CEO of Seagate: Nobody uses SSDs for storage

[Notional]

true.  In heinsight I am struggling to find a data centre that might overwrite it's data (other than security camera servers).

 

Exactly. The only other exception are scratch discs, but I'm not really sure in what setups they are used in the server business.

[EonityLuna]

This, kids, is how a company fades into obscurity.

See: Kodak, Blackberry.

[Eniqmatic]

We just took delivery of some additional SSD storage for a large SAN we have. Granted most of it is mechanical, however I'm glad to see us get a decent large capacity array of SSDs.

[PortentousLad]

I cannot wait to be able to afford a 1 or 2 TB and through out all of my HDDs and never look back! It's like when CD's or tapes stopped being a thing. No one missed them. NO ONE!

 

Edited: (those embarrassing typos)

[Syntaxvgm]

I cannot wait to be able to afford a 1 or 2 TB and trough out all of may HDDs and never look back! It's like when CD's or tapes stopped being a thing. No one missed them. NO ONE!

Tapes are still a thing 

[bomerr]

Don't feel sorry for me. I don't care if it takes forever to boot up. As long as it does boot up, i'm happy.

like i said, it's not just the boot up. OS constantly needs to read/write data off/on the HDD for different apps so with an HDD the entire system feels slow, lagging and unresponsive. 

 

 

It's a good point that most users don't actually need much space. 

And I'd prefer all laptops came with small SSDs for that sake of inexperienced users, making them drop proof ect. 

 

But, except in small form factor laptops, they HAVEN'T replaced mechanical hard drives sadly. Reason is place like best buy put disk space, ram, and "i7" on the price card as the only metric to compare test systems by. 500GB sure looks better to shoppers than 250GB even if the latter is an SSD. 

Well laptops have mostly gone to SSD and all smartphones and tablets are ssd-based. So I would say hdds have become obsolete for mainstream users. 

[Camul]

"Nobody uses SSD's..." 

 

Sure... Except for more than a few ultrabooks, macbooks, and enthusiast systems.  If SSDs are so rare... why did seagate spend R&D money on their hybrid drives?  

 

Seriously... trying to deny a new technology as "we think no one will buy into it" is a business model that has, and will bite everyone in the ass.  Happened with small cars during the 1970s, Nokia vs. Apple, several other predictions that not only proved wrong, but catastrophically so.

 

While I will not phase out a spinny drive anytime soon, my next rig will have a system SSD for fast boot times. 

 

You really stripped that of all context.

[jaggysnake57]

Maybe when SSD's get cheaper and don't die out as easily. Maybe then I'll use them. Or I'll pick up a cheap SSD and place my OS on it.

what do you mean die out easy......http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead think you might want to read that .....cliffs, all the drives got over 700 TB before failing most cleared 1 PB and the 840 pro cleared 2 PB......

 

i've had 13 year old hard drives run to this day 24/7.

nope. speaking the whole truth.

i have have had 6 drives fail on me in 4 years whats your point

 

I don't see SSDs becoming replacements for storage for a good while.

For the price you pay for an SSD you can get several times the storage in HDDs.

Also SSDs can fail with less warning and once they do getting data off them can be much more challenging.

Don't SSDs have much shorter storage life if they are shelved and not in use vs HDDs as well?

of the 6 drives that failed me only 1 gave me any warning and that was the only one i could retrieve data from.

 

They do, but they don't make the flash chips. Or the controller. And their drives are not shitty. If anything, they're better than WD for better prices

actually there not. a data centre posted there drive failures and showed what drives were more reliable..and WD came out on top....seagate were quite some way behind....funny given its always WD drives that give me the most issues

on topic.....HDDs are going nowhere for quite some time.....when i can get a 1TB ssd for £100 then ill make the full switch but for now ill stick with ssd for the os and hdd for mass storage. oh and if your not running or have never run an SSD for the os then not only do you not know what your missing but you cant really make much of an informed observation.

[deviant88]

LOL this is so silly, people dont use SSD for storage because they are fucking expensive 512 and 1TB disk are insanely pricey.

