Good quality 2tb SATA hard drives

[Yousuf Khan]

Aside from the number of writes, what about long term stability for files
written to SSD 5 or 10 years ago?

One advantage of an old SSD is that it is still alive for reads even
after death. With an HDD, when it dies -- it dies, for both reads and
writes. But an SSD can still be read after it can no longer be written
to. So it gives you the chance to copy stuff off of it and into a new
drive.

As far as its maximum writes, that seems to be highly dependent on how
frequently you write to the same blocks over and over again. With the
wear-leveling technology in modern SSD controllers, you don't really
write to the same blocks all that frequently, they usually attempt to
write to as many least-recently-used blocks as possible. I don't see a
big problem with write lifetimes as they make it sound like in most
write-ups. For example, I've had my new SSD for less than a month, it's
a 240GB drive, and I've already had about 1.09TB written to it (almost
5x more than its capacity). It's still showing 100% lifetime. Of course
I've attempted to keep the really heavy-duty and frequent write
operations off of it, like the pagefile and file indexer. But other
heavy but infrequent writers like Thunderbird remain on this drive.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Only because they are much newer products, much less mature pricing wise.

Being semi-conductors, flash memory falls in price alongside the
standard Moore's Law miniaturization rate. Hard disks don't follow the
Moore's Law rate, they are much slower in density increases.

Don’t believe it with say the 5TB or 10TB drives which
should be the best $/TB with hard drives by then.

There are already 500GB SSD's available, vs. 4TB HDD's, which is a
factor of only 8x difference. A few years ago, the difference was more
like 32x. I can see 1TB SSD's aren't too far around the corner (maybe by
next year), but 10TB HDD's are going to be at least 3-5 years away. The
differential is dropping. Also at some point, you're going to run into
the "good-enough" wall, where people simply won't need much more
capacity than they already have. People are already there with many
CPU's, and the size of their RAM, HDD size will similarly stagnate. When
the HDD size stagnates, the SSD will catch up in capacity at least at
the "good-enough" sweet spot.

Not when you just want a drive for your PVR where the performance
of even the green hard drives is all you need performance wise.

Even a PVR can benefit from an SSD. PVR's are mostly limited to two
simultaneous recordings these days with HDD storage. With SSD, they may
be able to increase that upto 10 simultaneous recordings, if network
bandwidth allows them. Even if network bandwidth can't keep up with
that, there will be some usability improvements, such as quicker
restarts for the firmware, and faster and smoother search response
(forward and backwards).

Fantasy with multiple TB hard drives.

I can see HDD's taking over the spot of current tape-backup operations.
It's already happening actually. Basically archival storage.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Rod Speed]

Tom Del Rosso wrote

One advantage of an old SSD is that it is still alive for reads even after
death.

Depends on how it dies. That isnt how they die on a power failure when
writing.

With an HDD, when it dies -- it dies, for both reads and writes.

That's just plain wrong too. Quite a bit of the time they just have
some unreallocatable sectors and you can still read the rest fine.

Just had that with a Toshiba that died with just 2 weeks to go with
warranty it was possible to do a final backup before returning it fine.

But an SSD can still be read after it can no longer be written to.

That's ONLY true if its run out of writes. Which doesn't happen with a hard
drive.

So it gives you the chance to copy stuff off of it and into a new drive.

So do many failures with hard drives too.

As far as its maximum writes,

Which hard drives don't have.

that seems to be highly dependent on how frequently you write to the same
blocks over and over again.

Wota surprise.

With the wear-leveling technology in modern SSD controllers, you don't
really write to the same blocks all that frequently, they usually attempt
to write to as many least-recently-used blocks as possible.

And you don't have to fart around like that with a hard drive.

I don't see a big problem with write lifetimes

I do when hard drives don't have any write lifetime.

as they make it sound like in most write-ups. For example, I've had my new
SSD for less than a month, it's a 240GB drive,

I'm not silly enough to buy hard drives that small today.

In fact I don't buy hard drives smaller than 2TB today.

and I've already had about 1.09TB written to it (almost 5x more than its
capacity). It's still showing 100% lifetime.

