SSD prices falling rapidly

[cosmicalstorm]

SSD prices are looking really good.

Jim O'Reilly
Commentary


SSD Prices In A Free Fall

With the prices of solid-state drives expected to reach parity with hard-disk drives next year, are HDDs doomed?

Hard-disk drive vendors point to the higher price of solid-state drives as a reason to keep on buying hard drives, but as Bob Dylan sang, "The Times They Are a -Changin'." The advent of 3D NAND has become a game-changer for the storage industry by increasing SSD capacity and dropping SSD prices.

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.

The result of the density increase is clear: This year, SSDs will nearly catch up to HDD in capacity. Meanwhile, hard drives appear to be stuck at 10 TB capacity, and the technology to move beyond that size is going to be expensive once it's perfected. HDD capacity curves already were flattening, and the next steps are likely to take some time.

This all means that SSDs will surpass HDDs in capacity in 2016. There’s even serious talk of 30 TB solid-state drives in 2018.

So what about SSD price points? In 2014, prices for high-end consumer SSDs dropped below enterprise-class HDD, and continued to drop in 2015. A terabyte SSD can be had for around $300. Moreover, this is before 3D NAND begins to further cut prices. By the end of 2016, it’s a safe bet that price parity will be close, if not already achieved, between consumer SSDs and the bulk SATA drives.

This will put pressure on hard-disk drive  makers to lower prices, but, frankly, they’ve used up most of the tricks to reduce cost and are already at single-digit margins for bulk SATA drives, so they don’t have much wriggle room.

With parity achieved in capacity and price, one has to ask whether HDDs will still be needed.  SSDs are blindingly fast in comparison. Typically, large consumer SSDs are 5x the streaming performance and 5000x the random read/write rate. With low operating power and very low standby power, SSDs are ideal for large archives, too.

Additionally, wear-out isn’t an issue with SSDs. Those two node uplifts in the manufacturing process add literally years to the device life, and the economics of 3D NAND allow for extra over-provisioning, making the write life of the drive well beyond its time in a data center. This is especially true for archived storage, where writing is at a much lower rate.

There clearly is an inflexion point in the use of hard drives coming. Once parity is achieved, the transition to SSDs will become a tsunami. This transition is already well along for so-called enterprise drives. With price and capacity already matched or exceeded by SSDs, 7200 RPM and faster HDDs will quickly fall out of favor.

As in any transition, there will be points of resistance. After-market HDD spares will continue to be sold, though upgrades and replacements will increasingly use SSDs, especially in servers. The volume reductions in HDDs will probably lead to some major fire sales, though. These will all delay the day the last HDD ships, but do not expect a tape-like extended demise, with 30 years of predictions of the end of tape countered by ongoing increases in tape capacity. SSDs and HDDs basically do the same thing and there’s no reason to have both.

Speaking of tape, the SSD archive appliance likely will cause the demise of that hallowed medium. Today’s interest is more for rapid access to data, as demonstrated by Google’s Nearline cloud storage and Amazon Glacier. An SSD basis provides the desired low power with instant-on performance. Tape-based Glacier takes two hours to recover the first blocks of data.

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.

If you were told that a BMW and a golf-cart were the same price, which would you buy? That’s going to be the dilemma facing buyers sometime in 2016, with SSD and HDD. I think I know your answer!

PS: We may have a similar discussion in 2021, when ReRAM, PCM or some other solid-state solution, mounts a challenge to flash memory. 

Jim O'Reilly was Vice President of Engineering at Germane Systems, where he created ruggedized servers and storage for the US submarine fleet. He has also held senior management positions at SGI/Rackable and Verari; was CEO at startups Scalant and CDS; headed operations at PC ... View Full Bio

[Ace Pace]

This article started out wonderful then went straight into "I don't know what I'm talking about" land. Nobody uses tape drives despite them being slow, tape drives are used regardless of their speed as cold storage mechanisms.

[Simon_Jester]

How resistant are solid state drives to corruption of data over extended periods of time?

Although if storage gets really cheap, the obvious solution to that is to just use triply (or more) redundant drives and cross-check every year or whatever...

[Darth Nostril]

They haven't been around for all that long so we don't really know what long term storage prospects will be.

Which is why the article is so full of crap, people use tape drives because they work as long term backups, nothing to do with read/write times.

Nice to see the prices coming down and reliability going up, in a years time or so I'll be able to replace my 120 gig C: drive with a 1Tb drive for about the same price.

[Mr Bean]

How resistant are solid state drives to corruption of data over extended periods of time?

Although if storage gets really cheap, the obvious solution to that is to just use triply (or more) redundant drives and cross-check every year or whatever...

Tape storage solutions claim a thirty year life time with companies who are serious about data retention planning on ten year cycles of swapping to the next thing that claims thirty year life cycle and a complete redundant backups.

