this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Toshiba exec claims hard drives are 7X cheaper than SSDs and will continually evolve for large datacenters (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 8 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] qupada@kbin.social 40 points 8 months ago

We've done this exercise recently for multi-petabyte enterprise storage systems.

Not going to name brands, but in both cases this is usable (after RAID and hot spares) capacity, in a high-availability (multi-controller / cluster) system, including vendor support and power/cooling costs, but (because we run our own datacenter) not counting a $/RU cost as a company in a colo would be paying:

  • HDD: ~60TiB/RU, ~150W/RU, ~USD$ 30-35/TB/year
  • Flash: ~250TiB/RU, ~500W/RU, ~USD$ 45-50/TB/year

Note that the total power consumption for ~3.5PB of HDD vs ~5PB of flash is within spitting distance, but the flash system occupies a third of the total rack space doing it.

As this is comparing to QLC flash, the overall system performance (measured in Gbps/TB) is also quite similar, although - despite the QLC - the flash does still have a latency advantage (moreso on reads than writes).

So yeah, no. At <1.5× the per-TB cost for a usable system - the cost of one HDD vs one SSD is quite immaterial here - and at >4× the TB-per-RU density, you'd have to have a really good reason to keep buying HDDs. If lowest-possible-price is that reason, then sure.

Reliability is probably higher too, with >300 HDDs to build that system you're going to expect a few failures.