SSD Prices in a Free Fall

http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssd-prices-in-a-freefall/a/d-id/1320958

by nkurz • 11 years ago

570 328 11 years ago

networkcomputing.com

forscha• 11 years ago

Is the hdd demise indeed expected so quickly?

toomuchtodo7• 11 years ago

It appears so.

"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."

Goodnight spinning disk; you've served us well.

Retra• 11 years ago

They already seem so clunky and primitive!

notNow• 11 years ago

Time to join the ranks of his FDD and CD-ROM buddies

Keyframe• 11 years ago

And we just got 10TB spinning disks on the market! Can't wait for the price to fall down for big SSD storage!

x0x0• 11 years ago

/me does the happy dance

an ssd is the best hardware upgrade I've had in the last 5 years

Once you get used to it, try using a computer with spinning rust and it will just feel glacial

who doesn't need multi-tb ssds in their laptop?

codemac2• 11 years ago

I wouldn't count them out, just as much as disk drives were supposed to replace tape for how long now?

I bet disks will get even more dense (think 20+ TiB), have better reliability when powered off, and be sold in pallets to large companies mostly.

For the consumer market, disk drives are already pretty much dead.

StillBored• 11 years ago

I have no doubt that we will see devices that big. The question is will anyone buy them. So its really a question of cost. HD's will be dead next year if I can buy a 10TB SSD for $300.. If it costs $4000, i'm sure HD's will last another couple years.

nolok• 11 years ago

Not entreprise grade but consummer, and totally anecdotal, but I've bought a 500 GB Samsung EVO 840 SSD for less than 200€ a month ago. Given the specs (performance and capacity) of that drive and my previous experience about a year and a half ago buying a 120 GB SSD, I expected to pay maybe twice that ?

Even if the price fall slows down a bit, we're quickly getting to a point where I don't see why you would buy a SSD at home for anything other than your consummer NAS or similar. Anyone who tried a SSD surely isn't willing to go back to HDD for anything other than their "archive/storage" drive. And if this article prediction is true, soon even that will be taken by SSD.

snowwrestler• 11 years ago

SSDs need to be powered up fairly often to maintain data integrity. So, they're great for the drives in computers, but for external or backup drives--which might only be powered up occasionally, spinning magnetic disks will still be a better choice for a while, it seems.

edit: maybe not. Bringing this article up from samcheng's post below:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...

cpr• 11 years ago

Do you have a source for this? Just curious.

trose• 11 years ago

Seems pretty plausible that we could create an SSD that would power up on a timer then couldn't we? Am I missing something?

pmontra2• 11 years ago

Maybe not.

http://www.itworld.com/article/2921047/hardware/no-you-wont-...

revelation• 11 years ago

How do SSDs refresh their cells? Is that just a normal write as with DRAM?

Wonder if you can refresh SSDs without having that go towards the write counter.

jcromartie• 11 years ago

I think that we'll just see magnetic disks go away, and tapes pick up the long-term storage market. Pretty much nothing happens when you drop a box of tapes.

justin66• 11 years ago

pmontra and Bill_Dimm (edit: and cjensen!) post contradictory blogspammish articles (through no fault of their own - what else is out there?) which both reference the same JEDEC slideshow which has popped up a few times in the last few months.

This is an important enough topic that I wish a better reference existed.

vectorjohn2• 11 years ago

So what if they have to be brought up once in a while? Who cares? They use so little power, that's really not an issue to bring the drive online, even frequently.

MCRed3• 11 years ago

Think about the market dynamics. Not just the 3D technology they are talking about, which brings parity within range, imagine what you would do if you were an SSD maker and this was on the horizon.

You'd rush to reach parity because as soon as that happens there's no reason to buy an HD over an SSD. So you're going to want to cut prices as fast as possible so that when the market switches over-- which will be a HUGE tipping point for the industry-- you can get as much market share as you can. Even taking a loss now on a reliable drive may get you customers for life who you can profit from later.

I think the transition is going to be extremely dramatic and it's a huge opportunity in this industry. I think we'll be seeing HD makers switching over their product lines to have more and more flash, and more and more flash drives, while re-positioning hard drives to very particular environments where they have an advantage (I'm not sure where these are)

But this is going to be a tornado of a market and some people are going to be come very rich as a result.

hbbio• 11 years ago

In a side-note in the article, the author mentions that Amazon Glacier runs on tape. Although I'm not sure Amazon officially explained the technology, I heard (and read on Wikipedia) that they store data on conventional HDDs, that are however kept "offline".

Has anyone here some more knowledge about that?

_dark_matter_• 11 years ago

Yes please. I was also intrigued by this statement. I was under the impression that Amazon never told what the "secret sauce" was behind Glacier. Looking at Wikipedia now, it seems there are still multiple contending theories.

Also, is it true that the service is not very popular? Are people here using it or similar?

takasc2• 11 years ago

Everyone knows it is not very popular - the limitations are extreme so you have to have a very specific use case for it.

JimmaDaRustla3• 11 years ago

I'm using it for incremental backups of my photo collection. If I ever need to restore my entire collection, its available on S3/Glacier.

kstrauser• 11 years ago

My home Synology unit does nightly backups to Glacier. It'd be terrible to lose our house to natural disaster, but losing all our digital data (photos, records, etc.) would make it just that much worse. For about $10 a month, I know I can recover all that stuff even if we lose everything else.

teraflop2• 11 years ago

The big sticking point with Glacier is that the cost model for retrievals is complicated and unintuitive. There's a two-step process where you have to first retrieve data and then download it, and you're billed based on the peak retrieval rate in a month, not the total amount downloaded. It's not so bad now that they let you set a retrieval policy to limit your throughput, but before that, you had to carefully schedule your retrievals in order to avoid unexpected costs.

