
SSD Prices in a Free Fall - nkurz
http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssd-prices-in-a-freefall/a/d-id/1320958
======
discardorama
Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350

Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40

Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices
follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking
at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would
have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity.

In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.

~~~
brownbat
Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has
shifted.

I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and
video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when
not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or
Netflix "stores" my movies.

When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to
meet all my needs (thanks to changes in internet services).

Sure, it won't be true for everyone. (Editing TIFFs for GIS anyone?) I don't
run a Chromebook, but its philosophy is not completely insane for a reason...

It's like storage has differentiated into at least two separate purposes. Main
system drive for consumer PCs, formerly an HDD only component, is feasibly
replaced by SSDs. At the sizes needed for that, the difference in price per GB
is already under a factor of two.[1]

[1] Caviar Blue 80GB @ $0.375/GB; MyDigitalSSD 64GB @ $0.578; Kingston 90GB @
$0.658/GB... [https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-
drive/#sort=a7&...](https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-
drive/#sort=a7&page=1&X=0,25540&S=8000,100000)

~~~
pyrocat
I agree to a large extent but I think 80GB is an extreme on the low end. Many
modern games (especially MMOs) are 20GB+. Windows 7 alone requires a huge
amount of storage. I have a 120GB partition at home (just for OS+programs, not
data) and I'm constantly uninstalling steam games in order to install others.
If you want a modicum of breathing room, I'd say minimum 200GB.

~~~
dragontamer
IIRC, Assassin Creed Unity required 50GB by itself.

If Windows takes up 30GB, you pretty much need to wipe out everything just to
play Unity on 80GB. I think 256GB to 512GB is the best bet for the standard
consumer.

~~~
timboslice
I just got a 250GB Samsung EVO SSD. Filled it up in a matter of weeks by
installing some of my favorite games from Steam. I'm looking to add a 500GB to
my build, but I should have STARTED with a 500GB.

~~~
madez
This seems like a big waste. Why would you put games on a SSD?

~~~
onli
You are right, it is a pity that you are downvoted.

Right now, you maybe put your favorite game on the SSD, not the whole steam
library - and that is what gamers often recommend themselves. FPS don't get
influenced by the HDD, only loading times, and those are normally not too
high. Many new games have only two loading times: loading the game and then
loading the save. Afterwards, everything is streamed, and a proper HDD is fast
enough for that. And that is what the people responding to your comment here
miss completely.

Using a SSD is for many games a waste.

~~~
ionised
Why is it a waste?

If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?

You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.

Improved loading times and better texture loading in games where it is heavy
(think Fallout 3 or Skyrim) is a great reason to wack an SSD in your system.

~~~
onli
Skyrim and Fallout 3 are in my eyes counter-examples for using an SSD, since
you basically have only the two loading times and afterwards it's streaming.
Maybe if the Quicktravel takes too long on the HDD.

> If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?

Oh, sure then :) It is only a waste in the relation of price per gigabyte vs.
the possible performance improvement ingame.

> You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.

See
[http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_wo...](http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_world_gaming_performance/3)
if you want another source.

~~~
Retric
I have a 500gb SSD which cost ~200$. Sure 5 years ago I would agreed with you,
but now days it's really not that expencive and in game load times feel much
longer. IMO, Skyrim is load happy, sure the open world is fine, but go to
town, get into your house, get out of your house get out of ton is 4 load
screens in ~1Min of gameplay.

~~~
onli
You see, that reasoning is perfectly valid, and when putting it like that I
agree :) Well, kind of, 200$ still feels to expensive for me for that.

I just won't let me be told that the texture streaming outside in the open
world needs that.

------
awwducks
Seems like a prime case for using a (bar/line/etc) graph to show the trend.
I'm strangely disappointed in not seeing one.

~~~
antome
That's because SSDs are still 10x the price of HDDs, have little more than
halved in price the past year, and they're talking out the ass.

------
hbbio
In a side-note in the article, the author mentions that Amazon Glacier runs on
tape. Although I'm not sure Amazon officially explained the technology, I
heard (and read on Wikipedia) that they store data on conventional HDDs, that
are however kept "offline".

Has anyone here some more knowledge about that?