And it remains to be seen if that is a lie or not like hard drive
MTBFs always were.

Of course I've attempted to keep the really heavy-duty and frequent write
operations off of it, like the pagefile and file indexer.

And that isnt even possible if you don't have a hard drive.

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

Being semi-conductors, flash memory falls in price alongside the standard
Moore's Law miniaturization rate.
Yes.

Hard disks don't follow the Moore's Law rate, they are much slower in
density increases.

That’s just plain wrong. And says nothing useful about whether they
will ever be as cheap as hard drives with 10TB drives etc anyway.

There are already 500GB SSD's available, vs. 4TB HDD's,

And at MUCH higher $/GB prices.

which is a factor of only 8x difference. A few years ago, the difference
was more like 32x. I can see 1TB SSD's aren't too far around the corner
(maybe by next year),

By which time you are likely to see 6TB hard drives too.

but 10TB HDD's are going to be at least 3-5 years away.

We'll see... And SSDs will still be MUCH more expensive $/GB
for the largest than with the largest hard drives available too,
which is why those that need the largest sizes for the PVRs etc
will still be using hard drives for that sort of storage.

The differential is dropping. Also at some point, you're going to run into
the "good-enough" wall, where people simply won't need much more capacity
than they already have.

Don’t believe that with PVRs. There will always be plenty that
keep recording more than they get around to watching and
who don’t bother to edit out what they have watched from a
particular evening's recording of one of the channels on a MUX etc.

People are already there with many CPU's,

Different matter entirely with hard drive storage with PVRs.

and the size of their RAM,

Different matter entirely with hard drive storage with PVRs.

HDD size will similarly stagnate.

Don’t believe that, essentially because of PVRs etc.

When the HDD size stagnates,

Don’t believe that will ever happen with operations like google around.

the SSD will catch up in capacity at least at the "good-enough" sweet
spot.

And will still be MUCH more expensive and there
wont be any 'sweet spot' with PVRs and google etc.

Even a PVR can benefit from an SSD.

Nope, not PERFORMANCE WISE they cant.

PVR's are mostly limited to two simultaneous recordings these days with
HDD storage.

That is just plain wrong. Mine can do 16 simultaneous
recordings with an eco green slower hard drive.

and I happen to live in an area where there are only
4 free to air transmitters with only 4 channels per mux.
Some places have hundreds of channels per mux.

With SSD, they may be able to increase that upto 10 simultaneous
recordings,

I can do that trivially with any eco green hard drive.

I doubt too many would want to record more than 16
channels at once and the hard drive handles that fine anyway.

if network bandwidth allows them.

It handles hundreds of channels simultaneously fine with digital TV.

Even if network bandwidth can't keep up with that, there will be some
usability improvements,
Nope.

such as quicker restarts for the firmware,

No point in restarting the firmware.

and faster and smoother search response (forward and backwards).

That’s just plain wrong. Its done from the file
structure and searching is instant even with a
hard drive because the file structure is cached.

I can see HDD's taking over the spot of current tape-backup operations.

Hardly anyone uses tape for backup anymore, they use hard drives.

And that’s another example of where its $/TB that
matters so they wont change to SSDs any time soon.

It's already happening actually. Basically archival storage.

Not with SSDs it aint, because they don’t last
as long as hard drives for archival storage.

 

[Noob]

Do they have suicidally short sleep time-outs like WD?

http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/

 

[Percival P. Cassidy]

I can see HDD's taking over the spot of current tape-backup operations.
It's already happening actually. Basically archival storage.

I was talking this past weekend with a member of my extended family who
works for an organization with huge server farms. Their backups use
humungous (about the size of the living room where we were talking)
robotic tape systems.

Perce

 

[Percival P. Cassidy]

Hardly anyone uses tape for backup anymore, they use hard drives.

I was talking this past weekend with a member of my extended family who
works for an organization with huge server farms. Their backups use
humungous (about the size of the living room where we were talking)
robotic tape systems.

Perce

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

That’s just plain wrong. And says nothing useful about whether they
will ever be as cheap as hard drives with 10TB drives etc anyway.