As far as I can tell, Google's new nearline storage offering is superior to Glacier in nearly every way. The retrieval is much faster, and the retrieval costs are a flat rate per gigabyte that's equal to what Glacier gives you in the best case. Only drawback is the lack of a free tier.

bglusman• 11 years ago

It was never confirmed, but I recall this[1] article making a pretty persuasive case Glacier was using optical disks.

[1]https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd...

JimmaDaRustla3• 11 years ago

I'm probably explaining something most everyone here already knows, but:

I don't know what Glacier uses, but the "offline" storage is much the same how mainframes use tape - disk based files (datasets in mainframe speak) are migrated to tape after a given amount of time to decrease storage costs. These datasets needs to be recalled back to disk to be used again. This is nearly identical to how Glacier operates with S3 as explained by Amazon.

The reason tape isn't available immediately is because the tape drive, unlike a traditional harddrive, doesn't contain a reader. So multiple tapes typically sit in machines with only only a few readers that move back and forth based on requests made to read the tapes. If there are many requests, the amount of time to recall a dataset increases.

Glacier may or may not be using tape, but the behavior is nearly identical to how tape has been used in past systems.

Someone3• 11 years ago

You're referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_storage_managem.... AFAIK, most systems work at the file level, but if you address space is large enough, you could implement this as a virtual memory system that swaps RAM to disk, disk to slower disk, slower disk to tape, tapes to tapes stored offline, etc.

I don't know what Amazon uses, either, but I expect Glacier data to be pushed out to some layer that doesn't need power while idle at all, heavily checksummed and also replicated across the globe. The relatively heavy prices tag for accessing it probably is there to keep contention on some relatively thin pipe low. For example, if they use blue ray, they may have only a few readers online for every 100 or 1000 customers, both to keep prices low and to differentiate Glacier more from their other products.

stephenjudkins2• 11 years ago

Here's one theory: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... and here's the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647571

Facebook uses Blu-ray discs with a robotic storage system for its cold storage: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/it-networks/robot-digs-thr...

agumonkey2• 11 years ago

It would be nice if Facebook released some stats, kinda like backblaze, about blu-ray durability.

discodave2• 11 years ago

Pretty sure Amazon said publicly that they are not using tape for Glacier, I can't find the source except this second hand one:

https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd...

SixSigma• 11 years ago

Tape is guaranteed for 10 years without data loss

wmf3• 11 years ago

Yet Google is using RAID-4 for their tape backups.

arca_vorago• 11 years ago

I think a lot of people may have confused Google's tape storage systems for Amazon's. I don't think Amazon is using tape, but the big G most definitely is:

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/images/_300...

ghaff• 11 years ago

Nothing authoritative. The links down-thread are almost all Robin Harris speculating about what it might be based on using various back of the envelope calculations. I'm actually pretty amazed that Amazon has been able to keep even minimal details off the web as far as I can tell.

The closest I've seen to a direct statement from Amazon is: " An Amazon statement sent to Ars says only that "Glacier is built from inexpensive commodity hardware components," and is "designed to be hardware-agnostic, so that savings can be captured as Amazon continues to drive down infrastructure costs."" http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/for-on...

FWIW, Google's competitive Nearline service almost certainly uses disks:

The difference between Google’s Standard Storage and Nearline Storage slices on its public cloud comes down to a software layer, Tom Kershaw, director of product management for Google Cloud Platform, tells The Platform. We also think there might possibly be extra physical distance between the devices hosting the Nearline Storage and servers residing in the Google datacenters and network links that expose Cloud Platform services to the outside Internet. The Nearline Storage could also be running on slightly older equipment that is heavier on the disk drives but that is not beyond its technical or economic life.

http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/16/why-the-coldest-storag...

wmf3• 11 years ago

The article predicts that SSD prices will fall from 30c/GB to under 5c/GB in 18 months. This seems like a case of citation needed.

STRiDEX• 11 years ago

Can you cite predictions?

maaku• 11 years ago

Yes, they're called reasons.

lappa• 11 years ago

You can cite industry improvements in the manufacturing process that companies say will effect the price at a certain point along with scientific developments and in general claims made by actual corporations.

BinaryIdiot2• 11 years ago

I mean you can cite predictions but unless there is trend data to back them up I'm not exactly sure how useful they are.

I think wmf is looking for citations of things like trend data and maybe even plans from SSD manufacturers that shows "hey we're working on this cool tech that should help us lower costs by next year!" types of things.

NeutronBoy2• 11 years ago

Predictions are guesses with facts to back them up.

Turbo_hedgehog• 11 years ago

Is keeping a SSD powered on enough to prevent bit rot?

MCRed3• 11 years ago

It should have no impact. It really is about write capacity. The little cells can only handle being changed so many times before they wear out. The wearing is a chemical/semi-conductor type problem.

It's not like DRAM where keeping power applied keeps the cells "fresh" (and in DRAM it's done literally be refreshing each cell at a certain frequency.)

The simple equation is the more times a cell is erased the sooner it fails. Write leveling and other software efforts work to spread around or eliminate unnecessary writes.