~~~
_dark_matter_
Yes please. I was also intrigued by this statement. I was under the impression
that Amazon never told what the "secret sauce" was behind Glacier. Looking at
Wikipedia now, it seems there are still multiple contending theories.

Also, is it true that the service is not very popular? Are people here using
it or similar?

~~~
teraflop
The big sticking point with Glacier is that the cost model for retrievals is
complicated and unintuitive. There's a two-step process where you have to
first retrieve data and then download it, and you're billed based on the
_peak_ retrieval rate in a month, not the total amount downloaded. It's not so
bad now that they let you set a retrieval policy to limit your throughput, but
before that, you had to carefully schedule your retrievals in order to avoid
unexpected costs.

As far as I can tell, Google's new nearline storage offering is superior to
Glacier in nearly every way. The retrieval is much faster, and the retrieval
costs are a flat rate per gigabyte that's equal to what Glacier gives you in
the best case. Only drawback is the lack of a free tier.

~~~
discodave
You're not wrong, but if you look at the problem that Glacier is trying to
solve then it doesn't look so bad:

1\. Glacier is competing with tape. So for potential customers, if it's easier
to acquire and maintain than your own tape library then that's a win.

2\. In the words of James Hamilton the use case for Glacier is referred
"jokingly to as Write Only Storage". If you're using Glacier for disaster
recovery then paying a one time cost to retrieve a bunch of data pales in in
comparison to the potential costs of not being able to recover your data.

3\. Is nearline actually superior for the case of "oh shit I need to retrieve
everything right now"?

4\. AWS already has this cloud storage thingy called S3 and it has reduced
redundancy storage if you're looking for something slightly cheaper.

[http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/08/glacier-
engineering...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/08/glacier-engineering-
for-cold-data-storage-in-the-cloud/)

~~~
teraflop
I guess you've got a good point as far as #3 goes; the analysis is actually
more interesting than I thought it was. Both Google's nearline storage and
Glacier scale your retrieval capabilities proportionally to how much data you
have stored with them. You can express it as a tradeoff between cost/GB and
the time taken to retrieve your entire dataset

Google throttles your downloads to a fixed rate, so they're effectively
forcing you to one point in that space: (3 days, $0.01/GB). With Glacier, you
get a curve depending on how fast you want it. It's much more expensive at the
same speed (3 days, $0.10/GB) but you can go to one extreme of getting all
your data for free over the course of 20 months, or getting it all within 4
hours for about $1.80/GB.

So I guess it's fair to say that Glacier gives you more flexibility, but
Google's offering is a much better value at the particular point that it
optimizes for.

~~~
Dylan16807
Honestly it's hard for me to imagine a total emergency restore-EVERYTHING
situation that needs the data in under a day.

If it's not that much data you should have a local copy anyway. If it's
massive amounts of data is your connection even that fast? And how did you
wipe 50 servers at once?

~~~
vidarh
> And how did you wipe 50 servers at once?

Fire does that quite easily...

~~~
Dylan16807
That's destruction, not wiping. If you are buying new servers as part of
rebuilding you don't exactly need all the data downloaded in a 10 hour window.

~~~
vidarh
That's an absolutely irrelevant distinction: The data is gone.

And why, in this day of rapid provisioning via cloud providers, do you expect
a company to suffer the extended loss of waiting for new servers to want to
bring the data back?

~~~
Dylan16807
So you're talking about a company using entirely physical servers and
switching to an entirely virtual infrastructure, while also dealing with the
other effects of the disaster that hit them.

They're doing this in less than half a week, or assuming not all the backups
are live data they're doing this in less than a day.

I submit that this is an extremely atypical company, and that in practice a
company that just had a devastating fire is not going to be impacted more than
marginally by the download speed limit.

There are a good few scenarios where there's total data loss. There are much
fewer where you need to restore all the data in under a working day.

------
fencepost
I can't comprehend trusting data to a (single) 30TB SSD or even 10TB SSDs
given the regularly reported failure modes of "It's not a drive anymore."

