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HDD is still cheap for GB, displacing it will require a lot of time, say 10 years at least. I can buy a 3TB HDD for less than 100€, with the same amount I can barely buy a 256 GB SSD. Which, alone, is useless.
If in 10 years we will have reached the HDD maximum density and SSD prices will have dropped to acceptable prices then the huge increase in speed will make HDDs a rarer and rarer choice, like it happened for data tapes in favor of RAID architectures.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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I suspect it's going to happen sooner than a decade from now.
SSD price/GB is falling faster than HDD price/GB. Projections I've seen in the last year or two show SDDs becoming cheaper in initial purchase costs for bulk data storage around 2025. Since those are just projections for when trend lines intersect, I suspect it will probably actually happen a year or two sooner. It takes several years for the R&D costs of a new platform to actually earn out in sales; meaning that a 2024 HDD platform will probably never do so when it's overtaken a year later; meaning HDD dev will probably stop one platform before where the original intersection point is and SSDs will only need to be cheaper than a 2-3 year old design to win.
Strait line projections also assume that the R&D budgets will remain intact; I suspect that's also overly optimistic. The Tom's article shows the pending collapse of cheap laptop HDDs (and similar articles at Anandtech have shown its already in rapid retreat). While that doesn't matter much for overall profitability because the margins on those drives are negligible, so losing them doesn't matter much to the overall bottom line. The problem is that they're already eating high speed SAS drives alive in the data center, and these are a big money maker. Currently they can partially counterbalance that by selling more maximum density 3.5" drives at premium prices; the pending problem there is that in the data center power consumption (directly and in HVAC needs) and physical volume matter at least as much as the raw price/GD. That in turn means that even for bulk archival storage SSDs will become cheaper in TCO well before they're cheaper in terms of raw dollars/gigabyte on the sticker price. Once that happens I'm skeptical that consumer/SMB NAS sales will be able to sustain the R&D.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I like your analysis and you find me agreeing with that - I was being conservative, projections are often overly optimistic (they are used to attract investments after all) and usually cherry pick both the source data and the destination of the sales (enterprise market is very different from consumer market).
Since I'm a consumer and not involved in any data storage I was thinking of consumer market, plus a couple of incidents in the next ten years and probably even my expectations are optimistic too.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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As a consumer I've retired spinning rust everywhere except on my NAS; and suspect that my ~2020 NAS refresh may be my final HDD buy. Even then if SSDs are close enough that it's a $800 vs $1100 total system cost going with flash to get a system the size of a hardback book instead of one constrained by a 4x 3.5" drive cage would be tempting.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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They cost too much for my pockets, my future computer (if everyhting goes well I'll buy it in December) will cost about 1100$ with a 3TB HDD and 256 GB SSD for Windows and the most demanding games (which I plan to swap in the HDD when I change active game). A TB SSD would cost me way too much - I may be an engineer but in Italy it means I'm paid slightly more than a generic labourer.
Also, as of now my only PC is a 5.5 years old notebook with progressively failing hardware, so an upgrade has been out of the options for a lot of time.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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nod
Based on historical price drops, we're probably about another year or year and a half from a 1tbd SSD being as cheap as a sweetspot SSD (currently 256, presumably 512 then) and capacity HDD. I suspect that's about when they'll start eating a bigger chunk of the mid end desktop market.
I've bought a 128 @ $300, a 256 @ $330, and most recently a 1tb @ $550, the latter of which let me go all flash in my desktop. I'm well aware that those have been as luxury priced as the $500 graphics cards I buy every other year or so, and the $1000k I spent on a 2560x1600 monitor I bought a half dozen years ago, nevermind the $500 on the behemoth tower from Caselabs I've packed it all into...
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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How to Crash Systemd in One Tweet Maybe it's a feature.
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who'd'a thunk it? 
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Another week, another new Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Anniversary edition. This week's collection of fixes is causing installation issues for some users. Also, the sun rose this morning.
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At this stage, heads should be starting to roll. Lessons aren't being learned and, given the vast amount of telemetry they are harvesting, this is completely unforgivable.
This space for rent
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Apple CEO Tim Cook has robustly defended his company's strident approach to security in a new on-stage Q&A, declaring: "Encryption is inherently great." Who couldn't use a little military grade encryption? My fanfiction must be kept seeeecret.
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At Paris Fashion Week, smart glasses and belts will let the audience see the models' state of mind. I'm sure they feel FINE (Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic, Emotional).
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Sean Ewington wrote: Freaked out
That's the polite version!
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Is the head of Y Combinator fixing the world, or trying to take over Silicon Valley? Sorry about the font.
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A judge in Texas has put the kibosh on a last-minute legal attempt to block the controversial decision for the US to give up control of one of the key systems that powers the internet. Freedom?
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In his current column for the Communications of the ACM, Cerf worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document—to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from. Surely someone is preserving these jokes on clay tablets.
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It’s not just systemd, not just Linux, not just software; the whole industry is at fault. We have taught ourselves, wrongly, that there is no alternative. A poor craftsman blames his tools.
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He quotes Andrew Ayer in there: "Go and Rust are compelling, safe languages for writing the type of systems software that has traditionally been written in C."
Rust, I agree - it is squarely aiming at the kinds of tasks traditionally written in C/C++.
Go, on the other hand, is *not* a systems programming language. It has strengths for writing all sorts of software, but there is simply no way it will ever be used to write a safe alternative to something like Systemd.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Sean Ewington wrote: A poor craftsman blames his tools.
Agreed. Much as I disparage script languages, this statement:
Everything is terrible because the fundamental tools we use are, still, so flawed that when used they inevitably craft terrible things.
I very much disagree with. It really isn't the tool's fault.
It's ironic that he quoted Ayer (my bold):
Writing bug-free software is extremely difficult … good programmers recognize the difficulty of writing bug-free software and understand the importance of designing software in a way that minimizes the likelihood of bugs or at least reduces their impact. The systemd developers understand none of this, opting to cram an enormous amount of unnecessary complexity … written in a memory-unsafe language.
The issue is not the tool! Give me a plumber's wrench and I can make a complete mess of the plumbing fixtures because I have no idea how to properly use the tools of the trade.
Marc
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Good programmers can make good software despite bad tools - it will just take more time and be worst than what they could do with better tools, but still good.
Good programmers recognize bad tools and won't use them, if given the chance.
If you take a monkey and give it good tools you still have things produced by a monkey (basically dejections and annoyance).
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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I think there's some truth it this, but for a different reason--all these toy languages distract too many developers and diminish their expertise. As they say, Jack of all trades, master of none, though many don't even rise to the level of "jack of all trades".
Another big impact is that when a "cool" language loving developer leaves, the team has a real problem finding a replacement. Thirteen years ago, I got an interview as a Python programmer because my resume was the only one with the word Python on it--though what I'd done is to convert a Python tool to C++! (In the end, they were forced to hire a transfer from another department who didn't know Python at all.)
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The spacecraft arrived at the Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which is about 4km on its longest side, in 2014. It became the first mission to orbit around a comet, and, with its small Philae lander, the first to touch down on a comet’s surface. Spoiler alert: It 'sploded.
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An open source, physically secure personal computer. ORLY
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Our database load used to be rather write heavy, but the reads increased in a disproportionate amount every day, and we kept throwing money at the problem without really knowing why.
But then one day, I went to actually find out - and this story is meant to guide you in a similar effort. A cautionary tale.
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