But over the practical life of a drive (5-10 years?) being powered off will not cause them to lose data.

Edit: I've been following FLASH technology since before the terms "FLASH" was coined, back when it was called EEPROM -- Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory, an evolution of PROMs (write once) and ERPOMS (erasable with UV light). If there's a myth out there that flash drives just forget things, I'd like to point out that I've had flash drives (low quality at that) from the 1990s that were left for 20 years and then read successfully! Show some citations of real evidence before you down vote me.

cjensen4• 11 years ago

That's incorrect. Charge leaks very slowly out of cells. It's not a big issue, but it does happen. Powered-on SSD firmware knows about the problem and will maintain the cells.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...

pgeorgi• 11 years ago

flash drives (low quality at that) from the 1990s

90s flash is more likely NOR, which doesn't suffer some of the failure modes of NAND.

As for NAND, micron would probably not discuss rumors about their technology as fact: https://www.micron.com/~/media/Documents/Products/Presentati... (read disturb on page 19, data retention on page 21)

bifrost2• 11 years ago

No need to power or refresh, but if you have a cruddy SSD you should keep other backups.

ChrisLomont• 11 years ago

SSDs should suffer the same bit-rot other flash does.

JEDEC specs require that a drive that has used 10% of its rewrite capacity it should hold the data for at least 10 years, and this decreases to when a drive has used 100% of its rewrite capacity it should hold the data for at least one year. So to meet specs a consumer drive should fall in between these timeframes. However, cheaper drives may well not completely meet this spec; this is common for many other manufacturing processes.

The bit rot also depends on many other factors, the most important being temperature (you cannot outwit statistical mechanics). The next one is a combination of hot neutrons causing bit flips from impurities in the material and from cosmic rays, the latter of which can be reduced by choosing better storage locations.

Better controllers could understand the decay modes and read and rewrite data to maximize expected lifetime, so power is needed for maximal expected lifetime.

In practice, all of this is not of much use to everyday people [1]. But if you want to maximize your data retention, study all these issues.

Here's a case the authors claim bit rot happened in three months offline [2].

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-...

[2] http://www.maximumpc.com/jedec-your-ssd-needs-power-source-a...

throwaway77672• 11 years ago

No need to power or refresh, but if you have a cruddy SSD you should keep other backups.

No need to power or refresh, but if you have data you value you should keep backups.

Seriously, no matter where you are keeping your data, if you don't have a completely independent copy somewhere, you will lose it some day.

pkaye• 11 years ago

It should be enough because the SSD will schedule a periodic "fsck" equivalent and check for degraded bits to repair.

bifrost2• 11 years ago

SSD technology still has a reliability hurdle, you can nuke one in a month if you write to it constantly. Spinning media has much longer read/write durability. Until there is parity its still a bit of an arms race for capacity.

Hybrid drives are pretty awful so I don't think they'll stick around. I could see Hierarchical Storage Management make a comeback and an entry to the consumer space, but thats been esoteric at best.

toomuchtodo7• 11 years ago

False.

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

cjensen4• 11 years ago

True, and I've done it! I accidentally used a consumer grade (Crucial M500) in an application where endurance would be reached in less than a month.

In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-fail.

Edit: Burning up an SSD was how I learned that TRIM is unnecessary: even though many parts of the filesystem were stable and never re-written, the bandwidth was even across the entire drive. The firmware noticed that some cells were underused and moved the stable data off them so it could use up the endurance evenly.

wpietri• 11 years ago

Do they? The article specifically says otherwise and links to this:

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/netap...

It also mentions that the 3D NAND process dramatically improves matters over previous tech.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's weird that you don't acknowledge that the article addresses your point.

cjensen4• 11 years ago

While you are correct that you can nuke a normal SSD in a month, you can buy high-endurance drives which will last much longer. For example, you can buy a p400m with 7.5PB of write endurance [1]. It's just a question of making sure you buy a part that matches your need.

If you're writing more than 7.5PB in a month... I'm prepared to be amazed :-)

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/p400m-ssd-enterprise,342...

Freaky• 11 years ago

Endurance is really not a concern for the vast majority of consumers. The media wearout indicator on my 19-month old cheap TLC drive has dropped 2%, and I'm a fairly heavy user.

The vast majority of SSD failures seem to be a result of firmware faults.

moonbug• 11 years ago

https://www.nimblestorage.com make what's essentially a flash+disk hybrid HSM-in-a-box. They're very nice, from experience.

MCRed3• 11 years ago

I can't wait. Once I can reasonably replace everything with SSDs I will.

And then I'll never buy spinning rust again.

I dreamed of this eventuality in the 1990s. I didn't know what technology would be used. I never expected EEPROMs would evolve in this direction (now marketed as "FLASH") as they were so fickle and unreliable in those days.

This will allow lots of interesting things.

Imagine a laptop that's got its main RAM backed on a dedicated bit of high speed flash... so it instantly powers off completely and instantly powers back on completely.

Soon, we'll have the massive increase in storage capacity much like we've had a massive increase in compute capacity to the point where you no longer really think about it-- all computers are "fast".

awwducks• 11 years ago

Seems like a prime case for using a (bar/line/etc) graph to show the trend. I'm strangely disappointed in not seeing one.

antome• 11 years ago

That's because SSDs are still 10x the price of HDDs, have little more than halved in price the past year, and they're talking out the ass.

discardorama2• 11 years ago

Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350

Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40

Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity.

