I had a terrible experience through all my life with HDDs. Slow af, sector loss, corruption, OS corruption... I am traumatized. I got 8TB NvMe for less than $500... Since then I have not a single trouble (well except I n electric failure, BTRFS CoW tends to act weird and sometimes doesnt boot, you need manual intervention)
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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My sample size of myself has had 1 drive fail in decades. It was a solid state drive. Thankfully it failed in a strangely intermittent way and I was able to recover the data. But still, it surprised me as one would assume solid state would be more reliable. That spinning rust has proven to be very reliable. But regardless I'm sure SSD will be/are better in every way.
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I doubt it. SSDs are subject to quantuum tunneling. This means if you don't power up an SSD once in 2-5 years, your data is gone. HDDs have no such qualms. So long as they still spin, there's your data and when they no longer do, you still have the heads inside.
So you have a use case that SSDs will never replace, cold data storage. I use them for my cold offsite back ups.
Nothing in this article is talking about cold storage. And if we are talking about cold storage, as others gave pointed out, HHDs are also not a great solution. LTO (magnetic tape) is the industry standard for a good reason!
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You're wrong. HDD need about as much frequently powering up as SSD, because the magnetization gets weaker.
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Sorry dude, but bit rot is a very real thing on HDDs. They're magnetic media, which degrades over time. If you leave a disk cold for 2-5 years, there's a very good chance you'll get some bad sectors. SSDs aren't immune from bit rot, but that's not through quantum tunneling - not any more than your CPU is affected by it at least.
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Probably at some point as prices per TB continue to come down. I don't know anyone buying a laptop with a HDD these days. Can't imagine being likely to buy one for a desktop ever again either. Still got a couple of old ones active (one is 11 years old) but I do plan to replace them with SSDs at some point.
But you don't need 32TB storage per drive in your laptop.
I don't know that sounds like a reasonable size for the new GTA.
Haven't they said that about magnetic tape as well?
Some 30 years ago?
Isn't magnetic tape still around? Isn't even IBM one of the major vendors?
Anyone who has said that doesn't know what they're talking about. Magnetic tape is unparalleled for long-term/archival storage.
This is completely different. For active storage, solid-state has been much better than spinning rust for a long time, it's just been drastically more expensive. What's being argued here is that it's not performant and while it might be more expensive initially, it's less expensive to run and maintain.
Tape will survive, SSDs will survive. Spinning rust will die
Right up until an EMP wipes out all our data. I still maintain that we should be storing all our data on vinyl, doing it physically is the only guarantee.
Microsoft has project Silica where they store data in glass. Being electromagnetic field-proof is one of the stated goals.
That's a WORM medium though, so really purely for storage. Which is still extremely useful of course.
That's all circumstantial.
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Just replace then all with flash, along with bluray (or other optical storage) for archival.
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My datacenter is 80% nvme at this point. Just naturally. It's crazy.
Nvme is terrible value for storage density. There is no reason to use it except when you need the speed and low latency.
There's a cost associated with making that determination and managing the storage tiering. When the NVME is only 3x more expensive per amount of data compared to HDD at scale, and "enough" storage for OS volume at the chepaest end where you can either have a good enough HDD or a good enough SDD at the same price, then OS volume just makes sense to be SSD.
In terms of "but 3x is pretty big gap", that's true and does drive storage subsystems, but as the saying has long been, disks are cheap, storage is expensive. So managing HDD/SDD is generally more expensive than the disk cost difference anyway.
BTW, NVME vs. non-NVME isn't the thing, it's NAND v. platter. You could have an NVME interfaced platters and it would be about the same as SAS interfaced platters or even SATA interfaced. NVME carried a price premium for a while mainly because of marketing stuff rather than technical costs. Nowadays NVME isn't too expensive. One could make an argument that number of PCIe lanes from the system seems expensive, but PCIe switches aren't really more expensive than SAS controllers, and CPUs have just so many innate PCIe lanes now.
Hdds were a fad, I'm waiting for the return of tape drives. 500TB on a $20 cartridge and I can live with the 2 minute seek time.
It's not a real hard disk unless you can get it to walk across the server room anyway.
Tape drives are still definitely a thing.
If you exclude the introductory price of the drive and needing specialized software to read/write to it it's very affordable €/TB
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