Perhaps it's because I'm not doing anything where massive storage is a
requirement, but having data striped in RAID6 makes me happy. I'd be happy to
use SSD for the underlying medium, but I want something that's less prone to
single points of failure. Backups are all well and good, but what's the
interface speed of a drive like that? How long to restore a 20+TB backup?

~~~
mmebane
At least with SSDs, there's much less worry about your RAID 5/6 array self-
destructing while it's failing over to a hot spare. With hard drives of that
size, I'd only feel comfortable with full mirroring.

~~~
simplexion
Who in their right mind still uses RAID5 with spinning disks in a production
system? That is like not wearing a seatbelt and driving above speed limits
constantly.

~~~
deeviant
What do you do? mirror every drive?

~~~
simplexion
OBR10

~~~
deeviant
Thanks, it was an honest question. I'll look into OBR10.

Currently I'm at a small-ish startup and I have ~150 TB of data on a synology
nas. It's in 2 raid groups, both raid 6. Seemed safe enough.

 _edit_ Ah, right. From some reason I didn't make the connection that raid 10
was raid 0+1, it doesn't work for us simple because of the sheer amount of
data we need to store. Also, although it would be a real bitch if we lost
everything(like set us back a week+), most of the data is derived data, and we
have all the raw data in cold storage, so we could eventually rebuild the
array from scratch.

------
MCRed
I can't wait. Once I can reasonably replace everything with SSDs I will.

And then I'll never buy spinning rust again.

I dreamed of this eventuality in the 1990s. I didn't know what technology
would be used. I never expected EEPROMs would evolve in this direction (now
marketed as "FLASH") as they were so fickle and unreliable in those days.

This will allow lots of interesting things.

Imagine a laptop that's got its main RAM backed on a dedicated bit of high
speed flash... so it instantly powers off completely and instantly powers back
on completely.

Soon, we'll have the massive increase in storage capacity much like we've had
a massive increase in compute capacity to the point where you no longer really
think about it-- all computers are "fast".

------
wmf
The article predicts that SSD prices will fall from 30c/GB to under 5c/GB in
18 months. This seems like a case of citation needed.

~~~
STRiDEX
Can you cite predictions?

~~~
lappa
You can cite industry improvements in the manufacturing process that companies
say will effect the price at a certain point along with scientific
developments and in general claims made by actual corporations.

------
peter303
HP is working on a memrister based SSD with density of Flash and the speed of
transistors
[http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine-
dreams/).

~~~
ad_hominem
I believe they killed that off

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-
machi...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machine-
repurposes-design-around-conventional-technologies)

~~~
qzcx
Not killed off so much as delayed due to lack of ability to mass produce at a
decent price point so far. It is far from scrapped. It was over hyped and
optimistic to begin with. It just hit the reality that it has several decades
of work to catch up on to be on the same page as current tech.

------
monksy
Could someone explain the 3d storage innovation to me?

Wouldn't stacking flash cells like that be susceptible to interference?
(Heat/magnetic or electrical noise?)

~~~
Symmetry
Not really. The charges and currents in a flash chip don't interfere with each
other for the same reasons that they don't in any other chip. There's a
minimum distance you have to keep things apart but luckily it gets smaller
every process node. Heat would be a problem if it was like a processor but
you're generally only reading from or writing to one part of the chip at a
time so heat isn't a particular concern compared to a processor or DRAM.

------
ryanmarsh
So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry
level?

~~~
Teckla
_So does this mean Apple will finally stop shipping a 16GB iPhone as entry
level?_

Not to mention the iPad.

The original iPad came out over 5 years ago with 16 GB of storage. Entry level
iPads still have 16 GB of storage.

Given that iOS has gotten bigger and retina iPads made a lot of apps bigger,
entry level iPad storage has actually regressed considerably.

Pretty confusing, given that flash prices have gone down considerably in 5
years.

I guess you don't bank $200 billion by being generous to your customers.