In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.

philjohn2• 11 years ago

The author commented that they've seen a 50% drop in price over the last 8 months (from 20x HDD to 10x HDD), so it's not outside the realms of probability with the increased yields of 3D NAND.

discardorama2• 11 years ago

I doubt the 50% figure.

Just as a test: I looked at the price history for a random 256GB SSD (from Crucial). The highest price in the last year? $115. The current price? $99. Not nearly a 50% drop.

Link: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-C...

mrfusion• 11 years ago

Prices get weird on Amazon. Maybe newegg would yield a better comparison. Also maybe that HDD and that SSD aren't the same level of quality?

adventured2• 11 years ago

It's essentially accurate.

For example on Newegg a vanilla 7200 HD from Western Digital, at 1tb, will run you $50. The lowest cost 1tb SSD will run in the mid $300s. A solid 7x difference.

In less than two years we'll see consumer retail 1tb SSDs for $150 to $200. What's actually going to happen, more than a violent price plunge pushing 1tb down to $50, is capacity will soar while prices fall more reasonably than the article indicates. So you'll be buying 5tb SSDs for $300 in three or four years. The difference is the friction the SSD makers will insert into the market, when it comes to falling prices; ie the difference between what they could sell them at, and what they actually will sell them at. The race will be to higher capacities first, then as capacity saturation nears, the bottom will fall out of lower SSD storage tiers on pricing.

theandrewbailey3• 11 years ago

Even if you factor in the performance difference, the cost still doesn't quite work out. On average, I don't think they are ~9x faster (more like 5x). Sure, SSDs max out disk interface speed and effectively have no seek time, but there are few workloads that are heavy on 4k random I/O (like booting and copying small files).

AlisdairO• 11 years ago

Really? For myself and everyone else I've talked to, using an SSD was by far the largest upgrade they've applied to their home computer for many years.

mschwaig• 11 years ago

As a desktop user tasks like booting and copying small files make a hell of a difference for the perceived speed of a system, because they feel like they should be fast. This is where SSDs shine. On the other hand, most tasks that involve sequential I/O with bigger files are expected to take some time. Have you ever tried unzipping eclipse on different systems?

gwern• 11 years ago

And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper

Don't be sure about that. Remember that the Thai floods setback HDD prices and made them more expensive for years; they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked. With SSDs dropping, that might deter much more investment into HDDs (and with less demand from HDDs in the first place, there will be fewer of the economies of scale & learning curves that drove previous HDD price decreases - and vice versa for SSDs!).

theandrewbailey3• 11 years ago

they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked.

They have. I remember buying 2TB drives a year before (2010). I paid about $200 each. Last year (2014), I bought 4TB drives for $130 each. That's about 3x improvement over 4 years, right?

rgbrenner2• 11 years ago

backblaze (who uses desktop hdds) says they paid $0.044/gb in sept 2011: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-a...

Today on newegg it's about $0.03/gb.

white-flame• 11 years ago

Let's look at the sweet spots, because that's really what many people will buy:

  Best $/GB HDD on pricewatch.com: $0.024/GB for 2TB at $48.95
  Best $/GB SSD on pricewatch.com: $0.387/GB for 240GB at $92.95

That's a 16x price increase, not 10x.

samstave2• 11 years ago

Yeah, 240SSD for <$100 is great! while I cant stand the case and build quality of my System 76 machine - the guts are the best bang for the buck.

The fact that it can take two internal drives (both SSD) is awesome - so having dual 240GB drives allows for plenty of space.

I have a 1TB external that I glacerize my other stuff to.

Also, get a Flickr account which can host your 1TB of pics for free (money for nothin')... and you wont consume space on your local box with pics.

slg• 11 years ago

I wonder if those sell simply because of their positions in the market. Is the average consumer knowledgeable to know whether they need 240 GB, 2 TB, or 6 TB? Or do they simply compare prices and sizes and choose whatever they think is the best value? A 2 TB drive might just be another example of the 2nd cheapest wine trick?

yohui• 11 years ago

That's not the best Price/GB ratio for an SSD. And unlike the SSD, the HDD on Pricewatch is a generic white label drive.

For example, this 240GB OCZ ARC 100 is $70 ($0.292/GB) after promo code and mail-in rebate:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682022...

Or not counting mail-in rebates, this 480GB PNY CS111 is $152 ($0.317/GB):

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00TIJMEV2/

Found via PCPartPicker: https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-drive/

jegutman2• 11 years ago

Ah zeno's paradox. When the SSD matches the HDD price, in 28.5 months, the HDD will have moved, and so on and so on. Although at some point they'll probably just make many many fewer HDDs so the price will stop moving much.

For any storage experts, will HDD still be preferable for long-term cold storage or are those even currently an unacceptable solution? Seems like cold storage might end up being more important over time. I guess AWS Glacier is <$1 per TB per month which is pretty cheap and can presumably even fall over time. I have no idea what the reliability of these services is though.

otisfunkmeyer• 11 years ago

if im not mistaken, amazon glacier is $10 per TB per month at 0.01 per GB per month stated price. please correct me if something has changed!

kibibu• 11 years ago

Although at some point they'll probably just make many many fewer HDDs so the price will stop moving much

At this point prices will go up again.

dzhiurgis• 11 years ago

Perhaps this is too simplistic, but I think it should be cheaper to build solid-state chip than mechanical device.

