'Writing is on the wall for spinning rust': IBM joins Pure Storage in claiming disk drives will go the way of the dodo in enterprises
'Writing is on the wall for spinning rust': IBM joins Pure Storage in claiming disk drives will go the way of the dodo in enterprises
IBM wants to replace HDDs with its FlashSystem C200 storage system
You're viewing a single thread.
I generally agree, it won't take long for SSDs to be cheap enough to justify the expense. HDD is in a way similar to CD/DVD, it had it's time, it even lasted much longer than expected, but eventually technology became cheaper and the slightly cheaper price didn't make sense any more.
SSD wins on all account for live systems, and long term cold storage goes to tapes. Not a lot of reasons to keep them around.
As a person hosting my own data storage, tape is completely out of reach. The equipment to read archival tapes would cost more than my entire system. It's also got extremely high latency compared to spinning disks, which I can still use as live storage.
Unless you're a huge company, spinning disks will be the way to go for bulk storage for quite a while.
Define "quite a while"
Sure, enterprise is likely to make the switch first, but it's also likely to kick start the price reduction to consumers. So I actually don't think it's that far away. I would guess we are like 5 years away from SSDs being the significant majority of consumer storage technology by volume.
Even now, as a self hoster it's pretty reasonable to have SSDs if you are talking about single digit TB. Sure SSDs are about 2x the price, but we are talking about a difference of like 60 USD if you only need 2 TB.
Based on current trends, I'd say we might get SSDs and HDDs at the same cost per GB around 2030. That's based on prices being 12-13x higher in 2015, and around 5x higher now. SSD cost efficiencies are slowing down, but there will also be a big change in demand once the prices get close, because SSDs have other advantages people will switch as soon as it's economical.
I've currently got a 200TB storage array using enterprise HDDs (shout out to Backblaze's HDD failure rate publications), and I definitely would not have been able to afford 200TB of enterprise SSDs.
Yeah, for anything over 10TB for an individual consumer it will take time.
Well, tape is still relevant for the 3-2-1 backup rule and I worked in a pretty big hosting company where you would get out 400 tb of backup data each weekend. it's the only media allowing to have a real secured fully offline copy that won't depend on another online hosting service
If you're storing petabytes of data sure, but when a tape drive costs $8k+ (Only price I could find that wasn't "Call for quote"), and only storing less than 500TB, it's cheaper to buy hard drives.
I'm not sure how important 2 types of media is these days, I personally have all my larger data on harddrives, but with multiple off-site copies and raid redundancy. Some people count "cloud" as another type of storage, but that's just "somebody else's harddrive"