~~~
curun1r
Complaining about overpriced/limited storage options in the iPad/iPhone is
like complaining about overpriced/limited food options at a sporting event,
airport or any other venue where you've got no other option than to buy from
an approved vendor.

With lock-in comes higher prices.

~~~
coldtea
There's no lock-in what's at play here for most people. You can get a
tablet/smartphone from several vendors, including Samsung, Google and
Microsoft and people switch from iOs to Android and back all the time. It's
not like apps are a huge investment or that it's hard to move your data
across.

These people WANT to buy the iPad/iPhone, instead of something else. So a more
accurate response would be "with desirability come higher prices".

~~~
simplexion
We have students who WANT to buy Apple products like crazy at the school I
work at. The majority of responses for why they want them is, "They look
pretty."

~~~
coldtea
Well, they do. But as a seasoned IT pro who cut his teeth on Sun OS and HP-UX
back in the day, having a high end machine, with a great screen, great battery
life and quite light to carry around that also has a friendly UI and runs a
full blown UNIX underneath but also gets all major proprietary programs is
nothing to sneer at either, pretty or not.

There's a reason even Linus Torvalds carried a MacBook Air (though I think he
found something even lighter now).

------
ksec
They are talking as if 3D NAND is free. The maximum of 64 layers is not yet
production ready AFAIK. Even the 32 is too expensive, we are talking about 8
or 16 layers coming soon , which when you include two nodes step back you are
talking about 2x to 4x improvement. 3D NAND isn't free to manufacture either.
When you add up the cost, 3D NAND will be no more then a continuation of SSD
falling prices according to its current tends in the coming years.

P.S - It just means it will prolongs the life of NAND and SSD will continue to
get faster, higher capacity and cheaper before hitting its limits.

------
bwy
I find great irony in statements like these when the motivation of every party
is considered. The idea is that prices are "in a free fall," i.e., they
haven't fallen completely yet. But this will encourage people to buy SSDs and
drive them in the very free fall of which the article speaks!

Experienced the same principle in my life a few weeks ago - I moved to a place
described as "gentrifying." Realized a week into staying there that I was one
of those people who was actually contributing to its gentrification! By no
means was it gentrified, though.

~~~
kenjackson
At least you were told it was "gentrifying", not that it was "gentrified". You
probably got a discount for moving into a neighborhood that was gentrifying.
Once gentrified, the discount probably largely disappears.

------
pacquiao882
They are just getting rid of stock before NVMe M.2 SSD's go mainstream with
10x performance and lower production costs compared to AHCI SATA3 SSD's.

[http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_h...](http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_headed_in_2015/)

------
sneak
This article makes a previously unasserted claim that Glacier uses tape. Is
this accurate? What is the source?

~~~
tammer
It's often assumed that Amazon uses tape for glacier but that's actually
unfounded. Amazon's keeping the details of glacier as a trade secret[1]

[1]: [http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-
bdx...](http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/)

------
markhahn
Flash has had a drop in price because it gained mainstream utility, and
therefore serious volume production. It's entirely unclear whether this will
continue.

The physics of flash cells is not all that promising: there's certainly no
Moore's gravy-train. 3D is a decent tweak, but it's not like 4D is coming
next. As flash cells shrink, they become flakier (which might not hurt drive-
writes-per-day, but is that the right metric?)

------
yuhong
What I am really interested is when SSDs will be cheap enough to be in common
OEM systems.

------
Turbo_hedgehog
Is keeping a SSD powered on enough to prevent bit rot?

~~~
MCRed
It should have no impact. It really is about write capacity. The little cells
can only handle being changed so many times before they wear out. The wearing
is a chemical/semi-conductor type problem.

It's not like DRAM where keeping power applied keeps the cells "fresh" (and in
DRAM it's done literally be refreshing each cell at a certain frequency.)

The simple equation is the more times a cell is erased the sooner it fails.
Write leveling and other software efforts work to spread around or eliminate
unnecessary writes.

But over the practical life of a drive (5-10 years?) being powered off will
not cause them to lose data.

