Blogs Is it time for the hard disk to die?

I've got SSD's in my Desktop and my Laptop and love them. It's just the instant response and great performance that means I just couldn't go back (I mean I could but I wouldn't choose to). I'm about to take the ODD out of my laptop though to fit the original 500GB HDD back in there. I've got a 120GB Force 3 SSD but because I'm gaming more on the laptop I need the space for lots of games + media.

 

I don't have an SSD and can't justify the cost, boot time is irrelevant (rarely switch them off and if I do I can make a drink while it boots up,) game loading times are not an issue (takes longer to join the server and wait for everyone else generally).
The only benefit is if I got an advantage over other players in game for some reason (presumably caching issues). I am not sure this would justify the extra cost per gb over yet another 2tb mechanical (at normal prices not current)

 

The small ssd's are great for a system partition, but documents films and music are much better suited to a HDD.

 

I think this basically says it all.

Unless the SSD is used simply for reading data and rarely written to but then that means putting your page file over on to a HDD and disabling a number of windows services to stop excessive wear and tear on the SSD.

 

That about sums up my feelings towards SSD's and HDD's.
I need a few TB's for all my digital copies of DVD's and CD's etc. Speed doesn't matter for that, but capacity and price do. Hopefully in a few years we'll be able to buy digital full HD films online. That'll need a lot of cheap storage.

 

id say about 40p per GB for me to by
and about 5-10p for HDD to die

 

Not for a long time I'd say.

 

"Is it time for the hard disk to die?", only when they reduce the price of SSD's to a more affordable level, then they'll probably only get used for storage.

 

I'd love an SSD as my main drive, but can't justify the price just yet, not when the money could be put to better use on upgrading the rest of my ageing system. My Windows 7 install is 180GB, and that's at it's bare minimum as all media and documents are stored on my server, so I'd need a 256GB SSD which I cannot justify when the 500GB drive I have works just fine for the time being.

As for the death of mechanical hard-drives, I don't think that day will come for a long, long time. Space requirements are ever increasing, and it seems mechanical disks will still be king in that department for a long time. When SSD's reach an affordable 2TB, I wouldn't be surprised if mechanical disks were at 20TB etc. It would cost me thousands to replace the 5TB I've got entirely with SSD's.

 

I'll stick with a 120GB SSD for an OS, once you've used 1 for an OS there is no going back to HDD honestly .

But for a big games drive or media & backup drives HDD's still completely eclipse SSD's due to cost but even so I'm trying to wait it out for the HDD cost to come down lower than the equivalent of 25GB Blu-ray discs cost which is £75 which would let me backup 2.3TB of data, something I've been considering & still am .

 

Issues of degrading performance, no TRIM in RAID, small capacities, and high price make them a luxury item, and not a necessary one.

I have no SSD drives in my system, and probably won't until they reach a sensible price, and seem a little less fragile.

My system boots in 40 seconds, and Photoshop loads in 4 seconds. I have enough RAM to allow windows to not rely on a swap file, so I fail to see what the huge benefit will be.

Game loading times would be a GREAT reason to have one, but unfortunately, all my games are already on my C: drive along with the OS and I'd need at least a 256GB SSD.. and that would be 80% full.

They're just not practical.

Is the hard drive dead? Of course not! That's a ludicrous thing to suggest. It will be YEARS before SSDs replace hard drives for mass storage... just because SSDs suck at mass storage. Frankly... I fail to see the point of this article/blog.

 

I wouldn't say "die". I personally would prefer to see larger capacity at better value from SSDs before I let HDD's take a back seat. I know this is wishful thinking, but if they could make a 500GB SSD for under £160 I would be over the moon and quite willing to say goodbye to the HDD.

 

I run two 120GB Vertex 3s in RAID0 for a boot drive and two 300GB Raptor drivers for large applications... capacity is becoming slightly less of an issue with SSDS now, but it'll be a good 2 years before you see the back of them entirely from the desktop market, and possibly 5 years before they're gone from the server market.

 

3TB Caviar Greens are still £150. You can buy data on a HDD at £50 per TB still. Last time I checked my 256GB M4's were around £250 making them roughly £3000 for the equivalent 3TB drive.

£3000 vs £150 - I think the HDD has a long life left ahead of it! Get 2012 out of the way, repair the factories and lets bump it up to 1TB per platter please Seagate and WD for those 5TB drives and beyond that we all want to ram in to our NAS boxes

 

Waiting for an affordable SSD with 500 gb then I will change.

 

My thought, exactly. A quite useless blog. People simply cannot afford to go all ssd. You know that. I know that. We all know that. So why this blog?
On top of that, WD Green hdd's are still quite affordable. I've yet to have any trouble with them.
I bought this drive, a Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARX 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive, on sale at NewEgg for just $139.99 including free shipping, according to the receipt, 1/05/2012. If people can't afford one of those, then they definitely need to forget all about ever owning a computer. SSD's will never, ever, cost so little for the same capacity.
There's also the ssd/hdd hybrids that are continually being developed and sold. I've used the SilverStone device that melds a small ssd with a regular hdd with quite good results. At first, then after about 2 years the ssd became corrupted. Due to the device or me I'm still not sure.
Please, if you post another blog, have it be about something that's actually relevant. This one is quite worthless.

 

For me, the number 1 thing I look for in storage is reliability. I'm really fed up of buying something and then it going wrong 6months-12months down the line. Hard drives going wrong are the worst, not only do you lose your data (if you don't back up), you also don't have a pc. If a graphics card goes wrong, you just can't play games for a while. I would like to upgrade to SSD as they are reported as reliable (although is this proven yet? anyone had one go wrong?), but I have yet to find a reasonably priced 500GB SSD. The cost is still just too much, even at under £1 per GB might sound cheap but if you want 500GB that's £500, just for storage (and you probably need two of those for backup?). Even 50p per GB will be too much? £250 for 500GB. You can get double that storage for under £100. Although I suppose you are getting the performance so it does justify it slightly. Maybe they can offer slower SSD with higher storage (with the lower price) to replace the HD and the SSD that are out now for OS and programs. I just hope they keep advancing and the prices keep dropping to make them "common". With these floods, I know its terrible to families and the economy etc but its a chance to say "why bother rebuilding these factories that make outdated HD's, rebuild the factories to make SSD".

 

You say that but until you have experienced an SSD in your system you can't appreciate it. I was sceptical at first but now I'd never go back to a HDD for my boot drive.

 

Why the big fuss over decreased boot times?

So, a very-expensive SSD is going to save you....30 seconds a day, since most people only tend to turn it on/off once per day. Hardly seems worth it to me.

As it happens, I don't even shut my PC down...I send it to Sleep (after the Bit Tech article about Sleep-related power consumption being almost zero last year) and my PC takes all of 3 seconds to come out of sleep mode.

Until I can install the games I play the most often *and* my operating system on the same drive and get the reliability and longevity I'm getting out of my Spinpoint drives I won't be wasting my money on SSD.