Moore's Law isn't in effect anyway. He said transistor count would double
every year, and it did from 1959 to the mid-80's. Then it was every 18
months or 2 years but people still call it Moore's Law.

Hardly anyone uses tape for backup anymore, they use hard drives.

With one tape drive equal to the price of a server, they use tape where they
have lots of servers.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Depends on how it dies. That isnt how they die on a power failure when
writing.

But that isn't really dying, that's just a power failure. The drive is
still usable afterwards when the power is re-established. Some data
might get corrupted, but the drive will still be usable.

That's just plain wrong too. Quite a bit of the time they just have
some unreallocatable sectors and you can still read the rest fine.

Just had that with a Toshiba that died with just 2 weeks to go with
warranty it was possible to do a final backup before returning it fine.

But that's not the definition of dying either. Dying means becoming
unusable. A lot of bad sectors is just a major error, but still not
dead: but it may be enough to get warranty replacement, sure. Dead is
when for example the controller dies, or the spindle seizes up.

Which hard drives don't have.

But a hard drive will usually run out of reads and writes at the same time.

I do when hard drives don't have any write lifetime.

No, HDD's just have an overall lifetime.

I'm not silly enough to buy hard drives that small today.

More than big enough for an operating system drive. You can still use
big hard drives for data drives. That's what I'm doing. Even when I was
using an HDD for my operating system drive, I had it partitioned down to
200GB for the OS, and the remaining for data. Keeping the OS partition
small allows for much easier backup and restore of the OS.

In fact I don't buy hard drives smaller than 2TB today.

Good for you.

And it remains to be seen if that is a lie or not like hard drive
MTBFs always were.

It's a separate SMART value only available in SSD's. There's no reason
to believe that SSD's don't know exactly how much is being written to
them, based on block sizes and number of blocks written. It's also safe
to assume that the SSD's controller knows exactly which blocks are no
longer writeable, so it may update the SSD lifetime value based on the
number of unwriteable blocks accumulated.

And that isnt even possible if you don't have a hard drive.

Sure, but even when I had a boot hard drive, I used to keep the pagefile
on other hard drives. But a lot of people also keep their pagefiles on
the SSD.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

By which time you are likely to see 6TB hard drives too.

Which actually just proves my point. If 1TB SSD's are to be met by 6TB
HDD's, then the capacity differential will only be 6X, which is a
smaller differential. If the differential started out at 32X and is now
around 8X, and then it'll be 6X, the trend is obvious, the SSD is
catching upto the HDD in capacity.

Don’t believe that will ever happen with operations like google around.

That's hardly a home usage scenario, that's an enterprise usage
scenario. In fact, it's operations like Google that might reduce the
need for internal storage capacity at home. They are the companies
developing cloud storage, which might make large capacities at home
unnecessary.

It handles hundreds of channels simultaneously fine with digital TV.

With digital tv, you aren't getting all channels broadcast to you all of
the time, just the ones that you're watching or recording.

That’s just plain wrong. Its done from the file
structure and searching is instant even with a
hard drive because the file structure is cached.

Searching forwards is easy, but searching backwards has always been jerky.

Hardly anyone uses tape for backup anymore, they use hard drives.

Never worked in a data server centre have you? When you're backing up
petabytes of data, you're using tape right now. We're talking about
robotic tape libraries equipped with multiple DLT or LTO tape drives.

Not with SSDs it aint, because they don’t last
as long as hard drives for archival storage.

I was talking about HDD's taking over from tape.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I was talking this past weekend with a member of my extended family who
works for an organization with huge server farms. Their backups use
humungous (about the size of the living room where we were talking)
robotic tape systems.

Yup, that used to be something I used to do myself: enterprise tape
backup operations. These days hard drives are cheap enough and large
enough to take over some of the medium-sized jobs that tape used to do.
Tapes usually hold several terabytes themselves, and they have a
sequential read/write speed advantage over hard drives still, especially
when you have multiple simultaneous tape drives being used
simultaneously. It's amazing how quickly you can backup an entire
department with multiple tape drives. And these days with a SAN serving
as the medium for data transfer, you can keep several tape drives fully
saturated and busy enough to justify the purchase of the robotic
library. You can backup an entire departmental data centre within a
couple of hours starting after midnight and going to the morning before
users come back into the office.