Edit: I've been following FLASH technology since before the terms "FLASH" was
coined, back when it was called EEPROM -- Electrically Erasable Programmable
Read Only Memory, an evolution of PROMs (write once) and ERPOMS (erasable with
UV light). If there's a myth out there that flash drives just forget things,
I'd like to point out that I've had flash drives (low quality at that) from
the 1990s that were left for 20 years and then read successfully! Show some
citations of real evidence before you down vote me.

~~~
cjensen
That's incorrect. Charge leaks very slowly out of cells. It's not a big issue,
but it does happen. Powered-on SSD firmware knows about the problem and will
maintain the cells.

[1] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-
data-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-
retention)

~~~
acqq
And AnandTech quotes Intel materials who often boasts to have the most durable
drives. Imagine what happens to other ones.

~~~
philjohn
Samsung back up the 850 Pro with a 10 year/150TB host writes warranty.

The trick is moving back 2 processes, which alleviates some of the issues
they've faced with the 840 series.

~~~
acqq
The warranty is certainly not "it will keep the data 10 years without being
powered on." We discuss the topic of how long SSDs retain the data when
powered off. Intel says, powered off but stored on just 35 degrees C, only 14
weeks, as published by AnandTech:

[http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9248/3.PNG](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9248/3.PNG)

And Intel is proud to be more reliable than others. In one of their
presentations I've seen they show that they use some very high tech setups
(like accelerators!) to measure the degradations fast, and that the other
producers fare worse on their tests.

------
ghshephard
I find it surprising that most people aren't recognizing that SSDs don't even
need to come close to price parity to completely replace hard drives. Random
access alone makes them so much more valuable, and a good SSD is now worth
more than extra memory in terms of increasing the performance of a computer
system.

------
rorykoehler
Having had a failure rate above what I was used to with hdds I'd prefer to see
an increase in quality rather than a fall in price. It gets annoying having to
replace my os ssd every 18 months or so. My most recent phone's memory also
died after 30 months.

~~~
pixl97
Uh, what kind of SSDs are you buying that you're having that kind of failure
rate (god please don't say OCZ). I've been using Samsung and Intel SSDs for
years now with failure rates below the failure rates of WD drives (and well
below Seagate failure rates).

~~~
rorykoehler
SanDisk . They have always been quick to replace them. The last one they even
upgraded to a much more expensive model which makes me think the issue was
being widely experienced. If I were to buy today I would buy Samsung as I have
heard they are much more durable. Incidentally it was a Samsung phone that
died though I don't know who made the memory for that.

~~~
Vexs
There was a review of SSD lifespan a while back, they found the samsung 840
pro was able to survive something to the effect of 2 petabytes of wear before
failing. The worst of them all started to fail at 100TB, and failed at 900TB.
Unless you're running something with crazy IO, I can't imagine ever
practically running into that limit.

~~~
jordanthoms
Yeah, but the problem is that SSD failures usually have nothing to do with
flash wearing out, and more to do with catastrophic, sudden failures somewhere
else (mostly the controller AFAIK) causing the drive to stop doing anything at
all. I had a 840 Pro fail on me, hadn't had many writes but just stopped
showing up in the BIOS one day.

------
abandonliberty
I wonder how reliability is doing; Unlike HDDs SSDs have a very unpredictable
failure pattern, including sudden death rather than slow degradation.

If you want to ensure data is safe you need to run a raid 1 or online backup
service.

~~~
mcv
Are you saying HDDs can't suffer a sudden death? HD crashes aren't exactly
unheard of.

~~~
abandonliberty
>Mechanical failures account for about 60% of all drive failures.[2] While the
eventual failure may be catastrophic, most mechanical failures result from
gradual wear and there are usually certain indications that failure is
imminent. These may include increased heat output, increased noise level,
problems with reading and writing of data, or an increase in the number of
damaged disk sectors.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background)

------
bifrost
SSD technology still has a reliability hurdle, you can nuke one in a month if
you write to it constantly. Spinning media has much longer read/write
durability. Until there is parity its still a bit of an arms race for
capacity.