In the future Seagate is gonna go bankrupt, memory tech advances really fast, 3d Nand, HBM and more and more R&D going on as someone said in about 5 years if seagate doesnt do SSD they wont be much of a top player anymore.

[Sakkura]

Ah ok. Are they mostly b2b drives? Never seen a Seagate SSD. But since they don't make any of the key components, it really just means they are an middle man, adding cost.

 

The Seagate 600 and 600 Pro are consumer drives. They're just not particularly well-known because they're nothing too special.

[sof006]

I'll swap out to a rig full of SSD's when they become £60 for 1TB like current high capacity HDD's

 

Right now I only have one 500GB SSD.

[Sakkura]

actually there not. a data centre posted there drive failures and showed what drives were more reliable..and WD came out on top....seagate were quite some way behind....funny given its always WD drives that give me the most issues

 

Those are hard drives, and tested under conditions way outside what they were designed for. It can barely even be applied to their HDDs in regular consumer builds, let alone their SSDs.

[TorqueS]

I agree with the CEO today...for the main consumer, using SSDs for mass storage is absolutely impossible...it's just too expensive.

A 1TB SSD costs as much as a R9 390 or a GTX 970 lol...

 

But I also think this is bound to change in the near future.

Most people that built PCs in 2014 and now 2015-2016 will most likely end up with a 120GB / 128GB / 240GB / 256GB SSD and a 1TB / 2TB new drive + old drives.

It's the best combo for the money I'd say.

 

I find a 120GB SSD pretty spacious for my needs(but that's subjective). I manage to keep Windows some programs(Office, Photoshop, CPU-Z. Aida64 etc..) and games like CS:GO, Battlefield 3, League, Hearthstone, World of Tanks...and free space is about 10GB(+18GB left for over-provisioning).

[ManWithBeard1990]

Well, ssd's were predicted to surpass hdd's in price per gigabyte some time in 2016... Personally I don't see it happening, but it might.

[gastew15]

While they are correct, it only remains that way due to the price difference of HDDs vs SSDs. Storage for most people has always remained a game of the cheapest option which has led consumer drives for many years.

[spartaman64]

 

Seagate sells SSDs, so...

 

Seagate is generally considerably cheaper than WD.

dont they just have sshds?

 

 

The Seagate 600 and 600 Pro are consumer drives. They're just not particularly well-known because they're nothing too special.

oh but they dont have the market share in ssds so of course it would be in their interest to stop the transition to ssds

[Fetzie]

-snip-

 

Using WD as an example because I'm not up to speed on other manufacturer's SKUs:

 

WD Purple drives are designed for 24/7 writes of high bit-rate data streams (surveillance systems) in server cases with a RAID card constantly updating the redundant data from the RAID 5 or 6 array.

WD reds are designed to be stuck in NAS devices or datastores, where they are subjected to increased heat and vibrations due to many drives operating in close proximity with a RAID card constantly updating the redundant data from the RAID 5 or 6 array. They are, along with the Purple drives, designed with a vastly higher MTBF than the Black/Blue/Green drives (something like 10 million hours compared to 2 million)..

WD Blacks are the drive intended for use in scenarios where most people have an SSD - OS, fast access storage.

WD Blues are like blacks, but they have slower access times.

WD Greens are designed to cope with being turned on and off by the system regularly (so basically operated like a hot-swap device).

 

For example, if you put a WD Green in a NAS or a surveillance system, it will die faster than if it is the sole storage drive in a PC because it isn't designed to cope with 24/7 writing as well as the vibrations and the additional heat. A test which puts a drive outside of its comfort zone will inevitably give that drive a worse rating. Conversely, if they put a WD Red in a scenario where it is merely operating as a storage drive in a PC, it'll out-last the sata connector used to plug it into the motherboard. That's why these test results aren't "useful" data.

Edited August 2, 2015 by Blade of Grass

[lak]

i've had 13 year old hard drives run to this day 24/7.

 

nope. speaking the whole truth.

