BwazeBut most of us don't live on a 23rd century Federation Constitution-class starship.

At the moment, but lets consider this:

2018
The worlds first 14Tb drive is launched (I have ignored the WD one due to it using SMR technology)
storage.toshiba.com/enterprise-hdd/cloud-scale-capacity/mg07-series

Samsung starts Mass production of first 30Tb SSD (RRP $11625)
www.anandtech.com/show/12448/samsung-begins-mass-production-of-pm1643-sas-ssds-with-3072-tb-capacity

2023
20Tb HDD with "new" technology that finally reaches Sata600
(Linked Article)

Micron Releases 30Tb SSD (RRP $4400)
www.storagereview.com/review/micron-9400-pro-ssd-review



So in 5 years we have gone from 14Tb to 20Tb in Spinning storage and finally achieved the ability to saturate Sata600 with a HDD.
In the SSD world we have gone from a single 30Tb drive with performance barely reaching PCI-E 2.0 limits costing OVER 10k dollars retail to MULTIPLE 30Tb drives with PCI-E 4.0 being a limitation for ~33% of the price. There are even reports of Inital PCI-E 5.0 SSDs in datacenters from the likes of Kioxia. Also the reports from Micron and their 232 layer nand meaning 45Tb drives in the same 2.5 inch footprint are now a very near possibility.

So I will clarify my very inital statement. Where as before there was always the toss up of massive performance for massive prices with very little space to show for it. We are entering a time where the argument is getting more towards massive performance for big prices with equal or more storage and I can only see the argument swinging more and more in that direction in the next 2 or so years. Now will there still be a need/development for spinning based HDDs in the near future or will we end up going purely flash? I would sort of hope not in the long run. Having the ability for differing mediums is very handy especially when you consider things like Samsungs infamous data loss on SSDs for data that isnt regularly refreshed/moved but the answer of Speed = SSD and Storage = HDD is getting blurry in my opinion.

The fact that both WD and Seagate have heavily invested in NAND spells the truth. Unfortunately until Enterprise customers refuse to pay the stupid prices that they are paying for SSD and M2 NAND we in the consumer space will be stuck on 4TB, maybe.

I was looking around today and the Crucial MX500 is $229 for the 4TB version but the WD version was $249 US. The US always has better pricing than Canada so I went on Amazon and the WD Blue is currently $309 and the MX500 $324 Canadian. As I have said this before if someone can release a 8 TB SSD/NVME for the consumer space for $499 Canadian they will sell and influence the rest of them to give up peons some NAND love. The Crazy thing is about 3 years ago I came into a Windfall and bought myself an 8 TB SSD to mark it. The crazy thing is that drive is exactly the same size and weight as my BX500s 2 TB. Hopefully the fact that Corporate does not understand that 2020 and 2021 were anomalies and are still trying to get the most they can without giving us anything of substance Samsung 870Evo 4TB $499 US.

There is also the fact that an affordable 8+ TB SSD would kill HDD for the most part. So maybe there is some effort to keep 8+ TBs out of the hands of consumers. Use an HDD to install or just load Windows and you know what I mean. Now we are getting Direct Storage as well so the incentive is stronger for NAND. Too bad Intel abandoned Optane the 4K numbers are crazy. That tech with one of those new Phison controllers would probably be insane.

Optane will be one of those techs that will be "before its time"

Same as some of the RAM cards back in Ye' Olde Days where you could repurporse DIMMS into short and long term storage depending on setup. Imagine it now where you could do your 64Gb of DDR4 when you upgrade to a DDR5 platform and make PCI-E 5 SSDs jealous :D

kapone32The fact that both WD and Seagate have heavily invested in NAND spells the truth.

Yes, but the fact that they are NOT divesting their HDD divisions and are continuing R&D in same also spells and speaks the truth.