But this also reminds me LCD / CRT wars. LCDs were promised to be cheaper, but it took years to amortize the setup costs, but we got there eventually.

dean• 11 years ago

Cheapest new 250 GB HDD on NewEgg: $34.95

Cheapest new 256 GB SSD on NewEgg: $82.99

digikata• 11 years ago

It's more interesting to me to compare cost/GB on the most frequently shipped or bought capacity for each media. At 250GB, the SSD is at close to (or maybe just ahead of) the most common size. 250GB HDDs are basically close to EOL which I imagine can skew the 'sweet spot' price up or down depending on the situation. Under that definition, SSD sweet spots are probably 128 or 256GB, and HDD is probably 1TB or 2TB?

fencepost5• 11 years ago

The cheapest 250GB HDD isn't really a good measure - twice the capacity is what, $3-4 more?

mark-r2• 11 years ago

But is the 250 GB HDD still in production? I'm guessing that's a fire sale price. I don't think drives still in production ever go below $50.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

Yup, pretty much. The only bit of news is that SSDs can achieve hard drive densities with 3D NAND, but like the early calls for the demise of all lighting other than LED. That was 10 years ago, its getting closer now. I'm putting in LED can lights in my living room for example. So at some point ...

toomuchtodo7• 11 years ago

To your LED point, I'm unaware of anyone not putting LED if cost of electricity or labor is of any importance.

Consumers may not have gotten the message yet, but anyone running the numbers is going LED or nothing at all (small exceptions for grow operations or theater lightening).

brownbat• 11 years ago

Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has shifted.

I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or Netflix "stores" my movies.

When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all my needs (thanks to changes in internet services).

Sure, it won't be true for everyone. (Editing TIFFs for GIS anyone?) I don't run a Chromebook, but its philosophy is not completely insane for a reason...

It's like storage has differentiated into at least two separate purposes. Main system drive for consumer PCs, formerly an HDD only component, is feasibly replaced by SSDs. At the sizes needed for that, the difference in price per GB is already under a factor of two.[1]

[1] Caviar Blue 80GB @ $0.375/GB; MyDigitalSSD 64GB @ $0.578; Kingston 90GB @ $0.658/GB... https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-drive/#sort=a7&...

pyrocat• 11 years ago

I agree to a large extent but I think 80GB is an extreme on the low end. Many modern games (especially MMOs) are 20GB+. Windows 7 alone requires a huge amount of storage. I have a 120GB partition at home (just for OS+programs, not data) and I'm constantly uninstalling steam games in order to install others. If you want a modicum of breathing room, I'd say minimum 200GB.

Amezarak5• 11 years ago

I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or Netflix "stores" my movies.

How sustainable is this for the average consumer with most national ISPs moving towards bandwidth caps?

I had to switch to business service because Netflix alone was blowing through the data cap - in fact it was blowing through even the data cap they had for their top tier consumer service.

fencepost5• 11 years ago

Keep in mind that SSD performance tends to degrade as the drive approaches full utilization - even if the actual internal capacity includes margin, you're probably best off avoiding approaching the available capacity. Heck, for the 250GB SSD I put in my primary laptop this past spring I intentionally formatted it to ~80% of the available capacity - that gives me plenty of space (~100GB free after all software & data) but even if I end up with things chewing that capacity I should keep good performance due to the available space for the drive's own data shuffling.

Perhaps 8.1 and Windows 10 are better about what they save, but going with anything less than 128 for Windows + apps + data seems risky to me.

rodgerd4• 11 years ago

When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all my needs (thanks to changes in internet services).

You seem like a very atypical use case. You can't be playing any of the modern AAA games, for example.

dghughes• 11 years ago

I think you should have put "my games" and "my music".

Tepix• 11 years ago

No Star Citizen for you (it's estimated to be 100GB in size - and yes, you want to store it on SSD because the load times are quite high even with SSD).

mcv2• 11 years ago

I still prefer to have stuff locally when I can. My Macbook currently has a 120 GB SSD, and I'd love to replace it with a TB.

rbanffy2• 11 years ago

I got myself a cheap Acer with 32 gigs of eMMC storage. I removed Windows 8, its restore partition (that took 10 gigs all by itself) and installed Ubuntu. It's not as fast as the "serious" laptop, but it's light, silent, has decent battery life and I won't be devastated if a truck rolls over my backpack. I mean, if I don't have it on my back, that is.

For Python/Django/Twisted development in a couple LXD containers, it's the just right amount of computing power at an incredibly low price.

duaneb• 11 years ago

The gap narrows exponentially with each order of magnitude drop in price. Under 256 gigs you'd be hard-pressed to need a hdd over a ssd.

WalterBright2• 11 years ago

My need for SSD is rather modest. I have an SSD big enough for the OS and things I use often, and a huge spinning secondary drive for things I rarely access.

mark-r2• 11 years ago

That's a good pattern, one I use too. But that's not what the article was about - it was making the case that SSD would soon reach similar capacities as spinning HDs, and at similar prices. I'm skeptical too.

I believe we are already at the point where SSDs are large enough and cheap enough for the majority of use cases. It's only going to get better. There has always seemed to be a price floor for hard disks, where making them smaller doesn't make them any cheaper, and I'm wondering if the floor won't be lower for SSD.

bcheung2• 11 years ago

Exactly. And how long until it achieves parity in the cloud hosting world. Hard drives and memory are so expensive you can buy they outright every other month it seems like.

jldugger2• 11 years ago

Data! http://www.jcmit.com/flash2015.htm

You can see there's about a 10x difference between the two on the logarithmic scale chart. The trend is slightly faster for SSD, but a quick straightedge-on-monitor projection suggests the intercept is closer to 2015, if ever.

ghshephard5• 11 years ago

Is that a typo? Did you mean "2025" (i.e. 10 years out?) - I looked at the graph, and that's what it looked like to me based on historical projections.

