The end of the Hard Disks

[David Hess]

Hard drives still have a place where greater capacity for a given cost is required and lower performance is acceptable.  High capacity SSDs are not only expensive, but have compromised retention and endurance.  MLC is a good compromise on retention and endurance but limits SSD capacity.

The increasing problem with hard drives is that their capacity has increased more than their speed, so rebuild time in RAID has become long enough to compromise RAID reliability.  Managed filesystems like ZFS should improve this situation but are not universally supported.

My PCs boot from HDD RAID which is also used for bulk storage, and SSDs are used for portable storage.  I do *not* use SSDs for scratch space because I found that it was wearing through their endurance too quickly, and that was with better MLC SSDs.

[bd139]

Capacity vs endurance is rarely a problem. How often do you write a whole TB disk?

[David Hess]

Capacity vs endurance is rarely a problem. How often do you write a whole TB disk?

It *was* a problem for me, and that was with better MLC disks than the cutting edge higher capacity devices which have a worse endurance.  Buying larger devices increases the endurance for a given throughput, but costs proportionally more.  I was writing the "whole device" quickly enough to burn through it in a year, versus the 5 year warranty.

[Zenith]

Capacity vs endurance is rarely a problem. How often do you write a whole TB disk?

It depends what you are doing. With normal PC use, it's probably at the most 4TB per powered on year. Even for a rubbishy SSD, that's decades, so wear out is hardly a problem. Video editing does a lot of writing. Regular backups to disk involve a lot of writes. Surveillance involves massive mounts of writes.

[SiliconWizard]

And for "data centers", there is an enormous amount of writes.

[Circlotron]

I think the tipping point is here.  I was surprised by how fast CRTs disappeared after introduction of LCDs.  Hard drives won't die quite as quickly, but I think if you look around in five years you will find spinning disks only in specialty markets.

Let's hope the same mentality that thinks vinyl records are superior to properly done  CDs doesn't prevail here also.

[Halcyon]

harddisks are irreplaceable for long-term backups!

if you leave a MLC SSD unpowered and uncooled for some years,
you will see massive data corruption.

SSDs need to be powered up regularly, so the firmware can do a background refresh data of flash cells that leak.

The SSD problem gets worse as the TBW increases, and it's much worse with QLC.

You get bit decay in HDDs too, as the magnetisation patterns decay over time. It's as well to do a read/rewrite in place about every year.

SSD lifetime for most consumers far exceeds the life of the whole computer. I still have SSDs in use that are about 10 years old and the wear indicator shows minimal wear.

As for hard drives, I've never had to re-write data. I've had data sitting on my old NAS for about 12 years without a problem (ZFS routinely checks for data corruption). I have drives that are over 25 years old that still read perfectly fine.

These issues just don't seem to manifest in normal usage.

[David Hess]

Let's hope the same mentality that thinks vinyl records are superior to properly done  CDs doesn't prevail here also.

Unlike magnetic storage, optical storage did not continue scaling because the diffraction limit for the optics was reached.  Increased density now requires a better numerical aperture or shorter wavelength, and those have already been stretched.  I doubt there will be a generation after Blu-ray.  I wonder what happened to near field recording.  Magneto-optical drives already used tricks like heat assisted recording and scalloped recording and topped out long ago.

Flash has its own scaling limit which has nothing to do with feature size.  The floating gate memory cells eventually lack a long enough retention to be useful.  The smallest logic process with floating gate memory is currently 28 nanometers.  3D Flash made a huge improvement in density.

Hard drives have the paramagnetic limit which has been reached, but there are several options being used to do better so further improvement will happen.

[Zenith]

I think the tipping point is here.  I was surprised by how fast CRTs disappeared after introduction of LCDs.  Hard drives won't die quite as quickly, but I think if you look around in five years you will find spinning disks only in specialty markets.

Let's hope the same mentality that thinks vinyl records are superior to properly done  CDs doesn't prevail here also.

The esoteric audio scene revolves around various things, usually expensive and with no engineering basis, which are supposed to enhance the sound quality by subjective measures. My favourite is "sonically competent mains leads". It's not the same with data storage. HDDs the size of a washing machine, with a 1.25 kW power consumption and a capacity of 500MB are not going to become sought after, because the bits have "almost overpowering presence".

There are rational reasons for continuing to use HDDs in some areas. It's hard to see them being supplanted in surveillance systems for a long time. Maybe within five years, USB external drives for backup will disappear.

Intel's Optane doesn't have the endurance problems of Flash SSDs, but it's very expensive.

[bd139]

I just asked our ops guys what they use in our CCTV box. It’s 4x Crucial MX500 2TB SSDs 

[Mechatrommer]

You can brag about your company hard earn money or for business purpose ssd.. but ssd price is still 5-10x, no.. hdd wont die anytime soon.

[bd139]

They bought them because the 6TB HDD in the box died after 3 months. Not having CCTV coverage was riskier than paying out.

[xrunner]

They bought them because the 6TB HDD in the box died after 3 months. Not having CCTV coverage was riskier than paying out.

Earlier this year I got a new security camera system (old one finally failed). The cams use a wireless link and the main unit has nice big display and has (or shall I say had) a 3 TB HDD for data storage (not to run the system). After I got it running I had to check inside and have a look. The HDD is user replaceable but after I shut it off and touched the HDD it was literally so hot it wasn't fun to handle. After a few weeks the HDD just failed. They sent me another HDD but it got really hot the same. I wondered if the thing would format an SSD (the HDDs use SATA) so I bought one - figured if it didn't work I'd use it in a PC. Well it formatted fine and so far no problems, plus it uses less energy.