 

Nice. But what kinds of workloads were they exposed to? What measures have been taken to minimise/prevent bitrot? Did the drives operate in a climate controlled environment? What is the drive's average idle time over a week? There are just so many variables here that could influence the longevity of a HDD, apart from their obvious mechanical nature. The point is that while 13 years 24/7 runtime is freaking amazing, an SSD can also do this as well. It's like saying my Raid 1 512GB 840 array has done ~35TB of writes in less than a year (which is nothing in a enterprise environment). Off-topic I know... /rant

 

I wonder how many years it will take for SSDs to be on the same GB/$ level as HDDs are now.

 

I guess the million dollar question is - when SSDs drop in price to an affordable GB/$ where purchasing a >4TB capacity SSD becomes mainstream for consumers (like WD Greens are), will HDDs still be relevant?

[DuckDodgers]

While SSD is definitely the future for storage, the NAND memory is clearly a stop-gap development and far from reliable and perfect solution and as such is simply not suitable for complete top-to-bottom replacement. We need other more robust non-volatile memory tech to take over.

[linuxfan66]

Using WD as an example because I'm not up to speed on other manufacturer's SKUs:

WD Purple drives are designed for 24/7 writes of high bit-rate data streams (surveillance systems) in server cases with a RAID card constantly updating the redundant data from the RAID 5 or 6 array.

WD reds are designed to be stuck in NAS devices or datastores, where they are subjected to increased heat and vibrations due to many drives operating in close proximity with a RAID card constantly updating the redundant data from the RAID 5 or 6 array. They are, along with the Purple drives, designed with a vastly higher MTBF than the Black/Blue/Green drives (something like 10 million hours compared to 2 million)..

WD Blacks are the drive intended for use in scenarios where most people have an SSD - OS, fast access storage.

WD Blues are like blacks, but they have slower access times.

WD Greens are designed to cope with being turned on and off by the system regularly (so basically operated like a hot-swap device).

For example, if you put a WD Green in a NAS or a surveillance system, it will die faster than if it is the sole storage drive in a PC because it isn't designed to cope with 24/7 writing as well as the vibrations and the additional heat. A test which puts a drive outside of its comfort zone will inevitably give that drive a worse rating. Conversely, if they put a WD Red in a scenario where it is merely operating as a storage drive in a PC, it'll out-last the sata connector used to plug it into the motherboard. That's why these test results aren't "useful" data.

Aren't purples vulnerable to data corruption due to being to being designed to rapidly record data without error messages? Is why their designed for surveillance systems...

[Fetzie]

Aren't purples vulnerable to data corruption due to being to being designed to rapidly record data without error messages? Is why their designed for surveillance systems...

 

That could be the case, but I don't know enough about the drive to say yes or no.

[Slinkey]

SSD all day everyday!

 

EDIT

I should change the name to Windows 10 now though

[Fetzie]

SSD all day everyday!

SSD.png

 

EDIT

I should change the name to Windows 10 now though

 

Why is your 5TB array a RAID0? Wouldn't it be more sensible to make it at least RAID1, if not RAID5?

[Slinkey]

Why is your 5TB array a RAID0? Wouldn't it be more sensible to make it at least RAID1, if not RAID5?

Sensible yes. But my entire build isn't sensible!

 

Edit

Bigger numbers = m0ar e-pen0r

[Misanthrope]

1) Lately I get so much content via digital streaming I only keep hard to find and favorites I watch or listen over and over locally. Though mostly to pass the time in the unlikely event of internet downtime

 

2) Even large files like game installs from steams I just put on the SSD and uninstall when not playing since it would take me maybe 1 or 2 hours to download even medium sized games and even large games are just done over 3 or 4 hours so easily overnight: Don't really need long term storage for games I own digitally

 

3) I still have access to internet speeds 10 times faster than what I have right now for relatively little more money (like only double what I pay right now) 

 

For this reasons, I am going with a 500gb + 128gb SSD as my storage. Might use an external mechanical for some of the rare stuff and collective movies to basically replace my 250 disc dvd wallet. But it's completely unnecessary I can and do easily get by with mostly just 128gb storage on SSD