However, I am seeing a trend towards using removable hard drives in some
of the smaller departmental settings because they are easier to do
random accesses on, and they offer cheaper prices at the mid-level than
tapes do. You also see larger departments using HDD's as archival
storage in hierarchical storage management scenarios. Hierarchical
storage is where little used files are moved to long-term storage in a
slightly farther drive system, freeing up your local hard drive from
getting filled up. The archived files will still be easily accessible,
on demand.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

I was talking this past weekend with a member of my extended family who
works for an organization with huge server farms. Their backups use
humungous (about the size of the living room where we were talking)
robotic tape systems.

Sure, but we were discussing storage in personal computers, not huge server
farms.

There's only a few dinosaurs that still use tape for backup of personal
computers.

Even google doesn't.

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

Moore's Law isn't in effect anyway. He said transistor count would double
every year, and it did from 1959 to the mid-80's. Then it was every 18
months or 2 years but people still call it Moore's Law.

Yeah, the detail has certainly varied since his original observation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

With one tape drive equal to the price of a server, they use tape where
they have lots of servers.

Not always, google doesn’t.

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

But that isn't really dying, that's just a power failure.

The power failure is the cause of the SSD dying in the sense that the data
is lost.

The drive is still usable afterwards when the power is re-established.

Not necessarily. The data can be lost.

Some data might get corrupted, but the drive will still be usable.

Just as true of many hard drive failures.

The point is that with that sort of SSD failure,
it doesn't just go read only with no data lost.

But that's not the definition of dying either.

It is failure of the hard drive in the sense that it has to be replaced.

Dying means becoming unusable.

But isnt necessarily completely unusable in the sense
of being able to move the data to the replacement.

A lot of bad sectors is just a major error, but still not dead: but it may
be enough to get warranty replacement, sure.

Its dead in the sense that it needs to be replaced.

No different to an SSD that refuses to write any
more and so needs to be replaced and the data
moved to the replacement when that happens.

Dead is when for example the controller dies, or the spindle seizes up.

That's just a more dramatic death. And SSDs have that sort of death too.

But a hard drive will usually run out of reads and writes at the same
time.

That's just plain wrong. Quite often they degrade more gracefully.

And SSDs just die too, not being able to read or write.

Yep.

HDD's just have an overall lifetime.

No they don't. Most get replaced because they are too small.

Few actually die.

Even with modern drives, most systems get replaced for
various reasons and the hard drive does not die at all.

Just had one of those the other day too.

More than big enough for an operating system drive.

Few bother with more than one drive in a system today.

You can still use big hard drives for data drives.

Makes a lot more sense to have everything on the much bigger drive.

That's what I'm doing. Even when I was using an HDD for my operating
system drive,

Hardly anyone is silly enough to have a
separate physical drive for the OS anymore.

I had it partitioned down to 200GB for the OS, and the remaining for data.

But that's not a separate physical drive for the OS,

That's a much larger than 200GB drive.

Keeping the OS partition small allows for much easier backup and restore
of the OS.

That's just plain wrong with modern backup systems.

And is nothing like a separate physical drive for the OS anyway.

It makes absolutely no sense to be buying 240GB drives anymore.

Good for you.

It's a separate SMART value only available in SSD's.

And it remains to be seen if that is a lie or not like hard drive MTBFs
always were.

There's no reason to believe that SSD's don't know exactly how much is
being written to them, based on block sizes and number of blocks written.

And it remains to be seen if they are lying about lifetimes.

It's also safe to assume that the SSD's controller knows exactly which
blocks are no longer writeable, so it may update the SSD lifetime value
based on the number of unwriteable blocks accumulated.

And it remains to be seen if they are lying about lifetimes because
it isnt actually a linear function of what has already been seen.

Sure, but even when I had a boot hard drive, I used to keep the pagefile
on other hard drives.

And few were silly enough to have more than one hard drive
and those who cared about performance ensured that they
had enough physical ram so that the pagefile did not get
used enough so that the location of it mattered a damn.

