On Fri, 28 Nov 2014 16:14:03 +0800, Timothy Sipples <[email protected]> wrote: > >Setting aside current pricing, what are the characteristics of hard disks >that make them better suited to particular use cases than (modern, current) >SSD?
You make a fair point that if pricing is not an object, then there's no particular use case for spinning disk that comes to mind. If you figure that the durability issues can be overcome with over-provisioning, then the the durability issue is simply a price issue as well. (Mostly, I'm not sure if SSDs are more or less susceptible to data rot simply sitting unused on a shelf.) So the question would be how quickly can SSD pricing can catch (and likely have to pass to deal with the durability/over-provisioning) issue? If SSD capacity follows Moore's law and disk doesn't improve substantially, that could be as soon as 6 years or so. It would be interesting to find some historical disk and SSD capacity pricing over the last 6 years to see if that looks plausible. Hmmm.... According to the wayback machine, Newegg November 2008 best SSD price was $2.25/GB. Best hard drive price easily accessible was $0.12/GB. Today Newegg's best SSD prices are about $0.38 and best HDD prices are just over $0.03/GB. Make of that as you will, but my guess is that over the next 10 years, spinning HD capacity will remain cheaper than SSD. But at relatively small capacities, the price difference will likely become immaterial. Scott ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
