HDDs' Burgeoning Capacities: Aspiring To Cut Off SSDs At The Knees
Some industry observers, such as yours truly, believe that HDD (hard disk drive) capacities have already overshot the vast majority of computer users’ storage needs. As such, other factors beyond the historically dominant metrics of absolute capacity and cost/bit will gain in prominence as selection criteria. And those other factors, such as random access performance, power consumption, ruggedness, reliability, and operating noise, specifically favor the flash memory-based SSD (solid-state storage) apparent successor.
Mine is not, I admit, a universally held opinion within the analyst ranks. And for those who favor the continued dominance of capacity-related decision factors, the HDD suppliers (many of which, I’ll note, have recently also become SSD vendors) are providing plenty of ammo to bolster their stances. Consider, for example, some cost/bit promotional examples I collected just yesterday:
- A Samsung 3.5″ 1 TByte HDD for $49.99, along with a Western Digital 2 TByte model for $99.99 (both $0.05/GByte), and
- A Toshiba 2.5″ 500 GByte HDD for $49.99 ($0.10/GByte), all in contrast to
- A Corsair 2.5″ 32 GByte SSD for $58.99 ($1.85/GByte)
Now, from an absolute capacity standpoint, consider the industry news of just the past few days. Yesterday, for example, Western Digital unveiled a 3 Tbyte HDD in a 3.5″ ‘bare’ configuration ($239, quantity 1), following up on a USB3-interface external storage variant ($249.99, quantity 1) unveiled earlier this month. At first glance, WD’s announcement might seem to be a copy-cat; after all, I wrote up Seagate’s 3 Tbyte release back in early July (a product which is already down to $199.99 or less). However, as Anand also noticed and noted in his WD coverage, Seagate’s drive was a five-platter monster (I’m reminded of Hitachi’s four-platter 1 Tbyte premier in early 2007). Conversely, WD’s focus was on power consumption, not to mention cost reduction, so it was willing to delay its entré until it could shoehorn the requisite capacity into an industry-leading four-platter configuration.
Then there’s Hitachi, who also chose October 5 to launch a new product, this a 750 GByte 2.5″ HDD. Again, at first glance you might wonder what the big deal is; Western Digital launched a 1 TByte 2.5″ HDD more than a year ago, after all, and Seagate started shipping a 1.5 TByte portable external drive a month ago. But WD’s drive is a three-platter, 12 mm design (translation: thicker than normal, thereby unable to fit in some systems), and Seagate’s drive is an even more bloated four-platter arrangement. Hitachi’s $129.99 drive matches Seagate’s per-platter capacity but, since it’s a two-platter approach, it fits into a conventional 9.5mm chassis. And it comes in both 5,400 and (beginning in the first quarter of next year) 7,200 RPM variants. Effective drive capacity tends to decrease as rotational speeds increase, thereby making Hitachi’s high-speed product plans particularly notable from an areal density standpoint.
Regarding Seagate’s 3 TByte external drive, I wrote back in early July:
This drive has migrated from the traditional 512 byte sector size to the newer 4 Kbyte sector arrangement with resultant stronger ECC, as a means of more effectively mitigating the degrading effects of raw error rates. Unfortunately, the 4 Kbyte sector size is at minimum performance- and capacity-inefficient, and worst-case completely incompatible, with legacy operating systems when the drive is directly accessed by them. By putting an intelligent USB- or FireWire-to-SATA controller in-between the drive and system, however, such incompatibilities can invisibly be worked around by it.
An intermediary approach can eliminate some, but unfortunately not all, O/S cognizance problems. A bit over a year ago, I mentioned in a blog post that I was in search of 120 GByte HDDs because of capacity-limiting 28-bit-maximum logical block addressing support in some of my computers. Well, folks, at 3 TBytes we’re once again bumping up against legacy LBA issues driven by 32-bit-max access limitations. Specifically, the full capacity of the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive (beyond ~2.1 Tbytes) can only be harnessed by systems that fully support 48-bit LBA; hardware, BIOS (specifically EFI), drivers, and one of the following operating systems:
- A 64-bit variant of Windows Vista or Windows 7 (including Windows Server variants derived from them)
- Mac OS 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’, or
- A ‘modified’ Linux distribution
Unfortunately, as WD’s 3 TByte HDD system specifications suggest, I wasn’t underestimating the challenge of utilizing such an advanced drive. The 4 KByte sector size approach that I was speaking of is known as the Advanced Format; both the WD 3.5″ and Hitachi 2.5″ drives mentioned in this writeup employ it. And to get around at least some of the native system support shortcomings, WD is including an AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface)-compliant HBA (Host Bus Adapter) with the drive.