The author, Jim O'Reilly, is not basing his article on historical analysis, but on an understanding of the impact of 3D NAND + his communication with the major flash providers - some of whom are committing to 8 TB and 16 TB SSD drives in the next 18 months. That, in conjunction with massively more efficient utilization of existing Fabs (both by dropping back a few process generations to increase Yield, plus stacking the NANDs in the Z direction) is going to create a huge disruption in the next 18 months.

Now - the question up for debate - does this disruption result in lower prices, does it result in large and expensive drives, or are the Fabs supply constrained such that they will be able to serve new markets, but not have sufficient capacity to drive down prices on high volume?

Regardless - 2015/2016 are going to be huge years for SSD storage.

TimSchumann• 11 years ago

I'd bet it's something more like a 5x increase in capacity for a 50% reduction in cost over the next year.

Doesn't sound as crazy when you think about it in that way.

bjd23852• 11 years ago

I bought a $50 1TB HDD from Newegg for my gaming desktop (which I of course do not use for gaming) about 6 months ago. I've looked again and they're the same price. It appears SSDs are still hundreds of dollars for the same capacity. I won't be buying an SSD until they're under $100/Tb.

lukeschlather• 11 years ago

When you factor in depreciation, 1TB of HDD is conservatively worth half of what 1TB of SSD is worth.

And judging from the reliability figures I'm hearing, it's more like a 1/10 multiplier and SSDs already outpace HDDs in value.

Ecio78• 11 years ago

for an HP 3PAR Enterprise storage 2TB 7.2k SAS NL: list price 2.300€, discounted about 850€ 1.95TB SSD: list price 12k€

(sources: HP partner quote for the SAS disk, quick textchat with friend in HP for SSD)

benjaminjackman• 11 years ago

Why would prices follow Moore's law rather than the laws of supply and demand? If all of a sudden there is an immense supply of drives whose performance and capacity themselves don't follow Moore's law then prices certainly wouldn't either.

If suppliers can deliver hard drives that follow some cube version of Moore's law (temporarily, long term everything seems to S-Curve IMHO), then prices will fall dramatically, even in a time frame less than 5 years.

Are spinnies horse drawn carriages, and Solid States the start of different, new, less mechanically restricted jet age? I think we all know that answer to that question -- maaaybe ;)

pedrorijo91• 11 years ago

Who besides Apple is 'forcing' users to use SSD? Even most of so called 'Ultrabooks' use HDD in order to become cheaper.

If almost no one understands the performance and reliability difference a SSD can give, and almost no one 'enforces' users to buy SSD, how is this technology become cheaper in a so fast rate?

frandroid• 11 years ago

Fabrication improvements.

ycken• 11 years ago

Quick search says the Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $99

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Notebook-2-5-Inch-Internal-PH2...

Expecting 60% drop is not that crazy.

bwy• 11 years ago

I find great irony in statements like these when the motivation of every party is considered. The idea is that prices are "in a free fall," i.e., they haven't fallen completely yet. But this will encourage people to buy SSDs and drive them in the very free fall of which the article speaks!

Experienced the same principle in my life a few weeks ago - I moved to a place described as "gentrifying." Realized a week into staying there that I was one of those people who was actually contributing to its gentrification! By no means was it gentrified, though.

kenjackson• 11 years ago

At least you were told it was "gentrifying", not that it was "gentrified". You probably got a discount for moving into a neighborhood that was gentrifying. Once gentrified, the discount probably largely disappears.

monksy• 11 years ago

Could someone explain the 3d storage innovation to me?

Wouldn't stacking flash cells like that be susceptible to interference? (Heat/magnetic or electrical noise?)

Symmetry2• 11 years ago

Not really. The charges and currents in a flash chip don't interfere with each other for the same reasons that they don't in any other chip. There's a minimum distance you have to keep things apart but luckily it gets smaller every process node. Heat would be a problem if it was like a processor but you're generally only reading from or writing to one part of the chip at a time so heat isn't a particular concern compared to a processor or DRAM.

unfasten• 11 years ago

Anandtech has some good 3D NAND info. I'm not positive they answer your specific question, but hopefully it's helpful.

Here are the two articles I remember:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb... (goes on for a few pages after this one)

http://anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/3 (This is mostly about how 3D NAND benefits TLC)

rhino369• 11 years ago

Yes it's very susceptible to interference though coupling of the charge on on the floating gate of the cell and through voltage differentials on the interconnect lines during reading and writing.

But 2D NAND storage essentially hit the peak density. The gate is only a few atoms across.

The only way to increase density to build up. They had to go back to larger transistor sizes because of all the interference. IIRC from 15-16nm to about 60nm.

ryanmarsh• 11 years ago

So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level?

simlevesque• 11 years ago

The iPhone storage is eMMC, not SSD.

ansible• 11 years ago

While they don't use the exact same chips, they are both based on the same NAND Flash storage technology.

On a per-GB basis, I'd expect the prices for SSDs and eMMC to track for the foreseeable future.

Teckla• 11 years ago

So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level?

Not to mention the iPad.

