Person with vested interest in X says X will continue to proliferate. More at 11
Also, for some extra context:
Haven’t hard drives been cheaper per storage amount than SSDs forever? The problem was always that they were slow. I think tape may still be cheaper per storage amount than hard drives, but the speed is abysmal.
Edit: yeah looks like tape is 3x to 4x cheaper than hard drives https://corodata.com/tape-backups-still-used-today
Tape will be around until something better for archival purposes comes around
It lasts significantly longer sitting on the shelf than HDD or SSD by far
I doubt it’s being used for anything other than backups and archiving though
It’s also used for sending huge amounts of data long distances. “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” That’s usually attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum, but wikipedia follows that with “other alleged speakers include…” so take that with a grain of salt. They do note that the first problem in his book on computer networks asks students to calculate the throughput of a Saint Bernard carrying floppy disks.
Amazon is using trucks to ship hard drives for the largest data transfers. It’s more efficient than doing it over internet. They also offer a service where they will put the data you want in a drive, mail it to you, and after you’re done, you send the drive back.
I’d love to see what could be done with current tape storage technology in standard compact cassette format.
There’s some space occupied by the servo tracks (which align the heads to the tap) in LTO, but if we ignore that…
Current-generation LTO9 has 1035m of 12.65mm wide tape, for 18TB of storage. That’s approximately 13.1m², or just under 1.4TB/m².
A 90 minute audio cassette has around 90m of 6.4mm wide tape, or 0.576m². At the same density it could potentially hold 825GB.
DDS (which was data tape in a similar form factor) achieved 160GB in 2009, although there’s a lot more tape in one of those cartridges (153m).
Honestly, you’d be better off using the LTO. Because they’re single-reel cartridges (the 2nd is inside the drive), they can pack a lot more tape into the same volume.
Yes. SSDs are still excellent for small form factor and speed, but for long term reliable storage in massive volumes, old fasion hard drives are only second to tape storage.
Source: I am in charge of four 1.2PB storage clusters, each consisting of 144 10TB Toshiba drives. The systems write their output to 10TB tapes for data delivery.
It’s criminal that some computers are still sold with mechanical hard drives, but I will still be using them in NAS for years to come. The right technology for the right job.
That’s where I have a theory about when the hard drive market will collapse. A lot of networked drive setups have 4 drives on RAID 10. With SSDs, those can become 2 drive RAID1, and will be faster. That means SSDs can be 2x the cost to eliminate hard drives as a viable option for a very common use case.
That isn’t too far away. Your next NAS upgrade cycle might be with SSDs.
Tapes themselves are cheaper but there’s also the upfront cost of the tape drive (we’re talking thousands).
And that there is the real crime. It’s a real shame no one’s making a tape drive at the consumer market price point. Tapes are a hell of a lot more convenient for backups and archival than the giant weird pile of storage formats we’ve seen over years.
Wendel from level 1 techs really likes the multi actuator spinning rust drives. You still wouldn’t use them for a boot drive, but they’re fast enough to saturate a sata connection, while still being much more dense than ssds. They can achieve 500MB/s sequential speeds, so they’re plenty fast for large file access. Most consumers should be using SSD’s but if you’re dealing with more than a couple terabytes, the best solution isn’t as straightforward.
Slow is relative.
Are you trying to compile 1GB worth of code or load into memory 4GB of game at startup: absolutelly, they’re slow.
Are you serving a compressed 1080p video file from your NAS to your media player over 100Mb/s ethernet: they’re more than fast enough. (Or to put things another way, trying to fit your home collection of media files on SSDs in yout NAS is probably not so smart as you can get almost 10x the storage for the same price and the bottleneck in that system isn’t the HDD)
You’re not going to put a massive production database of a performance criticial system on an HDD but storing “just in case” in one your historic of RAW images files after you’ve processed them is probably the smart thing to do.
For me, reliability is now the bottleneck.
So many HDs are crapping out after about 5 years. Not saying SSDs are better, but I haven’t used any for storage. But it’s starting to feel like a subscription plan as I’m rotating hard drives in my server nearly every year now since 2018.
As a newb I hope one day in my journey, I can look back at this and say “I finally understand this.” Til then thank you, magic man
There is a lot of power to waste for the savings you made, when not buying expensive SSDs (20€ a year is not much). Where we use HDDs, we don’t care about noise. Durability? We use huge RAID systems with lots of redundancy.
I personally like to swap new drives after 5 years to avoid failures. So when you find a 16 TB SSD for 350€, you send me a message.
My 4 bay HDD NAS uses around 45W, 50W with some light load, 70W spinning up. That’s about 1kWh per day, or 150 EUR per year.
I use it in my room, so I very much care about noise.
More durability = less redundancy (less cost) + less frequent swaps (less cost). My anecdotal evidence is 1 failed SSD in 15 years (160GB Intel, basically first Gen). Every other SSD is still working. I have a drawer full of failed HDDs.
Plus more performance.
Toshiba’s estimates feel reasonable. While the price difference is slowly narrowing compared to the widening performance and form factor gap, it’ll certainly continue to be a slow death. The current price ratio would need to be inverted before it makes sense to drop hdds entirely. And even then tapes will still be around forever.
With investments in storage tech being so diverted away from HDD technologies I wonder how much further capacity will get. We’re already at the point where disks have many platters and HAMR is finally going to be delivered after decades of “coming soon”. It feels like, much akin to processor fab, we’re approaching a wall.
Use HDDs for linear read/write (files) and SSDs for IOPS (databases)