This board bundling is conceptually no different than Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) did when it was advocating ATA/133 drives in the absence of native chipset support for that particular proprietary PATA speed, for example, or what some early SATA drive suppliers did until native chipset support for the serial storage interface reached critical mass. Nonetheless, it’s a cost-burdening extra step that I’m sure WD will be happy to dispense with as soon as possible.
Gordon Couger commented:
There is no excuse, ever to forgo proper backups. Three or four multiple terabyte drives make thar easy.
But I don’t think hard drives will ever match solid state drives for speed. I may end up with two SSD’s buffeting the reads and writes for several treads on several cores to keep data moving through the computer so I don’t wear out a couple of hard drives a year when working on data intensive models.
Alex commented:
Who needs 3TB of disk for personal use?
JoeCM commented:
I worked in NVM memory (flash and EEPROM) for the last 20 years. All that time my managers predict that flash will kill HDD. All that time flash is about 10x more expensive than HDD. Therefore both, flash and HDD, are used for slightly different applications.
Prophets predicting the future proved themselves to be false prophets for thousands years but they always find followers.
Brian Dipert commented:
Dear Theo,
Yes, I've written about this issue before, specifically as it relates to RAID. As per-drive capacity increases, and if one drive in an array fails, there's a statistically troubling increasing likelihood that another will fail before a replacement drive can be installed and the array can be rebuilt!
John L commented:
Agree with you (Brian).. most users don't need THAT large of HHD...
and yep, most of the users out there ... still don't back up their data very well.
only time time large HHDs make sense.. when you have Large qtys of large media files.
@bigger not better...
good thoughts .. but don't use DVD/CDs for long term backups.. reason: most don't last more than 5 years... many- less than 2 years!
Theo commented:
With TByte drives the access performance needs to become much higher. At 200MByte/sec, it takes 5120 seconds, or almost two hours to read a 1 TByte drive. For example, typical desktop virus scanning on these drives takes longer than a working day and thus becomes unusable. For the server the lack of performance is just as crippling. It would cost me $2 every time I would want to data mine a TB disk using an cloud server instance, ignoring possible I/O charges. Access performance of these drives needs a 100x improvement, not capacity. These drives need to migrate to 8x or 16x PCIe to be really useful in storing live data.
Brian Dipert commented:
Dear DM,
Why are you disregarding the server opportunity for SSDs? Speed...power consumption...AOL agrees (see below), and Facebook is also rumoured to be using lots of flash memory-based storage...
hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/10/15/2020210/AOL-Spends-1M-On-Solid-State-Memory-SAN
Squallseeker commented:
How does all this extra capacity affect SSD? Their benefit is being able to read and write data to near or exceeding 200MB/s. This allows the OS and certain larger apps to load faster. The smallest usable boot SSD is near 64GB since files tend to build over time; even then you would put most apps on a faster 6GB/s SATA drive… and have a couple TB of backup since my home camcorder now provides full 1080P. No, SSDs need to still get faster and larger to handle my raw USB3 HD capture, and platter drives need to get faster and larger too for my editing and storage. Both types are still needed and both still need improvements.
DM commented:
Why are you thinking of this in terms of desktops/laptops? Obviously servers depend on cheap disk to enable cloud services.
Bigger is not better commented:
I do not follow the “bigger is better” thought process at all (unless it’s my bank account). I have seen in the last few years many friends loose everything (financial records, personal pictures, etc.) because they kept everything on a “giant drive”; it’s the “I have the room” syndrome. I’ve been telling anybody that will listen for years that these things should be kept on a second drive and that drive backed up often. When a drive fails, a “part” of it doesn’t fail; the whole thing does. I keep all programs on my “C:” drive and pictures, financial records, documents etc. on a “FILECAB” drive. Because the “FILECAB” drive doesn’t contain any “installables” it is a cinch for even a crappy backup program to fly through and backup only what’s changed or new. Because the “FILECAB” drive is accessed less frequently there’s not as much wear and tear on it as well; I have drives that are upwards of 10 years old that happily continue along. I’ve had systems crash and had to reinstall the OS and applications, but I don’t think I can recall loosing a picture from years ago… With the new SATA drives and virtually pain free installation there is no excuse for not having 2, 3 or even 4 “smaller” drives (and the “small” ones are cheeeap, Newegg has a 250G right now for $42.00).
Building a system I would use a “big” C: drive for programs (fast as you can afford), smaller “fast” D: drive for swapping (some programs, for example music editing and video editing like to use the “second” drive for temp space), a third “FILECAB” drive for files and such and either a 4th HD drive or DVD-RW to backup the “FILECAB” drive. If you plan on keeping photo’s and such for more than a month you really need to burn them to a CD\DVD.
Les@TheSSDReview commented:
My opinion is that we will see PCIe incorporated into systems, or even better, the new Sandisk 64Gb ssd that is the size of a quarter with storage being still relied upon by hard drives because of their capacity/price value.
Les
www.thessdreview.com