The original iPad came out over 5 years ago with 16 GB of storage. Entry level iPads still have 16 GB of storage.

Given that iOS has gotten bigger and retina iPads made a lot of apps bigger, entry level iPad storage has actually regressed considerably.

Pretty confusing, given that flash prices have gone down considerably in 5 years.

I guess you don't bank $200 billion by being generous to your customers.

keithly• 11 years ago

They want to push customers to use iCloud for data storage.

curun1r• 11 years ago

Complaining about overpriced/limited storage options in the iPad/iPhone is like complaining about overpriced/limited food options at a sporting event, airport or any other venue where you've got no other option than to buy from an approved vendor.

With lock-in comes higher prices.

TorKlingberg• 11 years ago

Are there any estimates of the proportion of iPhone and iPads sold that are 16 GB? I would guess it's more than 50%.

smartician• 11 years ago

Not to mention the crazy price structure of MacBook Pros. The 13 inch model with a 128GB SSD is $1299, but if you want 256GB, you have to shell out $200 more. I don't think this price difference is justified just by SSD prices. Is this just Apple being stubborn with their price marketing? Is it to preserve the perceived resale value?

j1e• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

WildUtah• 11 years ago

Apple's storage pricing model would be unsustainable in a competitive environment. Entry level products with 16GB exist solely to establish a 'free' subsidized level while practical use requires a US$750 64GB model.

Ordinarily Samsung and Moto would make a phone of similar quality and charge the market rate of $8 for the 64GB upgrade to undercut Apple.

Unfortunately it's not a competitive market. Apple's 2013 iPhone 5S still has lower power use and more processing power the current Samsung phones because Apple invested in chip design and shipped an AArch64 chip Samsung can't match even with two years (1.33 Moore's Law cycles) of process upgrades and access to Apple's tapeouts.

Apple's screen process is still brighter with more faithful colors. Apple's case design is still more fashionable (even though I don't like the latest ones, they look slick). Apple's net software and services like maps and backup are catching up to Google and ahead of M'soft or anyone else. Apple still has better control over power consumption and background processing in its OS. Apple's user experience is still clearly better and easier than Samsung or Google.

A lot of that is Google losing interest in Motorola, the Nexus brand, and Android. The Nexus 5 was the last inexpensive high quality pure Android effort and it wasn't profitable. Motorola wasn't worth keeping. Android is good enough to keep Apple and Microsoft from squeezing Google off the net and that's all Google needs. Google hasn't even updated Android to take advantage of AArch64 which cripples all the Android phone makers against Apple.

Ultimately, Google knows that they can't compete against Apple because carriers have contempt for quality. No other maker but Apple has loyal and lucrative customers that will switch carriers to keep using Apple devices. Thus no other manufacturer has leverage to get the best quality devices it can make to users. Carriers want your phone crippled because they dream of controlling you and governments hand them monopolies so they can control your device maker.

The result is that only Apple can make a top flight device. And therefore they can use monopoly price discrimination tactics to bleed extra money from you for 64GB.

It beats the alternative which is carriers ruining all devices including Apple. I like Apple robbing me a lot more than AT&T or Telcel or Softbank or NT&T or China Mobile or Verizon.

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry level?

Apple's current entry level product, the iPhone 5C, ships with 8GB.

I have one. It's a little bit of a squeeze, but iOS 9 will alleviate that.

peter303• 11 years ago

HP is working on a memrister based SSD with density of Flash and the speed of transistors http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine....

ad_hominem• 11 years ago

I believe they killed that off

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machi...

qzcx• 11 years ago

Not killed off so much as delayed due to lack of ability to mass produce at a decent price point so far. It is far from scrapped. It was over hyped and optimistic to begin with. It just hit the reality that it has several decades of work to catch up on to be on the same page as current tech.

jerf• 11 years ago

While memristors may eventually become an important part of a balanced electrical component diet, I'd say the hype has failed to pan out. Don't hold your breath. Even if it does eventually manifest, it's going to take longer than you can hold your breath.

jlarocco• 11 years ago

Haven't various companies been hyping memristers for years now?

Sounds cool, but I'll believe it when I see it.

timboslice2• 11 years ago

I believe the original idea for a memristor came about in 1971 [1]. We still have yet to see it in a physical consumer product. I'm with you - sounds great, but I'll believe it when I see it.

http://www.ufpi.br/subsiteFiles/zurita/arquivos/files/Memris...

yuhong2• 11 years ago

What I am really interested is when SSDs will be cheap enough to be in common OEM systems.

rorykoehler5• 11 years ago

Having had a failure rate above what I was used to with hdds I'd prefer to see an increase in quality rather than a fall in price. It gets annoying having to replace my os ssd every 18 months or so. My most recent phone's memory also died after 30 months.

potato• 11 years ago

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.

rorykoehler5• 11 years ago

I seem to remember SSD manufacturers rolling out similar perks in their marketing spiel years ago. It would be great if this is for real. The drives I have had issues with have been high write drives and I knew they wouldn't last for ever but they lasted an incredibly short time even when taking this into consideration.

pixl97• 11 years ago

Uh, what kind of SSDs are you buying that you're having that kind of failure rate (god please don't say OCZ). I've been using Samsung and Intel SSDs for years now with failure rates below the failure rates of WD drives (and well below Seagate failure rates).

rorykoehler5• 11 years ago

SanDisk . They have always been quick to replace them. The last one they even upgraded to a much more expensive model which makes me think the issue was being widely experienced. If I were to buy today I would buy Samsung as I have heard they are much more durable. Incidentally it was a Samsung phone that died though I don't know who made the memory for that.

rodgerd4• 11 years ago

I've been using Samsung

Don't upgrade the firmware.

abandonliberty2• 11 years ago

I wonder how reliability is doing; Unlike HDDs SSDs have a very unpredictable failure pattern, including sudden death rather than slow degradation.