Hybrid drives are pretty awful so I don't think they'll stick around. I could
see Hierarchical Storage Management make a comeback and an entry to the
consumer space, but thats been esoteric at best.

~~~
toomuchtodo
False.

[http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-
experim...](http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-
theyre-all-dead)

~~~
cjensen
True, and I've done it! I accidentally used a consumer grade (Crucial M500) in
an application where endurance would be reached in less than a month.

In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose _any_ data.... but the
write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most
apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up
drive is so poor that it's hard to actually write enough extra data to fully-
fail.

Edit: Burning up an SSD was how I learned that TRIM is unnecessary: even
though many parts of the filesystem were stable and never re-written, the
bandwidth was even across the entire drive. The firmware noticed that some
cells were underused and moved the stable data off them so it could use up the
endurance evenly.

~~~
aNoob7000
Can you please elaborate on what application would basically kill an SSD in a
month? It is my understanding that the Crucial M500 drives support something
like 72TB of writes.

Please don't take any offense, I'm just interested in how you were using the
drive.

~~~
cjensen
Continuous record of 8 streams of 220Mb/s video. There were 10 SSDs for
storage in a RAID-6 configuration.

So the effective endurance of the RAID was (10 - 2) * 72TB = 720TB.

8 Streams of 220Mb/s is 220/s, 13.2GB/minute, 792GB/hour, 19TB/day. So about
38 days.

------
adibchoudhury
These estimates seem a bit exaggerated at this point. SSD is still lagging in
terms of capacity, and in my household we only have a handful of devices using
SSD. While it's become more widely-adopted for sure, HDD's are not "doomed"
until SSD capacity goes up and prices plummet. Still too expensive for an SSD.

------
mirimir
Total cost of ownership is another issue:

> Also, with much lower power use, there is a TCO saving to be added to the
> equation. Power savings work out at around $8/drive-year, so add another $40
> to the 5-year TCO balance and the hard-drive doesn't look so good.

And I wonder if Mr. O'Reilly has included the cost of power for cooling.

------
mirimir
Consumer SDDs are now inexpensive enough for desktop RAID. On Amazon, decent
consumer 240GB-1TB SDDs are available at $0.32-$0.40 per GB. And in my
experience, SSDs are so fast that even RAID6 arrays rebuild very quickly after
replacing a member. I use Linux software RAID.

------
tuzemec
Also the noise of the HDDs is killing me. I have quite a silent rig (fiddling
with music/audio in my spare time) and the most noisy thing was the HDD where
my audio samples were. So I've moved everything to SSD and I'm looking for
another 512GB to add.

------
kylorhall
I bought my 180GB SSDs for < 50 cents per GB like 3 years ago and it's barely
better than that right now. Storage in general has more to do with
availability and demand than technology, there's plenty of times when they've
gone up in price.

~~~
bobbles
For me it's like the osbourne effect coming into play.. I would like to switch
to full SSD, but I'm not going to do it until the price drops, which if enough
people had the same idea, means the demand drops, so the price stays the
same... repeat

------
robocat
Fab manufacturing capacity doesn't magically increase because of 3D chips.

------
bcheung
I surprised they didn't include any graphs. I'm very curious to see the trends
visually.

Prices per GB are still very far off. It's hard to believe they will achieve
parity that soon. Here's hoping though.

------
forscha
Is the hdd demise indeed expected so quickly?

~~~
snowwrestler
SSDs need to be powered up fairly often to maintain data integrity. So,
they're great for the drives in computers, but for external or backup drives--
which might only be powered up occasionally, spinning magnetic disks will
still be a better choice for a while, it seems.

edit: maybe not. Bringing this article up from samcheng's post below:

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-
data-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-
retention)

~~~
cpr
Do you have a source for this? Just curious.

~~~
Bill_Dimm
[https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24](https://blog.korelogic.com/blog/2015/03/24)

~~~
msie
The title is pure irony ("SSD Storage - Ignorance of Technology is No
Excuse"). See an another link posted here. Also from personal experience I
have had no problem with an SSD that wasn't powered for 7 days.