The world has indeed changed. We have become a place where PC's, workstations and enterprise servers are comprised of hybrid storage, part SSD, part HDD. This is fact, it is reality. Nothing less than a break through of gargantuan proportions in solid state memory will change that anytime soon.

lexluthermiesterYes, but the fact that they are NOT divesting their HDD divisions and are continuing R&D in same also spells and speak the truth.

The world has indeed changed. We have become a place where PC's, workstations and enterprise servers are comprised of hybrid storage, part SSD, part HDD. This is fact, it is reality. Nothing less than a break through of gargantuan proportions in solid state memory will change that anytime soon.

I don't agree on the breakthrough we already have the maligned QLC. That should have spoken to 16TB NVME drives using the 22110 form factor that every modern MB supports for $499 but we let them drip feed us 2 TB for $500. Indeed Team and Adata have helped to bring the price down but hopefully Kingston will do it. 2 TB of 4.0 NVME for $150 CAD is no joke but means that 4 TB should be $300 and 8 TB $600. You could do it too...if you have HEDT and can fill an add in card with 4 M2 slots like the Asus M2 card for another $70 for an 8TB scratch drive for $670 but it is greed that makes an 8 TB SSD cost over $1000. With the way they make boards today you could still do it but I would not want to have my MB be one huge Storage array with my OS.

Wow a 30 TiB Samsung SSD for only $11625! How long before it begins developing bad sectors and has to be RMA'ed? I suppose considering it's size it would only have to develop 500GiB of sectors before it goes down to 98%. Who isn't willing to bet $11625 on a Samsung 30 TiB SSD?

80251Wow a 30 TiB Samsung SSD for only $11625! How long before it begins developing bad sectors and has to be RMA'ed? I suppose considering it's size it would only have to develop 500GiB of sectors before it goes down to 98%. Who isn't willing to bet $11625 on a Samsung 30 TiB SSD?

That's only half the price of a cheap new car? What a deal!

80251Wow a 30 TiB Samsung SSD for only $11625! How long before it begins developing bad sectors and has to be RMA'ed? I suppose considering it's size it would only have to develop 500GiB of sectors before it goes down to 98%. Who isn't willing to bet $11625 on a Samsung 30 TiB SSD?

Such costs are purely R&D. Thats why over time the prices will come down.

I need like 2000 of these I have a couple of gigaquads to back up now all I have to do is find a bank that has enough money to rob so I can pay for them LOL

Panther_SeraphinSo in 5 years we have gone from 14Tb to 20Tb in Spinning storage and finally achieved the ability to saturate Sata600 with a HDD.
In the SSD world we have gone from a single 30Tb drive with performance barely reaching PCI-E 2.0 limits costing OVER 10k dollars retail to MULTIPLE 30Tb drives with PCI-E 4.0 being a limitation for ~33% of the price.

But 20TB HDDs were available way before, in 2023 we'll be getting 30 TB HDDs apparently. For much less than $4000.

And yes, spinning drives can't keep up with the speed increases of SSD, but that was the fact since solid state drives arrived. But if we're talking about home use drive speeds, when you try to move a bit bigger file or folder from a fancy fast and expensive PCIe 4 to PCIe 4 SSD, how many of them fall down to SATA speeds in a manner of secons?

A lot of people agree that affordable 8TB SSD drives is about where they can completely move from HDDs. There is less and less need for large home HTPC libraries due to streaming of music and of video, so only people that create lots of data themselves have such needs now.

And we were on a brink of that years ago. PCIe drives arrived, and SATA drives were getting bigger and cheaper, and it looked like it's only a matter of a year or two... Then the price of TB kind of stopped falling, we were getting new PCIe drives with faster temporary speeds that our PCs largely can't even utilize (with mostly the same sustained speed for generations)... They're dangling the DirectStorage now for two generations of SSD drives as "just around the corner" - but now we're hearing that today's GPUs actually don't have the ability to unpack the textures while gaming, so we'll be getting stutters and lower framerate... So apparently we'll be needing a new kind of GPUs and SSDs to properly utilize that...

