The end of the hard disk

[MilesAhead]

Samsung has just introduced a 15.36 TB SSD in a standard 2.5 inch form factor.  That's over 50% greater capacity than the largest hard disk drive available today.

-xtabber (August 13, 2015, 04:04 PM)

If Windows 7 sends a Trim command, doe it ever complete? 

I would love to see a 512 GB SSD for $20(shipping included.)

[xtabber]

Western Digital is buying SanDisk for $19 billion.

I guess I'm not the only one who sees a future without spinning iron platters.

[Tuxman]

I thought Western Digital stood for quality once.

[f0dder]

Oh and Renegade, you DID mismatch the two devices right? RAID1 of SSDs is not safe if you ordered both devices around the same time and they have been together in the raid the whole time. The result is that they will die by way of media wearout within a few days of one another usually.

-SeraphimLabs (June 25, 2015, 12:08 PM)

I really wouldn't be worried about an SSD dying from wear-out unless have really heavy workloads... in which case you know you're abusing the drive, and thus have an orderly plan for swapping them out in good time.

All the SSD deaths I've seen have been from firmware bugs (the early days) or flaky electronics. I wouldn't bother with batch-avoidance, and would just order identical SSDs

[Shades]

Western Digital likely wants the patents regarding solid state storage that Sandisk possesses and as a bonus they also get a way into Toshiba. SanDisk and Toshiba have a long lasting partnership regarding storage technology. The know-how that comes with this deal, I would imagine, is very important for a company as Western Digital. 

[xtabber]

revisiting this topic...
ok, so 4TB regular hard drives can be had for about $200-300.
1TB SSD is over $400

-superboyac (July 21, 2015, 04:26 PM)

The highest capacity 2.5" hdd available today is 2TB.  2TB laptop drives go for $100 and up, while 1TB laptop drives go for about $50 and up, $70 and up for high performance (7200 RPM) drives. 

Micron has just introduced a "budget" line of SSDs in the 2.5" form factor that is slower than top of the line SSDs, but still more than 10 times faster than the fastest laptop hard drive, at $149 MSRP for 512GB and $299 MSRP for 960GB.  That's 6 times the price for 10 times the performance.  The gap is closing.

I'd agree that I don't see SSDs replacing desktop HDDs any time soon for long term and off line storage, but I think they will mostly survive as external devices, either as portable drives or as NAS.

Added 11/6/15 - I've started to see 2TB laptop drives priced below $90, at the same time, the price of a Samsung 2TB SSD has dropped from $1,000 to $750.  Also, Micron has announced they will no longer make SSDs with less than $240GB capacity because they expect the market to move to 1TB and higher.

[xtabber]

Seagate is showing off a 60TB SSD in a 3.5 inch HDD form factor.  Toshiba has also announced new NAND that it says will allow it to produce 100TB SSD drives.

Don't expect to be able to buy Seagate's SSD until next year, and it might cost you over $40,000 then. But if you are in the cloud storage business, you probably spend far more on physical plant, maintenance and energy than you spend on drives, so this may already be a good deal

None of us here is going to buy this kind of SSD storage anytime soon, but what these developments mean is that storage companies are not going to be spending any money on HDD development or manufacturing facilities.  SSDs are less labor intensive to build and Seagate has already announced 8100 layoffs this year. 

The combination of lower production costs and competition between NAND manufacturers should cause prices to come down sooner rather than later.  Perhaps more important, those are capacities that you are never going to see in spinning metal, at any price.

And that, in turn, means that sometime in the foreseeable future, maybe even within the next decade, HDDs will go the way of the VCR.