As soon as I can get a 20TB SSD for ~$325-350, let me know. Until then, lol.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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Wouldn't a HDD based system be like 1/10th the price? I don't know if HDDs are going away any time soon.
The disk cost is about a 3 fold difference, rather than order of magnitude now.
These disks didn't make up as much of the costs of these solutions as you'd think, so a disk based solution with similar capacity might be more like 40% cheaper rather than 90% cheaper.
The market for pure capacity play storage is well served by spinning platters, for now. But there's little reason to iterate on your storage subsystem design, the same design you had in 2018 can keep up with modern platters. Compared to SSD where form factor has evolved and the interface indicates revision for every pcie generation.
Spinning platter capacity can't keep up with SSDs. HDDs are just starting to break the 30TB mark and SSDs are shipping 50+. The cost delta per TB is closing fast. You can also have always on compression and dedupe in most cases with flash, so you get better utilization.
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For servers physical space is also a huge concern. 2.5” drives cap out at like 6tb I think, while you can easily find an 8tb 2.5” SSD anywhere. We have 16tb drives in one of our servers at work and they weren’t even that expensive. (Relatively)
You can put multiple 8 gig m.2 ssds into 2.5" slot.
It's losing cost advantages as time goes. Long term storage is still on tape (and that's actively developed too!), and flash is getting cheaper, and spinning disks have inherent bandwidth and latency limits. It's probably not going away entirely, but it's main usecases are being squeezed on both ends
My sample size of myself has had 1 drive fail in decades. It was a solid state drive. Thankfully it failed in a strangely intermittent way and I was able to recover the data. But still, it surprised me as one would assume solid state would be more reliable. That spinning rust has proven to be very reliable. But regardless I'm sure SSD will be/are better in every way.
I believe you see the main issue with your experiences - the sample size. With small enough sample you can experience almost anything. Wisdom is knowing what you can and what you cant extrapolate to the entire population
I have one HDD that survived 20+ years, and an aliexpress SSD that died in 6 months. Therefore all SSDs are garbage!!!
That’s also the only SSD I’ve ever had fail on me and I’ve had them since 2011. In that same time I’ve had probably 4 HDDs fail on me. Even then I know to use data from companies like backblaze that have infinitely more drives than I have.
I generally agree, it won't take long for SSDs to be cheap enough to justify the expense. HDD is in a way similar to CD/DVD, it had it's time, it even lasted much longer than expected, but eventually technology became cheaper and the slightly cheaper price didn't make sense any more.
SSD wins on all account for live systems, and long term cold storage goes to tapes. Not a lot of reasons to keep them around.
As a person hosting my own data storage, tape is completely out of reach. The equipment to read archival tapes would cost more than my entire system. It's also got extremely high latency compared to spinning disks, which I can still use as live storage.
Unless you're a huge company, spinning disks will be the way to go for bulk storage for quite a while.
Define "quite a while"
Sure, enterprise is likely to make the switch first, but it's also likely to kick start the price reduction to consumers. So I actually don't think it's that far away. I would guess we are like 5 years away from SSDs being the significant majority of consumer storage technology by volume.
Even now, as a self hoster it's pretty reasonable to have SSDs if you are talking about single digit TB. Sure SSDs are about 2x the price, but we are talking about a difference of like 60 USD if you only need 2 TB.
Based on current trends, I'd say we might get SSDs and HDDs at the same cost per GB around 2030. That's based on prices being 12-13x higher in 2015, and around 5x higher now. SSD cost efficiencies are slowing down, but there will also be a big change in demand once the prices get close, because SSDs have other advantages people will switch as soon as it's economical.
I've currently got a 200TB storage array using enterprise HDDs (shout out to Backblaze's HDD failure rate publications), and I definitely would not have been able to afford 200TB of enterprise SSDs.
Well, tape is still relevant for the 3-2-1 backup rule and I worked in a pretty big hosting company where you would get out 400 tb of backup data each weekend. it's the only media allowing to have a real secured fully offline copy that won't depend on another online hosting service
If you're storing petabytes of data sure, but when a tape drive costs $8k+ (Only price I could find that wasn't "Call for quote"), and only storing less than 500TB, it's cheaper to buy hard drives.
I'm not sure how important 2 types of media is these days, I personally have all my larger data on harddrives, but with multiple off-site copies and raid redundancy. Some people count "cloud" as another type of storage, but that's just "somebody else's harddrive"
I'm about to build a home server with a lot of storage (relatively, around 6 or 8 times 12 TB as a ballpark), and I didn't even consider anything other than spinning drives so far.
Because spinning disks are a bit cheaper than SSD?
Especially for large sizes. Also speed isn't really much of an issue on a domestic network.
I had a terrible experience through all my life with HDDs. Slow af, sector loss, corruption, OS corruption... I am traumatized. I got 8TB NvMe for less than $500... Since then I have not a single trouble (well except I n electric failure, BTRFS CoW tends to act weird and sometimes doesnt boot, you need manual intervention)
I agree that single HDDs are terrible, but once you raid multiple of them together, it becomes much better. And now with zfs even better still
Sounds like you may not be making enough sacrifices to The Omnisiah
/s
"in enterprises" oh lol
Probably at some point as prices per TB continue to come down. I don't know anyone buying a laptop with a HDD these days. Can't imagine being likely to buy one for a desktop ever again either. Still got a couple of old ones active (one is 11 years old) but I do plan to replace them with SSDs at some point.
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