At the moment you can get an LTO Ultrium 4 format 3 TB tape for about twenty dollars in bulk. I'll say that again, twenty bucks for three terabytes of backup. Your average medium firm is just fine with two tape drives and about fifty tapes or about 3000 dollars. Not a crazy high expense but that gives them a total of 75 Terabytes of backup (50/2=25 tapes x3=75). If you want to go bigger you look into automated tape libraries which can scale from 240 Terabytes up to the five petabyte range inside of a single closet sized space. Tape drives are already at under one cent per gigabyte threshold, hard drives are still way up there at .03 cents per gig while the best and cheapest solid state is about .30 cents per gig (You can get a 1TB solid state for 300$ now). Keep in mind how much that needs to fall, that 1 TB drive needs to be buy able for ten dollars before it can compete with existing backup tape libraries.

Oh and promise to last at least twenty years because otherwise industry will still stay with tapes because tapes are incredibly reliable over a ten year time frame if you stick them in a room somewhere.

[Iroscato]

And for a moment after reading the title I thought I'd be able to pick up an Executor-Class on the cheap...

[Darth Nostril]

If only ....

[Grumman]

And for a moment after reading the title I thought I'd be able to pick up an Executor-Class on the cheap...

Now it's only nine kajillion dollars, down from fifteen kajillion dollars.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

And for a moment after reading the title I thought I'd be able to pick up an Executor-Class on the cheap...

Now it's only nine kajillion dollars, down from fifteen kajillion dollars.

Glad I wasn't the only one thinking this!

Thing with solid states is that each sector only has a finite number of rewrites before it becomes unusable, with wear-levelling it takes longer but you still have a problem of ever-decreasing usable storage. Until this problem is solved I'm not going to put my faith in SSDs.

[Borgholio]

Thing with solid states is that each sector only has a finite number of rewrites before it becomes unusable, with wear-levelling it takes longer but you still have a problem of ever-decreasing usable storage. Until this problem is solved I'm not going to put my faith in SSDs.

The MTBF for the individual cells on a modern SSD is so high already, that you would have to write to a drive constantly for a few years to wear down a significant portion of the drive. Through normal use, SSD drives can last even longer than normal hard drives since there are no moving parts to break.

[General Zod]

And for a moment after reading the title I thought I'd be able to pick up an Executor-Class on the cheap...

Now it's only nine kajillion dollars, down from fifteen kajillion dollars.

Glad I wasn't the only one thinking this!

Thing with solid states is that each sector only has a finite number of rewrites before it becomes unusable, with wear-levelling it takes longer but you still have a problem of ever-decreasing usable storage. Until this problem is solved I'm not going to put my faith in SSDs.

The rewrite problem is grossly exaggerated. Especially for the average consumer. Given I've had traditional drives die on me because of mechanical problems, I'm a lot more inclined to trust an SSD regardless of write limitations.

[Irbis]

Until this problem is solved I'm not going to put my faith in SSDs.

How long did you use your last, say, 3 PCs?

Given I've had traditional drives die on me because of mechanical problems, I'm a lot more inclined to trust an SSD regardless of write limitations.

I had 250 GB drive with lots of backup files die after 20 cm fall. Had that been SSD, it would be fine...

[Alferd Packer]

Besides, data centers are buying 10,000 drives (or more) at a time. As long as the MTBF is as high (and it will be higher) as mechanical drives and the price is equivalent, they won't get screwed on their SLA and they'll happily offer the increased performance to their customers. I bet we'll see a lot more chassis exclusively offering 2.5" bays in the coming years, as the demand for traditional drives decreases.

[General Zod]

There's more than a few tests about SSD reliability out there to back up what I'm saying. If all you do is write data to your drive 24/7, it will take about 3 years before it finally kills over from NAND failure.



http://www.zdnet.com/article/worried-ab ... eed-to-be/

[Starglider]

Ubiqitous cheap SSDs are great news, as hard disks were the biggest performance bottleneck for many applications as well as a major power and maintenance/replacement cost for data centers.

However SSDs in their current form do not offer long-term stability to effectively compete in the niche that tape storage still occupies, even at arbitrarily low cost per TB. I don't think charge trap based devices are going to cut it for that; we need something like phase-change storage.

[General Zod]

Ubiqitous cheap SSDs are great news, as hard disks were the biggest performance bottleneck for many applications as well as a major power and maintenance/replacement cost for data centers.

However SSDs in their current form do not offer long-term stability to effectively compete in the niche that tape storage still occupies, even at arbitrarily low cost per TB. I don't think charge trap based devices are going to cut it for that; we need something like phase-change storage.

I think this is an apples/oranges thing. Tape drives just aren't something SSDs are trying to compete with.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Until this problem is solved I'm not going to put my faith in SSDs.

How long did you use your last, say, 3 PCs?

My current machine, about 6 years. But many components have been upgraded/changed since then- I'm running 4 Velociraptor drives in 2 RAID-0 configurations (2 x 300GB and 2 x 600GB). WD have been doubling the range's capacity every couple of years.