View Single Post
  #6  
Old October 17th 18, 01:28 AM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
VanguardLH[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,453
Default "Hard Drive Stats for Q3 2018: Less is More"

Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 10/16/2018 3:45 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Lynn McGuire wrote:

"Hard Drive Stats for Q3 2018: Less is More"
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2018-...failire-rates/

"As of September 30, 2018 Backblaze had 99,636 spinning hard drives. Of
that number, there were 1,866 boot drives and 97,770 data drives. This
review looks at the quarterly and lifetime statistics for the data drive
models in operation in our data centers. In addition, we˘ll say goodbye
to the last of our 3TB drives, hello to our new 12TB HGST drives, and
we˘ll explain how we have 584 fewer drives than last quarter, but have
added over 40 petabytes of storage. Along the way, we˘ll share
observations and insights on the data presented and we look forward to
you doing the same in the comments."

That is a lot of hard drives. And no SSDs (cost ratio still too high).


https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-v...re-of-storage/

Says they do use some SSDs. Back in 2016, looks like Samsung planned to
get SSDs down to twice the cost of HDDs by 2020.

https://www.extremetech.com/computin...levels-by-2020

A newer article:

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.co...omparison.html

shows an SDD is still, at least, costs 7.4 times that of an HDD. At
Newegg, a Samsung 1TB EVO SATA3 SSD is $200 ($167 now on sale). A WDC
1TB Black SATA3 HDD is $100 ($73 now on sale). Not quite 7 times the
price but about 2 times (so Samsung has exceeded their timeline).

When replacing a single HDD with an SSD in your home computer to boost
its performance, the additional $100 is a tolerable one-time cost per
computer. Replacing 100,000 HDDs with SSDs would cost $10 million.


Isn't their average drive size around 7 or 8 TB now ? Aren't multiple
TB SSDs very expensive still ?


I just picked comparable capacities for SSDs and HDDs. There are
smaller and larger capacities for both with an escalated pricing rate as
capacities go up (or as an old drive ages and becomes more rare despite
being smaller). At whatever comparable capacity, SSDs are still way
more expensive than HDDs for any datacenter to consider moving to SSDs.

SSDs typically use NAND flash memory. However, the much faster DRAM
also constitutes a solid state drive but requires power to retain its
content. SSDs are NVRAM. DRAMs are not. DRAMs would need a battery to
be long-term NVRAM; however, batteries are chemical so they would need
to be replaceable (of course, non-replaceable batteries means deliberate
obsolescence which manufacturers like, just like for smartphones).
Pricing for DRAM is even more horrendous than for NAND: 16 x 64GB DRAM
modules to give 1 TB of storage would cost $14K.

1TB HDD = $100
1TB SDD = $200
1TB DRAM = $14K

Even SSD (NAND based) and DRAM will get replaced eventually. Someday
memristors may show up for commercial consumption.

https://www.techradar.com/news/compu...d-ssds-1222632