If you want to ensure data is safe you need to run a raid 1 or online backup service.

mcv2• 11 years ago

Are you saying HDDs can't suffer a sudden death? HD crashes aren't exactly unheard of.

abandonliberty2• 11 years ago

Mechanical failures account for about 60% of all drive failures.[2] While the eventual failure may be catastrophic, most mechanical failures result from gradual wear and there are usually certain indications that failure is imminent. These may include increased heat output, increased noise level, problems with reading and writing of data, or an increase in the number of damaged disk sectors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background

kylorhall• 11 years ago

I bought my 180GB SSDs for < 50 cents per GB like 3 years ago and it's barely better than that right now. Storage in general has more to do with availability and demand than technology, there's plenty of times when they've gone up in price.

bobbles• 11 years ago

For me it's like the osbourne effect coming into play.. I would like to switch to full SSD, but I'm not going to do it until the price drops, which if enough people had the same idea, means the demand drops, so the price stays the same... repeat

fencepost5• 11 years ago

I can't comprehend trusting data to a (single) 30TB SSD or even 10TB SSDs given the regularly reported failure modes of "It's not a drive anymore."

Perhaps it's because I'm not doing anything where massive storage is a requirement, but having data striped in RAID6 makes me happy. I'd be happy to use SSD for the underlying medium, but I want something that's less prone to single points of failure. Backups are all well and good, but what's the interface speed of a drive like that? How long to restore a 20+TB backup?

mmebane• 11 years ago

At least with SSDs, there's much less worry about your RAID 5/6 array self-destructing while it's failing over to a hot spare. With hard drives of that size, I'd only feel comfortable with full mirroring.

simplexion4• 11 years ago

Who in their right mind still uses RAID5 with spinning disks in a production system? That is like not wearing a seatbelt and driving above speed limits constantly.

bcheung2• 11 years ago

I surprised they didn't include any graphs. I'm very curious to see the trends visually.

Prices per GB are still very far off. It's hard to believe they will achieve parity that soon. Here's hoping though.

robocat• 11 years ago

Fab manufacturing capacity doesn't magically increase because of 3D chips.

sneak3• 11 years ago

This article makes a previously unasserted claim that Glacier uses tape. Is this accurate? What is the source?

tammer• 11 years ago

It's often assumed that Amazon uses tape for glacier but that's actually unfounded. Amazon's keeping the details of glacier as a trade secret[1]

[1] http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdx...

mirimir3• 11 years ago

Consumer SDDs are now inexpensive enough for desktop RAID. On Amazon, decent consumer 240GB-1TB SDDs are available at $0.32-$0.40 per GB. And in my experience, SSDs are so fast that even RAID6 arrays rebuild very quickly after replacing a member. I use Linux software RAID.

ghshephard5• 11 years ago

I find it surprising that most people aren't recognizing that SSDs don't even need to come close to price parity to completely replace hard drives. Random access alone makes them so much more valuable, and a good SSD is now worth more than extra memory in terms of increasing the performance of a computer system.

ksec• 11 years ago

They are talking as if 3D NAND is free. The maximum of 64 layers is not yet production ready AFAIK. Even the 32 is too expensive, we are talking about 8 or 16 layers coming soon , which when you include two nodes step back you are talking about 2x to 4x improvement. 3D NAND isn't free to manufacture either. When you add up the cost, 3D NAND will be no more then a continuation of SSD falling prices according to its current tends in the coming years.

P.S - It just means it will prolongs the life of NAND and SSD will continue to get faster, higher capacity and cheaper before hitting its limits.

mirimir3• 11 years ago

Total cost of ownership is another issue:

Also, with much lower power use, there is a TCO saving to be added to the equation. Power savings work out at around $8/drive-year, so add another $40 to the 5-year TCO balance and the hard-drive doesn't look so good.

And I wonder if Mr. O'Reilly has included the cost of power for cooling.

markhahn• 11 years ago

Flash has had a drop in price because it gained mainstream utility, and therefore serious volume production. It's entirely unclear whether this will continue.

The physics of flash cells is not all that promising: there's certainly no Moore's gravy-train. 3D is a decent tweak, but it's not like 4D is coming next. As flash cells shrink, they become flakier (which might not hurt drive-writes-per-day, but is that the right metric?)

pacquiao882• 11 years ago

They are just getting rid of stock before NVMe M.2 SSD's go mainstream with 10x performance and lower production costs compared to AHCI SATA3 SSD's.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_h...

tuzemec• 11 years ago

Also the noise of the HDDs is killing me. I have quite a silent rig (fiddling with music/audio in my spare time) and the most noisy thing was the HDD where my audio samples were. So I've moved everything to SSD and I'm looking for another 512GB to add.

adibchoudhury• 11 years ago

These estimates seem a bit exaggerated at this point. SSD is still lagging in terms of capacity, and in my household we only have a handful of devices using SSD. While it's become more widely-adopted for sure, HDD's are not "doomed" until SSD capacity goes up and prices plummet. Still too expensive for an SSD.

SSD Prices in a Free Fall

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