[Zenith]

Earlier this year I got a new security camera system (old one finally failed). The cams use a wireless link and the main unit has nice big display and has (or shall I say had) a 3 TB HDD for data storage (not to run the system). After I got it running I had to check inside and have a look. The HDD is user replaceable but after I shut it off and touched the HDD it was literally so hot it wasn't fun to handle. After a few weeks the HDD just failed. They sent me another HDD but it got really hot the same. I wondered if the thing would format an SSD (the HDDs use SATA) so I bought one - figured if it didn't work I'd use it in a PC. Well it formatted fine and so far no problems, plus it uses less energy.

If you have an HDD with a max power dissipation of about 6W getting hot like that, it sounds like bad engineering.

[DiTBho]

DDS2 is only 4GB per cartridge

my DVDRAMs are also 4GB per cartridge, practically 4GB is *the* unit of my backups, more than enough for text, C and vhdl sources 

[xrunner]

Earlier this year I got a new security camera system (old one finally failed). The cams use a wireless link and the main unit has nice big display and has (or shall I say had) a 3 TB HDD for data storage (not to run the system). After I got it running I had to check inside and have a look. The HDD is user replaceable but after I shut it off and touched the HDD it was literally so hot it wasn't fun to handle. After a few weeks the HDD just failed. They sent me another HDD but it got really hot the same. I wondered if the thing would format an SSD (the HDDs use SATA) so I bought one - figured if it didn't work I'd use it in a PC. Well it formatted fine and so far no problems, plus it uses less energy.

If you have an HDD with a max power dissipation of about 6W getting hot like that, it sounds like bad engineering.

Attached is pic of 3TB HDD removed from security cam system. Do you know anything about this brand? I never had any HGST brand before this system.

[bd139]

HGST are Hitachi. They were originally IBM but sold off in 2003 after the whole Deskstar (Deathstar) click of death issues.

No comment on them recently. YMMV as always.

[NiHaoMike]

I don't think it will be long before 2.5" HDDs get completely replaced by SSDs in the market, the cost per TB difference is becoming quite narrow. 3.5" HDDs are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

[tunk]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST
According to Backblaze some of them have a relatively low failure rate:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2022/
And I have 12 HGST Deskstar 6TB NAS (HDN726060ALE614) in a Dell
md1200 running 45k hours without problems.

[bd139]

Backblaze stats don't track MTTF / MTBF properly. There should be a statistical failure distribution for each drive type and they should be comparable.

[madires]

My guess is that SSDs will keep replacing HDDs in many applications. However, in areas where price or write endurance matters HDDs will prevail until SSDs can compete here too.

[Zenith]

Attached is pic of 3TB HDD removed from security cam system. Do you know anything about this brand? I never had any HGST brand before this system.

HGST was IBM's HDD business.  IBM did very well in the early 3.5" 1" high market and then they had two disastrous products, with huge failure rates - Deskstars aka Deathstars. Then they sold the business to Hitachi. It carried on under Hitachi for a few years and then it was sold to Western Digital. It carried on under WD semi autonomously and their products were directed toward the server end of the market.

Last I looked HGST HDDs had the best reliability stats at about 1% annual failure rate, Toshiba were next at about 4%, then came WD and Seagate at much higher rates - around 10% of the top of my head. These were at best crude figures, because the market is very segmented.

[Zenith]

I don't think it will be long before 2.5" HDDs get completely replaced by SSDs in the market, the cost per TB difference is becoming quite narrow. 3.5" HDDs are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

2.5" HDDs are really aimed at the laptop market. The typical laptop drives are 5400rpm (slow) because of the power and heat dissipation requirements, and were designed to take rough treatment, even while running, but that was always going to be a difficult engineering challenge. SSDs are much faster, vastly more robust, and use a bit less power.

I really can't see why the 2.5" HDD market still exists. You can buy a very respectable 1TB 2.5" SATA drive for about £75 and the mechanical 2.5" drive equivalent - inferior in just about every way - starts from about half that much. I suppose some people just have to have the cheapest..

[Mechatrommer]

otoh it is agreed that hdd for OS is extinct, esp the 2.5" laptop.  the price of 120-480GB ssd is bearable and really worth it for OS performance. Anybody who still choose hdd for OS, even for 3.5" PC, albeit they have the full right to do whatever with their own body, have choosen to stay behind in dinasour age and unaware that they are crippling themselves. I was talking data storage 4TB and above for hdd still applicable. 30TB ssd?  You can brag any goodness in it, you cant afford it.

[Zenith]

otoh it is agreed that hdd for OS is extinct, esp the 2.5" laptop.  the price of 120-480GB ssd is bearable and really worth it for OS performance. Anybody who still choose hdd for OS, even for 3.5" PC, albeit they have the full right to do whatever with their own body, have choosen to stay behind in dinasour age and unaware that they are crippling themselves. I was talking data storage 4TB and above for hdd still applicable. 30TB ssd?  You can brag any goodness in it, you cant afford it.

I was just looking at ready made desktop PCs on ebuyer at less than £700. Most have a 256GB or 512GB SSD only. Very few have both SSD and HDD, or just HDD. I'm sure about a year back it was mostly SSD and HDD systems.

Yes, 4TB and over seems like where HDDs are most applicable.