But a lot of people also keep their pagefiles on the SSD.

And are likely to discover the downsides of SSDs when they do that.

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

Which actually just proves my point.

Nope. And your CLAIM cant be proven anyway until that time
actually shows up and we can see what actually happened.

If 1TB SSD's are to be met by 6TB HDD's, then the capacity differential
will only be 6X, which is a smaller differential.

The maximum size differential is irrelevant to what matters, $/TB.

We arent going to see that cross over any time soon.

Essentially because it doesn’t cost anymore to double
the density with hard drives, in fact it costs less.

You can never get around the fact that with with an SSD,
double the capacity means double the number of transistors.

If the differential started out at 32X and is now around 8X, and then
it'll be 6X, the trend is obvious, the SSD is catching upto the HDD in
capacity.

Irrelevant to what matters, $/TB.

That's hardly a home usage scenario, that's an enterprise usage scenario.
In fact, it's operations like Google that might reduce the need for
internal storage capacity at home.

And so that just means more and more hard drives for google
so that will keep driving the increased capacity of hard drives.

And I doubt too many will keep all their irreplaceable stuff like
videos of their grandkids etc on something like google exclusively.

They are the companies developing cloud storage, which might make large
capacities at home unnecessary.

Not a chance, because the absolute vast bulk of
what people choose to record with their PVR wont
be available for free from operations like that.

I doubt that they will even be cheap enough so that no one
bothers to record anything from free to air TV anymore.

And they certainly arent going to do it with video of the grandkids etc.

With digital tv, you aren't getting all channels broadcast to you all of
the time, just the ones that you're watching or recording.

But you can clearly record a hell of a lot more than the 2 you claimed
that PVRs can only do, so there is no point in using a MUCH more
expensive and much smaller SSD for the storage on a PVR for the
alleged increased performance which you don’t actually get at all.

Searching forwards is easy, but searching backwards has always been jerky.

Not with digital TV it aint. Backwards is identical to forwards.

Never worked in a data server centre have you?

Ran them thanks. And we were discussing storage
on personal computers, not data server centers anyway.

When you're backing up petabytes of data, you're using tape right now.

Google doesn’t.

We're talking about robotic tape libraries equipped with multiple DLT or
LTO tape drives.

Not with the PERSONAL COMPUTERS being discussed we don’t.

We use hard drives, not tape.

I was talking about HDD's taking over from tape.

You were claiming that SSDs would take over from tape with
PERSONAL COMPUTERS. Not a chance, hard drives will be
whats used for backups and have been for a long time now.

Only a fool would use SSDs for archival storage of PERSONAL
COMPUTERS with so little experience with long term archival
storage on SSDs yet. Some might try they in ADDITION to
hard drives to see how they pan out over time.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

It remains to be seen how long they continue to develop new products for
each production line tho.
Cant see that continuing forever, even with Seagate that does tend to
keep the old operation going for a long time sometimes.

Seagate probably keeps the factories going a long time, as this
increases their production capacity, but as these factories are upgraded
it probably eventually consolidates design towards one stream of products.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Sure, but we were discussing storage in personal computers, not huge
server farms.

There's only a few dinosaurs that still use tape for backup of personal
computers.

Even google doesn't.

But google isn't about personal computers either, it's a huge server
farm. In fact it's several server farms, highly spread out over the world.

As for Google not using tape drives to backup its data, that maybe true
of its online data servers, as that data is highly redundant anyways,
and in some cases it's too big to backup. However we don't know if it's
true for Google's internal servers where it keeps its in-house data such
as accounting, CRM, RDBMS, etc. Most likely it isn't true, and Google
does have tape backups of its in-house data, if for no other reason than
regulatory reasons. There's entire businesses, like Iron Mountain, setup
specifically for managing off-site archival tape data. These businesses
exist because many other businesses require maintenance of years-old or
even decades-old data.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Nope. And your CLAIM cant be proven anyway until that time
actually shows up and we can see what actually happened.

And since it was *your* example, then by extension your claim can't be
proven either.

