<story><title>Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants</title><url>http://www.anandtech.com/show/11037/seagate-to-shut-down-one-of-its-largest-hdd-assembly-plants</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vidarh</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not that simple. How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year? How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)? How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?&lt;p&gt;SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you&amp;#x27;re not getting the right picture.</text></item><item><author>Taek</author><text>You can buy HDDs for $20 &amp;#x2F; TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.</text></item><item><author>shiftpgdn</author><text>My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don&amp;#x27;t think mechanical disks are long for this world.&lt;p&gt;For our next storage expansion it&amp;#x27;s ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash&amp;#x2F;SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don&amp;#x27;t have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tw04</author><text>&amp;gt; How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)?&lt;p&gt;The maintenance on enterprise storage is generally a percentage of purchase price.  So it&amp;#x27;s actually cheaper.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year?&lt;p&gt;4.5 watts idle&amp;#x2F;8 watts max for a spinning drive vs. 4.5 watts idle&amp;#x2F;11 watts max for a large capacity SSD (15TB Samsung).  The power consumption thing was a much better story comparing 3.5&amp;quot; 15k RPM drives.  7200 RPM drives it&amp;#x27;s basically a wash unless you&amp;#x27;re talking about relatively small capacity SSDs.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s really the crux of the issue.  &lt;i&gt;SPINNING&lt;/i&gt; drives are not dead.  &lt;i&gt;FAST&lt;/i&gt; spinning drives are dead.  10k&amp;#x2F;15k drives are going to see the end of their useful life in the modern datacenter far faster than anyone predicted 2 years ago.  Outside of legacy systems I would expect sales of 10k RPM drives to fall off a cliff if not completely disappear before the end of 2020.</text></comment>
<story><title>Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants</title><url>http://www.anandtech.com/show/11037/seagate-to-shut-down-one-of-its-largest-hdd-assembly-plants</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vidarh</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not that simple. How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year? How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)? How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?&lt;p&gt;SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you&amp;#x27;re not getting the right picture.</text></item><item><author>Taek</author><text>You can buy HDDs for $20 &amp;#x2F; TB. There are companies with millions of TB. Unless SSDs can meet that price point, HDDs have a very comfortable place in society.</text></item><item><author>shiftpgdn</author><text>My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don&amp;#x27;t think mechanical disks are long for this world.&lt;p&gt;For our next storage expansion it&amp;#x27;s ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash&amp;#x2F;SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don&amp;#x27;t have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>Yes but when you are looking at Petabyte scale system, unless those data are Hot and IOPs are concerned, HDD still wins given it is 10x cheaper.&lt;p&gt;And NAND has already hit the curve where it isn&amp;#x27;t going to get cheaper every year. NAND price is actually on the rise. Smaller Node is now actually more expensive, multiple layer are hard to yield.&lt;p&gt;So relatively speaking the 10x gap between HDD and SSD wont change in the next 5 years or so.</text></comment>