Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Posted May 13, 2015 20:25 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (guest, #2285)
In reply to: Trading off safety and performance in the kernel by zblaxell
Parent article: Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

This price per gigabyte making SSDs too expensive idea just keeps moving the goalposts.

I remember when people were claiming $1 per GB was the magic price point. Then it was $0.50 per GB.

As long as spinning hard drives are cheaper per GB there will always be people claiming SSD is too expensive. But at some point it gets to be like claiming your laptop needs a tape drive or a floppy.

Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Posted May 13, 2015 21:27 UTC (Wed) by reubenhwk (guest, #75803) [Link] (4 responses)

Please still using tape drives should be recycled along with their crappy electronics.

Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Posted May 13, 2015 21:28 UTC (Wed) by reubenhwk (guest, #75803) [Link] (3 responses)

Please -> *People*

Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Posted May 13, 2015 21:43 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

tape drives still have a better cost profile when dealing with very large data volumes

Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Posted May 13, 2015 22:01 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

And yet you still don't want one in your laptop, which is why I compared spinning hard disks to tape drives. A spinning disk is rapidly approaching a tape drive in speed and general usefulness.

Trading off safety and performance in the kernel

Posted May 13, 2015 22:26 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> tape drives still have a better cost profile when dealing with very large data volumes

Sorta, sometimes, and not really.. depending on your use case.

If you actually want to be able to access to your data in any sort of reasonable time frame then throwing the cheapest servers possible stuff full of 3.5 inch 7200rpm drives is far far better option. For money, time, and sanity. :)

SSHD

Posted May 14, 2015 16:22 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> As long as spinning hard drives are cheaper per GB there will always be people claiming SSD is too expensive. But at some point it gets to be like claiming your laptop needs a tape drive or a floppy.

As long as you can have more storage for the same price, why would you not? Pictures and movies don't need SSD performance at all.

Asking whether SSDs will win over spinning drives is like asking whether L1 caches will win over L2 caches.

Desktop users have solved this problem long ago: they get one small and cheap SSD for the system and applications + one big and cheap HD for pure storage. For laptops SSHDs look interesting. Two drives in a single enclosure.

There is however something entirely different which is killing spinning drives much faster than SSD price points: the cloud. Making the idea of local storage itself obsolete. Laptops with a small and dirty cheap eMMC used mainly as a network cache.