The maximum size differential is irrelevant to what matters, $/TB.

In a business environment that can be justified, based on performance.

We arent going to see that cross over any time soon.

The performance/$ is already higher with SSD, that crossed over a long
time ago. Even if capacity/$ isn't fully matching HDD's yet, some
businesses may be looking at the performance/$ ratio and saying that the
capacity is good enough for certain performance critical apps. I'm
thinking of HPC environments like science projects (e.g. Large Hadron
Collider) that expect to see data streaming rates in the TB/s range.

Essentially because it doesn’t cost anymore to double
the density with hard drives, in fact it costs less.

That can be said for flash too. Currently flash is low-priority
semiconductors, which is produced on older process nodes, such as 45nm,
if the demand for flash increases, then they will get produced on the
newest process nodes, such as 32nm and 22nm. You can achieve huge
density doublings just by going to the latest process nodes.

Flash also has the MLC (multi-level cell) feature which allows them to
store two bits per cell currently. This is already higher than the 1 bit
per cell available on SLC (single-level cell) flash. Next generation,
this can likely be increased to 3 bits per cell, and then 4 bits, etc.
So even without a process node change, you can still achieve doublings
of capacity on flash.

You can never get around the fact that with with an SSD,
double the capacity means double the number of transistors.

See above, about MLC flash.

And I doubt too many will keep all their irreplaceable stuff like
videos of their grandkids etc on something like google exclusively.

Well, I don't see that happening yet either, as the average broadband
bandwidth isn't high enough yet, and people find it difficult to keep
storage locations straight in their minds. However, videos of grandkids
are hardly straining anyone's personal storage anymore. Again, we're
approaching a point of diminishing returns, where capacity is good
enough. Many people are finding even a 500GB drive good enough for all
of their needs. For me, it would never be enough of course, but I'm not
typical.

Not a chance, because the absolute vast bulk of
what people choose to record with their PVR wont
be available for free from operations like that.

That's not the market that the cloud storage people are after anyways.
They are after more of the Facebook-style crowd, sharing and storing
photos, maybe a few video clips, etc. Usually, they may give upto 10GB
for free on these services.

If you stretch the definition of cloud a bit, then even the PVR crowd is
accommodated somewhat by services like Netflix.

But you can clearly record a hell of a lot more than the 2 you claimed
that PVRs can only do, so there is no point in using a MUCH more
expensive and much smaller SSD for the storage on a PVR for the
alleged increased performance which you don’t actually get at all.

Well, all cable/satellite provider's PVR's I've seen so far are limited
to recording upto 2 HD or SD video streams. Whether that's a limitation
of hard disk speed, or network speed, I can't say for sure. It maybe a
network speed limitation then.

Ran them thanks. And we were discussing storage
on personal computers, not data server centers anyway.

Well, now we're talking about enterprise stuff too.

You were claiming that SSDs would take over from tape with
PERSONAL COMPUTERS. Not a chance, hard drives will be
whats used for backups and have been for a long time now.

Only a fool would use SSDs for archival storage of PERSONAL
COMPUTERS with so little experience with long term archival
storage on SSDs yet. Some might try they in ADDITION to
hard drives to see how they pan out over time.

This part has nothing to do with SSD's, we're talking about enterprises
replacing tape backup with hard drive backup instead.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Daniel Prince]

Well, all cable/satellite provider's PVR's I've seen so far are limited
to recording upto 2 HD or SD video streams.

I have a dish 722k satellite receiver with an OTA (Over The Air)
adapter. It can record two programs off the satellite feed and two
programs off the OTA adapter for a total of four.

The new Dish Hopper system has three tuners. During prime time one
of those tuners can record all four networks (ABC, CBS, FOX and
NBC). So this receiver can record up to six different programs
simultaneously.

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

Seagate probably keeps the factories going a long time, as this increases
their production capacity,

But they are one of the few that has chosen to move
production to china so its possible that they may
choose to do even more of that with the operations
they have taken over, presumably in a hard nosed
approach to wiping out the competition.

but as these factories are upgraded it probably eventually consolidates
design towards one stream of products.

Yeah, that’s what I meant in different words.