are exceed local compute and memory capacity by a far wider margin than they exceed local storage capacity, so they're stuck in the cloud for now.
There are real reasons to expect consumer storage capacity needs to grow more slowly than they did in the 1990s, and there's real evidence that they have been growing more slowly in recent years. Just pointing at a trend from several decades ago without even trying to think through whether it's still relevant is not a useful observation or insight.
I pointed out the trend because not three years ago, you could buy the latest model iPhone with 64gb of storage. Today that number is 128gb. So while we have got better at moving transient data off to the cloud, I am not really sure that our data creation or consumption is nearing any peaks.
My experience is based mostly off doing IT support for mostly non-technical family and friends. By backups I meant OS features that do system file restorations from checkpoints like common in Windows and Apple. It is also common to have these on the same computer. Even if they're stored externally the computer running time machine must have that much local space free. So many of my tech support visits are helping people who run out out the tiny disk space on their affordable model Apple laptops and are no longer able to make time machine back-ups to their external HDD storage till they free the required space.
People commonly run out of 250 GB storage without even doing data intensive hobbies. I don't think my experience is unique.
And it’s not just booting the system that was noticeable. Everything became more responsive. It was like night and day.
I have no problem separating my OS drive from my games/photos/backups. It’s actually what I prefer to do. And I like to see that the operating system isn’t so bloated it can’t fit in 100 GB.
Today's entry-level SSDs are faster in pretty much every way than the top of the line from ten years ago. They're definitely "good enough" for most users.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/features/crucial-p2-ssd-qlc-fla...
In short, the problem you're complaining about wouldn't matter for the drive in question.
Do we still need things like Data Scrubbing on SSD?
Many drives will do some amount of background reading on their own to scan for degraded data. But this isn't visible to the host system and not guaranteed, so it shouldn't be relied upon and doing some extra reads (eg. once a month) is harmless.
I strongly believe QLC SSDs are a great choice for NAS usage, unless it's very frequently modified data. It's still more expensive than hard drives, but the noise, power and performance benefits can be worth it.
Back when QLC first took over the "value-tier" of the major brands I bought dozens of Inland drives because they were still TLC, making them better performing with higher endurance than other cheap SSDs, but the QN322 is a worst-of-QLC drive. Depending on the week it's only marginally cheaper than better drives — Intel 670p 2TB was $79.99 in-store two weeks ago.
You need to make the distinction between how many packages of NAND flash are soldered to the PCB, and how many dies of NAND are stacked in one BGA package. A 2TB SSD requires more than two NAND dies because the largest NAND dies in production are in the ballpark of 1-1.33Tbit, so a 2TByte drive would typically have 16 NAND dies in total.
> And the SLC cache size isn't fixed but rather a fraction of the free space.
That doesn't stop a 2TB drive from generally having 4x more SLC cache than a 500GB drive, other things being equal.
If you have a QN322, feel free to provide benchmark results.
And of course the performance specs for the 2TB don't show it being 4x faster than the 500GB model: those specs are for peak performance when using the SLC cache. Consumer SSD specs almost never list post-cache performance.
I don't have one of the drive in question, but unlike you I actually know enough about how these things work to know what performance claims are plausible or not. (See eg. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16681 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16577 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16491 )
It's indeed getting harder because some phones are literally now eSIM only. Before, there was near no excuse. My last phone's sim caddy had a SSD caddy on the other side, which just takes up so little extra volume & requires so little extra design/features.
For example, WD's Q2 financial report [1] shows:
Q1 2023 Cloud Revenue: $1,829M
Q2 2023 Cloud Revenue: $1,224M (down 33%)
Q1 2023 Customer Revenue: $679M
Q2 2023 Customer Revenue: $794M (up 17%)
[1] https://investor.wdc.com/static-files/5c73f7fb-869a-4850-bd2...
One of the main reasons is density. You can put 32 E1.S EDSFF SSDs in a single rack unit fairly commonly nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me if some 1U chassis did 40.
There's also reliability. They're not infallible, but it's looking like AFRs for SSDs might be half that of HDDs. That's a big deal.
