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Blogs Is it time for the hard disk to die?

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by brumgrunt, 18 Jan 2012.

  1. brumgrunt

    brumgrunt What's a Dremel?

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  2. Cei

    Cei pew pew pew

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    HDs will be around for a good while yet, simply due to capacity and price for that capacity.

    My gaming PC has a 60GB SSD and a 500GB mechanical drive - I'm using the SSD almost to capacity (due to BF3 install), and the 500GB drive is 2/3 full due to Steam. As such, if I was to move to an SSD only solution, I'd need a 60+512GB setup (320+60 is too small) - a very expensive proposition.

    This is without considering other media types. My main workstation has a 120GB SSD for boot, but then has another 8TB of spinning disk space. Add in the 4TB NAS and you start to get the picture. Even if SSDs halved in price, which they will over time, they are still going to be much more expensive than mechanical storage.

    From where I sit, an SSD+HD set up is the best possible solution - you get the speed of the SSD when you want it, but can pile your data on to a cheap drive .

    SSDs will take over, eventually, but it's going to take a long while to get there, simply due to the sheer capacity of mechanical drives.


    EDIT: Saying all that, I can foresee SSD only in laptops in the very near future. We've always been used to lower capacity drives in laptops (they're still only just struggling to hit 1TB, and I remember when 80GB was pretty reasonable), so people will accept a smaller SSD. My MacBook Air has a 256GB drive for starters, which I'm finding is plenty for mobile use.
     
  3. User-sam

    User-sam When in doubt, follow your nose.

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    Off with there heads!
     
  4. alpaca

    alpaca llama eats dremel

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    Usually, your blog posts are good, Antony, but this one... It does not say anything. It does not add anything to the SSD vs HDD discussion.
     
  5. scott_chegg

    scott_chegg Minimodder

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    The increasing popularity and ease of use of home NAS systems will help keep traditional spinning disks going for a long time. The enterprise storage sector still use disks extensively for primary storage, backup and archive. Modern storage systems have automatic tiering where your storage array will have a bunch of SSD as tier 1, a bunch of 15K spinners for tier 2 and a massive bunch of SATA for tier 3. Data will be moved up and down the tiers depending on access frequency.

    I have 3 ssd's and a 500 GB spinner in my main rig. 64 GB crucial sata 3 for OS and apps, 60 GB OCZ vertex 2 for selected game installs and steammover target, 30 GB corsiar ssd that I use as a fast scratch drive and the big spinner for main data storage.
     
  6. SpAceman

    SpAceman What's a Dremel?

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    My 500GB Steam library will be on mechanical for some time yet. Will possibly get an SSD for my next build.
     
  7. billysielu

    billysielu Minimodder

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    Hard Drives will die when SSDs stop dying. Nowhere near stable enough for the price.
     
  8. countstex

    countstex What's a Dremel?

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    Perhaps the answer lies elsewhere. At present we still require quite a lot of local storage on our systems, keeping HDDs popular. But in a future were cloud computing is far more prevalent an local storage needs are massively reduced then pure SSD devices become more viable. Technically you could do this now if we weren't the performance freaks that most of us on this site are. You could quite easily run Win7 from an SSD and use Google Apps, Flickr, YouTube, Onlive and various other online/cloud solutions and have very little need for local storage.
     
  9. Bungletron

    Bungletron Minimodder

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    Quite right, SSD and cloud storage might be viable but now internet connection reliability and bandwidth become the issue, something we lagging on (lag! :lol:) in the UK.
     
  10. steve30x

    steve30x What's a Dremel?

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    When I can get a 250GB SSD for 125 euro or less then that will be the day I will move from HDD. SSD's are too expensive at the moment and I am hoping they go low enough in price soon , because I want to have my computer as quiet as possible and my three HDD's are the loudest part of my computer.
     
  11. yodasarmpit

    yodasarmpit Modder

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    We live in a high definition world, we have ever increasing data storage requirements, and until SSD's can be produced and sold for less than the mechanical equivalent you won't see a massive sea change.
     
  12. Siwini

    Siwini What is 4+no.5?

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    Sure if you start selling reliable SSD 1TB for $100 but we all know that’s not going to happen for another decade, so no HDD will stick around.
     
  13. Scarlet0pimp

    Scarlet0pimp What's a Dremel?

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    I'm having great results personally using the z68 chipset and the Smart Response Technology (SSD Caching). Using 640Gb IBM WD and 64Gb M4.
    My boot time is fast 34 seconds and my popular games load very fast in comparison to my old system. In worlf of tanks i'm normally the first in to a map and have to wait 20 seconds before the game timer even starts to count down.
     
  14. Jim

    Jim Ineptimodder

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    Even now, as a 'performance freak', it's more than possible to do basically the same thing with a pure SSD device plus a NAS.
     
  15. mclean007

    mclean007 Officious Bystander

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    I'll let the sloppy grammar pass and say that was actually pretty amusing :)
     
  16. countstex

    countstex What's a Dremel?

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    Indeed, but then that's HDDs in your NAS right?
     
  17. countstex

    countstex What's a Dremel?

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    Maybe I'm spoilt being on Virgin (he says the night after a major outage) but I loose internet maybe once per year, and can get up to 100Mbit if I choose to pay for it. I don't, I pay for 10Mbit as that fits my needs. But I could. Internet access would be towards the top of my check list whenever buying a new property to live in.
     
  18. Indra EMC

    Indra EMC Like Modding my PC

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    I didn't think so, because :

    1. SSD still too damn expensive
    2. HDD Price is high, but it begin to decline because WD and Seagate factory on thailand now can operate.
    3. SSD capacity is still too small compare to HDD capacity.

    if manufacture can make an SSD as cheap as HDD, and also have huge capacity (1 TB / 2 TB for example) but 10 times faster than regular HDD, i can say "HDD will die" just like Floppy disk when flash drive take over.
     
  19. NethLyn

    NethLyn Minimodder

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    Interesting cross-comparison but CRT to TFT was more about the means of disposal and waiting for dead pixels to stop being an issue - now you only have to worry about them if a flat screen's damaged in transit compared to when they launched, and only the IPS screens are expensive anymore, but it's taken a good decade.

    SSD? Not quite yet. We'll have to wait for April to see what the HDD supply chain looks like, but the floods might still put the kibosh on the traditional price crash for Easter unless production's fully restored by then. Whenever it recovers, you know they'll sell stackloads, can't wait to get back to WD.
     
  20. theprodigalrebel

    theprodigalrebel What's a Dremel?

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    My boot drive is a Seagate 7200.12 500GB disk - 235GiB used (that's just Program Files, Windows and Games). About 50% full. (All UserData - Docs/Pictures/Music/Videos/PST - points to a 2TB drive. Pr0n has a dedicated 1TB drive. Backups, copies of large redistributables, installers and disk images that I would not want to download again/lose-the-DVD are on another 500GB drive)

    However, if I wanted every game I own (I still have a lot of older games that I haven't reinstalled since my last clean wipe of the OS drive) to be readily available and still have some breathing space for future installs, I would want nothing smaller than 360GB.

    I remember 10 years ago, when the family computer had a 40GB drive and every time a new game came out, I would have to spend a lot of time figuring out what movies/pr0n to delete, what game to uninstall, what was valuable/expendable etc. I do not want to do that again (even if it means shuffling data between disks as opposed to outright deleting it).

    Even when SSDs come down to 1 USD per GB in Q3 of this year (as predicted by lots of people), ~$350 would still be a lot of money for storage for a mild improvement in the user experience.
     
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