Having used a few SSDs I am a big fan of this technology. It's quite clear to me that rotating platter hard drives will, within the next ten years, maybe even 5 years, become a thing of the past - and deservedly so; I can't imagine a more antiquated technology than a metal disk spinning around at high speeds with a mechanically actuated arm as the read element.

Given that SSDs are inevitably going to displace rotating drives from the market ... when would you wager a bet that we'll see them in Linodes?

As I understand it, Linode uses two 1 TB drives per system; at today's prices, this is probably a couple of hundred bucks per Linode host. 2 TB of SSD would be something like $5,000, so clearly it's cost prohibitive at the moment. But maybe in two or three years the cost will have come down sufficiently?

The benefits of SSDs would be numerous:

- A potential increase in reliability (although SSDs are quite new, so they haven't been proven in the market, nor refined for as long as platter drives have) - Patriot is offering 10 year warranties on their SSD products and I'd be surprised if other manufactures don't eventually do the same.

- Greatly enhanced performance. There is no greater performance enhancement available than an upgrade from platter drive to SSD, for many workloads

- Reduced heat, noise, power requirements

- Possible form factor improvements - SSDs can be much smaller than hard drives without sacrificing any performance or increasing manufacturing costs significantly, so maybe a 1U server could hold 4 or 8 1.8 inch SSDs instead of 2 platter drives

So my bet is that in 2 years, we'll see SSDs used experimentally in Linodes and that in 3 years, Linode will switch over to SSDs.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

We complain plenty about lack of disk space here already, and with good reason. It'll be a very long time before SSDs reach parity with spinning platters on the $/GB front.

But maybe the future lies in some relatively small amount of SSD space for each of us for the main system, and then access to a much larger (spinning platter) SAN.

ORLY?

Nice one

Hard to say which one I hated the most... but probably cassette tapes. Punch cards had a big problem if you dropped the stack and they spilled all over, but they sure beat the heck out of paper tape and cassettes.

Flush toilet technology is even more antiquated than that.

James

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear:

I can't imagine a more antiquated computer technology still in use than a metal disk spinning around at high speeds blah blah blah ...

Yes but in a few years, it will be economical to have 2 TB of SSD per server. Admittedly, this only gets them to where the current hard disk capacity is at on Linodes, but then again, the pace of increasing storage in Linodes has been pretty slow over the past 6 years. So I don't expect Linode will be needing 20 TB per server any time soon.

And by the time 2 TB on a single SSD is economical, the SSD technology is probably "antiquated" as well, being replaced by something even better.

bji: you're also taking into account the 100K+ erase cycles? A place with many Linodes per physical server with unknown I/O workloads is sure to hit that limit sooner than for a conventional dedicated server.

With good wear levelling this is not an issue. An SSD drive will last longer than a spinning platter drive; Patriot is giving 10 year warranties on their SSD drives, and I don't see too many traditional hard drive manufacturers doing the same.

That being said, SSDs are fairly new tech so reliability may not be quite as good now as it is likely to be in a few years for these devices. It's all a bit of an unknown as the drives haven't been in the wild long enough to find out how well the wear levelling algorithms work in the real world.

Intel's original 80GB x25-m was rated to write 100GB per day for 5 years before having issues. Their 160GB model could presumably do that for 10.

Their 64GB x-25e would presumably be able to write 80GB per day for 50 years, or something in that ballpark. Point is, the SLC drives won't wear out during the lifetime of a Linode host machine. Even the MLC drives from Intel probably have a sufficient lifespan to be useful, although they're still far too small.

I believe the transistor was invented before the rotating hard drive...

And the winner is: Babbage's Difference Engine #2 (designed in the 19th century - Nathan Myhrvold has a working copy).

_________________
/ Peter

I do believe SSD's will become the future of hard drives. They are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and they are getting bigger. I saw a high-end SSD that holds 1TB of data for $5000. In a couple of years, it will go down lots. Expect SSD's in servers very soon.

The 1 TB SSDs have come down a bit, but not quite enough for my personal taste yet...

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/03/oczs ... timeframe/