2015 was the beginning of the end for SSDs in D.C.

[spackard]

http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-we-learned-about-ssds-in-2015/

A rather provocative title.
"2015 was the beginning of the end for SSDs in the data center.
Why?" asks Robin Harris in ZDNet.
"Because researchers have delved deep into their actual behavior and found multiple problems. Here's what you need to know. Despite their wide use, SSDs are a young technology, one we're still learning about. Here's a roundup of the best research on SSDs in 2015...

 

[simple_gifts]

zdnet generally has a lot of wild assertions like that. Generally we never adopted them widely primarily because of their $$ and unproven track record.

Dell warranties rotating HDD for up to seven years, SSD for only 3; so obviously they have the same concerns. Hitachi et al build special controllers to deal with them, so belief they are plug in replacements for other than laptops and desktops storage is just not born out in the facts.

No one in the enterprise rushes into stuff like this, lest they need to explain a lot 3 or 4 years down the road.

 

[Leo99]

I love my SSD. Best upgrade I ever made.

 

[JerryBob]

I know the article is about the DC, but I sure love the boost I got by dumping Windows, and installing an SSD and Ubuntu on my laptop

 

[3800Series]

Makes sense, mechanical hard drives have a proven track record. They are cheap storage devices that work very well for there price. They are reliable and easily replaced if one does fail. They have been around long enough where there will not be any massive performance upgrades.

On the other hand SSD's are new. They are constantly evolving and they have yet to hit there peak. They have many limitations in there way including Sata 3 transfer speed, the cost, and the fact that by next year the money you paid to replace several servers will be wasted as the price would have gone down or they will be obsolete compared to the constant evolving nature of fairly new technology.

People are already starting to say SSD's that we know of and use today are obsolete compared to M.2 (which is roughly the same exact thing) but with different designs and connections that offer transfer speeds 10x better then even the best sata 3 SSD's on the market today thanks to the pcie interface due to standards SSD's sata 3 data transfer limitations.

I think it's a great idea personal. It makes no sense to spend massive amounts of money on storage systems when you consider every 6 months will be obsolete with the coming of a new generation.

Mechanical hard drives just get larger and marginally better we have reach most of the maximum performance on its platform so its significantly cheaper when you consider servers can easily hold 100-1000 terabyte's.

 

[zzyzzx]

Originally Posted By: Leo99
I love my SSD. Best upgrade I ever made.


I love mine too, but I still keep on my data on a hard drive. In fact, the hard drive in question is more than a decade old and I still trust it more than my SSD.

 

[yesthatsteve]

Originally Posted By: zzyzzx
Originally Posted By: Leo99
I love my SSD. Best upgrade I ever made.


I love mine too, but I still keep on my data on a hard drive. In fact, the hard drive in question is more than a decade old and I still trust it more than my SSD.


+1

I have two small SSDs in my desktop to dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint. I have an older mechanical drive for data, and an external mechanical drive for backup.

 

[itguy08]

ZDnet seems to be alarmist on a lot of this stuff. Predicted RAID was dead and how all our data was at a loss or some nonsense because of HD Errors. I take whatever they say with a small grain of sand.

That being said we're increasing our SSD use where I work. Our new SAN has LOTS of SSD and it's quite a bit faster than what it replaced. I'm not the SAN guy but they seem to like it and IBM will warranty it so no real concerns there.

I love my SSD's. Put a 1TB in my iMac last Feb and it's awesome. Data and apps live there and only "archival" stuff goes on the external disks. Wish I did that sooner and I'll never go back to spinning rust as a primary storage medium. Backups are done to CrashPlan for redundancy.

 

[JHZR2]

I've had more issues on HDDs than SSDs (knocking on wood).

That said,month img beats a good backup. It would seem to me that if cost can be managed, that data centers using redundant ssds would be the best of all worlds because they're smaller and faster. I'd suspect thy are also more energy efficient and give off less heat, booperational comsoderations...

But rotating storage is cheap...

 

[Nick R]

Originally Posted By: itguy08
ZDnet seems to be alarmist on a lot of this stuff. Predicted RAID was dead and how all our data was at a loss or some nonsense because of HD Errors. I take whatever they say with a small grain of sand.

