It would be really cool to have access to fast SSD storage on our linodes, sold by the GB.

Maybe someone's running a web app, and they figure that if they had 7GB of really fast storage, they could make it run very fast. So maybe they'd be willing to pay $5/GB/month, or whatever.

I don't know what the numbers would be -- and maybe it doesn't make sense now.

But disks are a big bottleneck on virtual systems. SSDs seem to be the future.

And Linode has a great track record of adjusting prices as costs change -- you guys keep bumping up the amount of RAM we get, the amount of storage we get, etc. So customers could feel confident that if they jumped on SSD storage now, they could ride the prices down as stuff got cheaper.

I think that's the key to what I'm saying here. Just put it out there, for whatever it costs, and lower prices as the costs go down.

Relevant: http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4535&highlight=ssd

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Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

Actually, Linode has been pretty poor at upgrading disk space over time. In 2003 the $19.95 plan was 4 GB of disk if you paid yearly, and this was not very much disk space at the time. 6 years later, the $19.95 plan comes with 16 GB of disk space, which is also a rather piddling amount given the current cost of disks.

So Linode offers 4x disk space for the same price, when in the 6 year time period, the price of disks has gone done about 40x.

Linode hard drive space is now 10x more expensive when compared to the price of consumer hard drives as it was 6 years ago. I'm not sure I'd qualify that as a great track record of adjusting prices as costs change.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why Linode can't offer more hard drive space for the price. It's the ONLY thing I am unhappy about with Linode. And I have been unhappy about it for 6 years!

All that being said, I'd be interested in SSDs on Linode. However, with Linode's pricing structure, space on a Linode SSD drive would cost approximately $30 PER GIGABYTE PER MONTH. So 20 GB of SSD space would be $14,400 per year (Linode currently charges $2/GB/month for regular hard drive space, and SSDs cost approximately 15x the cost of regular hard drives right now, so Linode's monthly price for SSD space would presumably be 15x more per GB).

I don't think anyone would be interested in 20 GB of Linode drive space for $14,400 per year, no matter how fast it was ...

Linode aren't buying consumer hard drives and surely the biggest problem is that disks are 40x bigger/cheaper but they aren't 40x faster.

$30/GB/mth would be pretty cool for your innodb logs.

Has anyone out there is VPS-provider-land thought about SSD's as cheaper-than-RAM-but-faster-than-disk-big-fat swap files? Hmmm probably a bad idea - KISS.

Could you look at historical prices for server-grade hard drives, as bji did for consumer-grade? I bet you'll find it's a parallel story.

You guys are assuming that increases in CPU cost and RAM density haven't allowed Linode to increase the number of Linodes on a host.

That should translate into either a lower monthly cost for Linode customers, or higher resource allotment per customer. The prices haven't gone down, but the resource allotment has gone up, a little. But hard disk allotment went from poor in 2003 to abysmal in 2009. Of course, I think most other shared-resource hosting services provide about the same disk space per $.

Someday a host is going to rock the boat by offering decent disk price for the $, and then Linode and other providers will have to follow suit.

Well, consider this. The claim is that disk costs have decreased by a factor of 40. This is, of course, irrelevant.

Linode uses, AFAIK, a 4-disk RAID-10 setup. This limits their total capacity. If we assume they used SATA then (SATA was introduced in 2003) and don't use consumer-level drives, the maximum usable capacity would have been:

2003: 240 GB ( 120 * 4 / 2)
2009: 2000 GB ( 1000 * 4 / 2)

That is an increase of 833%.

Over the same period, Linode has increased capacity by 400%. Not keeping up, sure, but not quite as abysmal as is being claimed. Another consideration is that Linode must necessarily lag behind current technology due to the fact that capacity upgrades aren't as simple as using bigger drives in new systems; sufficient additional capacity must be brought online to support all existing users on the new platform. This can be a significant investment. Coupled with the fact that we could, for all we know, be on the verge of another capacity increase that would further reduce this gap, the rate of progression seems reasonable to me...

So disk space started out poor, is growing less than half as fast as it could, and that's hunky-dory?

It sounds like you're making a few basic assumptions with that statement that I'm not sure are realistic.

* Linode is buying all new hard drives for all existing servers today. That's not realistic, there's a debatable service lifetime of the hardware that has to be factored in.

* It might make sense for a hosting provider to buy 2 TB drives if they expect a long life expectancy, but my bet is still on 1 TB or 1.5 TB today.

* 2 TB does not equal 2 TB, 1 TB does not equal 1 TB... Using the 1 TB that was believed to be used, thats around 936 MB of usable space. Take the original (still?) ratio of 40/1 on the lowest tier, that would be a maximum of around 23.4 MB per user. That of course doesn't account for the host and any of its related storage or the capability to provide users with additional temporary extra storage.

* None of the arguments consider the bandwidth, which is secondary, but will limit the usefulness of the data. If you're just using it as an external drive, maybe a different solution that is geared towards that purpose would make more sense.

That's not to say that more storage isn't appreciated or that users don't need access to more storage space, but its not quite as abysmal as it might seem at first glance. Today you can use other providers such as Amazon S3 as a supplement or maybe in the future a data storage solution will be offered by Linode directly.

It's not growing half as fast as it could. If that were the case, the allocations would be far smaller than they are now. Lagging behind by a fixed amount of time (one doubling) is not growing at half the speed. It's growing at the same speed, delayed.



There are, AFAIK, no enterprise 1.5 or 2 TB drives yet.



Errm, none of this makes any sense. I think you mean 2 TB does not equal 2 TiB, and 1TB is 931.3 GiB... I have no idea where you're getting 936 MB from.

It's a reminder that a "2 TB" or "1 TB" drive does not yield "2 TB" or "1 TB" of useful storage respectively. A 1 TB drive, formatted with ext3, yields around 936 GB. The MB is just a typo.

It sounds like you're confusing TB, TiB, GB, and GiB.

Not at all.

No -- filesystem overhead, journal, root reserved superblocks, etc.

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Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.