RSSSeagate: Solid-State Disks Will Never Replace Magnetic Storage
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published August 24, 2007, 1:54 PM
A statement to BetaNews today by one of Seagate Technology's top managers indicates that some of the content of yesterday's Wall Street Journal story -- whose original online headline was "Seagate to Enter Flash Memory Market," prior to having been edited -- may have been inaccurate.
Josh Tinker, market development manager for Seagate's Personal Compute division (not a typo), told BetaNews this afternoon that his company does indeed plan to enter the solid-state disk drive market, but has no plans to shift production -- as reports yesterday indicated -- away from traditional hard disk drives any time soon.
"Seagate CEO Bill Watkins did state the company's plans to also introduce its own solid-state drive products some time in 2008," Tinker told us, confirming at least that part of the WSJ story. "This will augment what is already the broadest product line in the drive industry."
But the Journal also reported that Seagate was likely to begin its move toward flash-based storage with an entry into the hybrid drive market, where flash memory is used as an interim cache to support an HDD on the back end. As many of its customers already know, Seagate already began shipping hybrid drives last March. Tinker added, "We believe a large part of the storage market will adopt this [hybrid] technology going forward."
However, Tinker made clear, "We are not moving away from rotating magnetic storage in any way, but are adding solid-state products to our portfolio, including hybrid and SSD."
Tinker did not comment on whether Seagate would plan to invest in a flash memory manufacturer in whole or in part, as many financial analysts yesterday presumed the WSJ story had reported. Seagate had at one time a 40% stake in flash memory manufacturer SanDisk, but later sold its shares during the onset of the flash price wars. Now that SanDisk's fortunes have rebounded, many believe Seagate regrets that sale.
But regardless of whatever Seagate as a company feels about flash memory, Josh Tinker's personal opinion on solid-state drives is a matter of public record. Last May, during a panel on the topic of hybrid and solid-state drives at WinHEC 2007, Tinker responded to attendees' questions about when his company or the industry at large would make the shift to flash, by saying point-blank that it would never happen.
Flash memory does have a rightful place in storage technology, Tinker argued, and that place is in hybrid drives. The geography of memory as a storage component has yet to be fully understood and appreciated, so initial tests regarding the reliability of memory versus spinning disks have yet to take into account the practical uses of SSDs that will emerge. In a discussion with us after the panel, Tinker invoked this metaphor: We've yet to start taking SSDs with us on camping trips.
Once we know what the real-world operating parameters of real SSDs would be, he argued, we would be able to compute new metrics for mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) that would account for SSDs' true performance. Once that happens, he said, we may want to re-examine claims that flash memory MTBF stands tall over that of HDDs.
But that was last May, and a company's perspective can change quite dramatically in one quarter. Something has certainly changed, if only slightly, since one year ago, when Seagate's Watkins told BusinessWeek magazine not to expect his company to ever make a serious investment in flash.
In that interview, Watkins said he once asked the leaders of the big three flash memory manufacturers -- Toshiba, SanDisk, and Hitachi -- "If you believe in flash so much, then sell me your hard-drive business. None of them would."
To >> those with your head in the sand...remember that "floppies will never be gone"????? I didn't want to believe that, either, but...............
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|I got one of those solid state ZEUS 8GB SATA drives... On a test bed machine with vista on it. Boy is it a fast boot up. like 10 secs... Even with everything running highest resource heavy settings, and large Pagefiles, Its surprisingly fast... 2 GB ram too of course...
If everyones OS was on one of these and it was extreamly stable(which its not ATM) It would change the way OSes are thought about overnight.
Right now I ghost out my Solid state 8gb image for those rare times when the image gets corrupted from a bad shutdown or something... That seems to be the only bad thing right now on them... All my data and Movies and music, ect are stored on my 300 GB SATA and IDE drives 3 in all. which is great cause with the OS running so well, everything else is fine on standard storage for access.
For the record I only had to ghost the image ONE time so far... And the manufacturer spec state that the drives retain their storage for up to 10 years without power... So if they can just get the Hotswap disconnect issue; (if its shut down poorly or if its a USB drive and pulled from power prematurely, there is a small chance you loose all data on the drive); fixed It will be fantastic. I can not blame them for wanting to pursue this option... it will be your OS drive of the future for sure.
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|OK. I officially want that setup.
Now all I have to do is figure out where to get one of the 146MB IOPS models.
$71,477 isn't too much for a HDD, is it? :>
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|Yea it helps I do Government contracting and get some military goodies to play with. As I understand it these drive are not very affordable yet. lol
You know I am not a fan of Vista in general PC_Tool... But on this testbed machine it runs like a dream... you can find the drives and specs here... http://www.stec-inc.com/product/zeusssd.php
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|*grins*
Already found the specs. Found the price, too. (read above)
Kinda why I knew about the model and size, etc.
Looks yummy, but sadly, out of even my league.
jerk.. :p
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|They cannot stop progress. Magnetic tapes and traditional HDD are on the way to nonexistence.
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|Solid State Drives could replace Magnetic Storage. Cost is already WAY down around 10 bucks a Gig. Reliablity they claim is a issue but if thats tue why are they making hybrid drives. They also claim size is a problem but a 2 gig stick is no bigger than my thumbnail 8 gigs smaller than my pinky finger. Where they are getting this flash drives cant be done is beyond me. Is there something I am not getting?