Of course there's also cost. Prosumer SSDs are about $70-75/TB now, and common PCIe 4.0 U.2/U.3 enterprise and datacenter SSDs are in the $90/TB range. PCIe 5.0 enterprise and datacenter SSDs? "Yikes", is what I'll say. Have fun negotiating with your rep on those. ;) Meanwhile, 7200rpm SATA HDDs can be had for $15/TB. These are retail end-user prices. If you're doing huge volumes as a cloud provider or a huge SAAS business, pricing goes quite a bit lower.
-- -----
Where do HDDs still make sense? Sustained transfer operations, nearline storage, and as part of a storage tier where you can intelligently hide the HDDs behind SSDs (lots of solutions for this) and get SSD performance most of the time, and guarantee it where it matters. There's many use cases where they just dominate because of their low cost, and the ability to get the performance required for a lot cheaper.
Though compared to high-end enterprise SSDs, 7200rpm SATA HDDs are actually still fine for power, typically pulling 6-7W per HDD instead of 11-15W for fairly common enterprise SSDs. Some enterprise SSDs (mostly PCIe 5, mostly E3-based form factors) can pull 25W, if not 40W. Remember, enterprise SSDs don't do things like SLC cache much -- they just have a MOUNTAIN of NAND (plus PLP capacitors) you can read/write from in massive parallelization. There's no ingest drop-off as a result, but you do have to power all that NAND.
You forgot 'cold storage'. The data on SSDs will degrade if they are not powered on.
HDDs are quickly Falling off in the consumer space because SSDs are getting cheap enough, power consumption matters (for laptops), form factor matters (again, for laptops), and mobile entirely changed peoples' expectations of system responsiveness.
Even 20 years ago, the number of people (consumers, not businesses) I knew with tape drives was almost none. Today I know of zero.
I still think that an SSD for your boot drive is a no-brainer, but for other data storage HDDs still make sense. If the trend of affordable SSDs keeps up, that view might change in the future.
It essentially backs up the parent poster's data, just lets us navigate across a larger set of data.
When you analyze that trend in light of how many consumer use cases show little or no growth in capacity requirements over time (due to factors like cloud storage and video streaming), it's hard to see any long-term future for hard drives in consumer PCs.
It seems the ssd market isn't interested in making large drives unless they are dram-less (anything cheap) or have very limited write cycles (eg samsung qvo).
SSDs may have dropped even further. I had to unsubscribe from /r/buildapcsales[1] because I couldn't stop buying the SSD deals that popped up. I wanted to avoid juggling multiple storage drives in this machine, but now all my M.2 slots are full. Stuck one in a cheap USB enclosure to make a damn good flash drive.
QLC drives are starting to approach HDD prices. Here's an extreme example. Two months ago $100 was a good deal for a 2TB QLC drive[2]. Now you can get them (in limited circumstances) for $45[3].
[0]: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#f=2&s...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/111b8n8/ssd_...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/12fv841/ssd_...
My use case is penalty a bit particular, though... It's really just for localized copies of large datasets that exist elsewhere. So it's totally ok if the drive dies, since the data lives somewhere else. I doubt most people have a real need for that much localized data these days.
Really? Maybe the data on the disk platters will be fine, but an EMP which wipes SSDs could just as easily fry the HDD electronics and firmware flash memory. Your data may well be intact, but you are never seeing it again without some highly specialised data recovery equipment - and will that equipment survive the EMP apocalypse?
I'd be surprised to see hard drive sales become obsolete in the next decade, but I wouldn't be shocked to see the technology collapse in two. The market for them in terms of units sold peaked in 2010. Personally I'm just excited about all the cheap drives enterprises are going to offload onto the used market.
Coincidentally, only few hours ago my SSD was saved by HDD! I booted up my PC and went away for a few minutes. Returned only to be welcomed by busy HDD noises. I quickly turned by WTF into resource monitor - and (not)surprise! - PID 4 was munching D:\System Volume Information. That's really annoying, but what really terrified me - the same was happening to SSD C:! I have explicitly turned off defrag, updates and other stuff for it, but still. And I would never spot it because SSDS DON'T MAKE NOISE!!