BwazeThere is less and less need for large home HTPC libraries due to streaming of music and of video,

And HDD's is where I store all that so your point is

Panther_SeraphinHDD are definately in a phase of it possibly being redundant with how quick SSDs are gaining in terms of size.

I wonder with the reoccurant "bit-rot/loss" that seems to happen every so often with primarily Samsung drives will there always be a demand for Spinning Rust in certain areas of the business?

id find that extremely unlikely especially since you can use ssds as a cache for hdd drives for gaming, ssd will not overtake hdds, simply because they cost too much and do not offer the same write endurance that hdds do, they also loose data going offline, its easier to just hot swap hdds for data, ssd at the front of the system for enterprizes. im suprized things like primocache are not as mainstreem, i use it to horde games and play any game, with great success the hdd loads data to the ssd for speed. and if i dont need it i dont use it, ill always have large capacity high performance hdds. onley smr is spinning rust, spinning silver will continue to be upgraded and improved till 2035 likely, even for the enthusiast gamer. its why i converted to pc, direct storage for pc is very different from the console as they speed all drives and it works very well on hdd, just not as fast but were an instant gratification society, im going to enjoy it and keep hording programs and games. qlc ssds are crap, ive owned a few and thier not worth it TLC ssds are much better nvme drives, i own several sata ssd and nvmes, and lots of hdds and use all of them active data and gaming.

Damacliesid find that extremely unlikely especially since you can use ssds as a cache for hdd drives for gaming, ssd will not overtake hdds, simply because they cost too much and do not offer the same write endurance that hdds do, they also loose data going offline, its easier to just hot swap hdds for data, ssd at the front of the system for enterprizes. im suprized things like primocache are not as mainstreem, i use it to horde games and play any game, with great success the hdd loads data to the ssd for speed. and if i dont need it i dont use it, ill always have large capacity high performance hdds. onley smr is spinning rust, spinning silver will continue to be upgraded and improved till 2035 likely, even for the enthusiast gamer. its why i converted to pc, direct storage for pc is very different from the console as they speed all drives and it works very well on hdd, just not as fast but were an instant gratification society, im going to enjoy it and keep hording programs and games. qlc ssds are crap, ive owned a few and thier not worth it TLC ssds are much better nvme drives, i own several sata ssd and nvmes, and lots of hdds and use all of them active data and gaming.

Endurance is not a relevant argument, especially for a desktop user's context. Even bad QLC single die SSDs have enough endurance to outlive your machine. Form factor and protocol such as SATA/AHCI or M.2/NVMe do not affect NAND endurance, write cycles do. I doubt you write 250 GB a day, every day, over three years on a 1 TB drive, for example, and that's a 0.25 DWPD workload that even the flimsiest of low cost drives can match. PrimoCache is quite literally worthless for machines equipped with NVMe SSDs, newer Gen 4 drives already exceed 7.5 GB/s read speeds on their own, often exceeding 6.5 GB/s in write.

If we're using anecdote as hard fact, I have 12 year old SSDs in service (with 97% write endurance still available) and they work as well as they did when I purchased them, but I have barely 4 year old Seagate HDDs that have over a thousand uncorrectable sectors and routinely fail to write with cyclic redundancy errors. Completely junked and I need to take off the anime I have in it before it croaks for good.

See, again, it's just FUD. Bad hardware can happen to everyone.

HDDs may not be going anywhere but they are becoming increasingly obsolete, it's no use arguing otherwise. There's still a market for them due to lower costs at very high capacities, but like many other computer technologies, the tendency is for superior performance and lower cost components to appear, and we'll slowly get there as breakthroughs and market conditions allow.

My upcoming build has a motherboard with five M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs. As far as I'm concerned, it could completely omit SATA and I'd be calling it a plus. My laptop has already done away with SATA and has two full size M.2 2280 slots instead.

Hardware will advance, and the progress has been glacial due to the ubiquity of the SATA standard, like USB 2.0 or the MP3 codec, it has long since been replaced by technological advances but it lingers because most users consider it to be good enough.