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|Since when is $10/GB considered affordable outside of Flash memory and RAM?
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|LTO Tape is reliable and the only means to safely transport data backups offsite. One LTO-4 tape holds 800GB native or 1.6TB compressed capacity.
Disk is good for local restorations of small files. If you where going to do a full restore, its far faster to use Tape. With throughput of LTO-4 at 1.1TB per hour you would need a single diskgroup of 112 x 15K hard drives to equal it.
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|Are you kidding? Tapes are one of the worst kinds of backups available. Slow, unreliable and useless if you don't have the right model tape drive to read the damn thing. I'd much rather be taking home a RAID drive each night as opposed to a tape: faster, easily accessible and far more useful than a tape.
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|and useless if you don't have the right model tape drive to read the damn thing.
uhhh...
..you mean the drive you used to create the backup?
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|Obviously you've never had to backup 2TB Databases before. Tape is the best. Now, we do SAN to SAN replications of VDisks, but disk 2 disk is still expensive. Small scale in your house, yes, buy a damn Maxtor onetouch and be done with it...
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|Are you really replying to me, or did you hit the wrong button? I've been defending tape-based backup.
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|Nah, meant to reply to Tenoq, wrong button. He obviously doesn't work in a DataCenter, as he'd know that Tape is still a very reliable, viable option for most backups of large amounts of data.
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|In the forseeable future with the price differential between more traditional magnetic memory (and the leaps they have and are making in density) and flash memory, there is no surprise here.
Niche markets may justify the expense, but generally speaking he's right.
And tape is dead too...right...
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|lawls.
I brought out my phonograph last weekend. Been listening to records all week.
*sigh*
Music used to be good...
(Thos econfused by the use of the term "record", can click on the word above for it
s definition)
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|LMAO. I remember those... barely! :P (Just kidding, I even used to own them.)
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|Tapes are only used by fools stuck in an archaic, dream world where they believe tape backup is reliable.
Anyone who has had to go through the hassle of spending hours trying to recover data off a tape only to receive a message that a tape backup is corrupt has moved to more dependable media long ago.
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|I'm 36. No need to visit that link. I'm actually too embarrassed to mention what's in my vinyl collection. :)
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|Most tape backup programs (decent ones, anyway), will verify a backup after it is completed.
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|Yah, then it will say, "completed with errors," and you get to start all over. The only time I've had an erroneous backup to hard drive was when the disk itself had bad sectors. I fixed it once with HDD Regenerator, and the problem hasn't repeated itself since.
After I finish writing the archive to hard disk, I boot back into Windows and burn it to DVDs. Things go so smoothly these days; I tell you from the bottom of my heart that I don't miss tapes one bit. Never again will I entrust my valuable data to a tape. They're anything but reliable.
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|Really? A phonograph? A friend of mine has one of those. It doesn't work, handsome thing though it is.
I still have a record player, but I haven't used it in a few years. I spent $300 on a tape deck with two motors and Dolby B, C, and S, but I haven't used it since forever, either.
I've still yet to warm up to iPods. That'll probably be the thing to replace CDs, but I'm gonna give it a bit more of a wait before I make my move to upgrade.
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|Yah, then it will say, "completed with errors," and you get to start all over.
No, you replace the tape.
I boot back into Windows and burn it to DVDs.
*So* much more reliable than tape *laughs*
I can get 80GB per tape. That would take ~20 DVDs. Sure, if we wanted to hire someone to swap DVDs all day...
Funny stuff. Thanks.
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|Sounds a little like Gate's comment that nobody would ever need more than 640k of ram.
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|I'd say buried for inaccuracy, but this isn't digg...
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|Except he didn't say that.
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|No? And he never said either that the Internet would be a passing fad? Right...
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|Yeah... and OS/2 is the future! :)
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|Which is a shame, because then I wouldn't have to read the crap Dave posts whenever something vaguely Sony-related appears. ;)
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|What Seagate actually said was they didn't think Flash would replace Magnetic drives in the foreseeable future due to *overall costs*.
Frankly, I agree. Until they drop below $1/GB, solid-state drives will be to expensive for general use.
That said, I do see a market for these drives. For high end use, they can make great server storage for infrastructure servers. Moreover, I know some hardcore gamers that will buy them along with some graphics/video designers.
As for hybrid drives, it would be nice to put Windows' swap file and search indexes on the flash side. Possibly even the OS itself.
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|I totally agree. It has been the price of solid state that has kept it off the market for large storage. Also, I think there is a lot of profit in magnetic drives at this time and companies aren't willing to part with that yet. I hope to live long enuff to see this happen.
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|It's not just the manufacturing costs, GoodThings2Life. What Seagate has told me repeatedly - a position which I don't think has changed - is that the total cost of ownership case for the consumer has yet to be made, and that SSD's general reliability has yet to be proven.
-SF3
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|You're absolutely right, so I would like to, happily, restate my position as "overall costs" rather than "manufacturing costs."
I was in no way criticizing your article (for a change, haha), and I don't disagree that's what they've said. My initial post was not clear that, according to CNET, they were quoted in BusinessWeek as having made a case against the manufacturing costs. :)
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