That being said we're increasing our SSD use where I work. Our new SAN has LOTS of SSD and it's quite a bit faster than what it replaced. I'm not the SAN guy but they seem to like it and IBM will warranty it so no real concerns there.

I love my SSD's. Put a 1TB in my iMac last Feb and it's awesome. Data and apps live there and only "archival" stuff goes on the external disks. Wish I did that sooner and I'll never go back to spinning rust as a primary storage medium. Backups are done to CrashPlan for redundancy.


Agreed. At my new old job at a hospital, we had recently gotten several new XIOTECH Hyper ISE modules with Hybrid SSD/HDD storage for our SAN. It made a huge difference in in some I/O heavy applications, particularly our EMR. And especially late-night when all the VMWare snapshots ran. Previously the high load on the SAN was causing the EMR to slow to a crawl at night. No more!

 

[wirelessF]

SSD's have gone crazy cheap lately. I picked up a Sandisk 480GB and 120GB SSD for under $150 at Bestbuy and threw it in an old laptop and for extra storage for my gaming rig. I remember 6 years ago when it was cost prohibitive for 100+GB SSD's, debate for various controller types (RIP Indilinx Barefoot) and throwing some serious cash for a 160GB Intel X25-M G2 SSD which is still rocking in my rig.

 

[nthach]

Originally Posted By: JHZR2


But rotating storage is cheap...

Which is why Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and MS are still using spinning media - as a matter of fact Facebook and Panasonic are working together on using Blu-Ray discs as "cold" storage, they'll be rolling out a 100GB disc soon.

HP and Dell want to push SSDs in the data center, but they don't have quite the endurance as an mechanical SAS/SATA drive.

 

[PandaBear]

Both HDD and SSD are getting better all the time. HDD can handle massive number of continuous writes without wearing out and SSD are very fast for random access and virtually wear proof if you never write to it.

The only problem with SSD is that their prices are dropping all the time, and if you buy too big of a size, it depreciates so fast you are throwing away money. HDD for streaming and continuous read with Shingled tracks are super cheap, so cheap that SSD will never be cheap enough to compete. This will be ideal for backups and content delivery (video).

I can see in the near future (say 3 years), every personal computer will be on SSD and stay with a small size (say 120GB), instead of the ever increasing HDD that can't be made cheaper than $40 or smaller than 2TB. People who wants to store large amount of photos and videos will just buy external USB HDD.

 

[javacontour]

Unscientificly speaking, it seems I replace more per quantity installed SSDS compared to spinning storage at customer sites. We have many engineered solutions that use a combination of the two and it seems I'm replacing more SSDs.

It will be interesting to see how the NVMe storage does as it's rolling out in new products.

 

[bunnspecial]

I've started transitioning IDE-based laptops over to SSDs because high capacity 2.5" IDEs are virtually non existent now and when they do show up are as expensive as I'm paying for a 128gb mSATA+enclosure. As a side effect, my Powerbooks have never run better. IMO, SSDs come into their own for laptops due to their inherent shock resistance-the fact that they are faster, quieter, and use less power are great side effects. I'm still running a 500gb platter in my main laptop, but mostly because at the moment I need the storage space and haven't wanted to fork over the money for a decent sized SSD for it.

Enterprise drives are their own ball game. HDDs, like most electronics, have their reliability on a "bathtub curve" where they are most likely to fail within the first little bit of use but then will run a long time if they pass that initial test. Most enterprise drives are "run in" for 100 hours or so. I'm not sure if there necessarily is a quality difference in components, but I have a pair of 15K enterprise-class SCSI drives in one of my office computers that have well over 300,000 hours of on time and are over 10 years old with no indications of imminent failure.

 

[PandaBear]

Enterprise drives usually don't fly too low, and they don't pack the density as high as consumer class for the same technology (head / platter) so they do last longer.

Enterprise SSD also use more conservative wear leveling that has less chances of getting stuck in a bad place and lose data if you power off / timeout at a bad time.

 

[Rand]

2015 was also the beginning of the end for Datacenters.

So many companies moving from private datacenter to a cloud option like AWS or microsoft.