HGST – The SSD Guy Blog

Is an HDD/SSD Price Crossover Coming Soon?

The SSD Guy was recently asked whether HDDs would continue, at least through 2019, to remain preferable to SSDs as cost-effective high-capacity storage. The answer was “Yes”.

Longtime readers will note that I steadfastly maintain that HDD and SSD gigabyte prices are unlikely to cross for a very long time. Historically, a gigabyte of NAND flash has cost between ten to twenty times as much as a gigabyte of HDD. Let’s look at where Objective Analysis expects things to go by 2019.

Our current projections call for NAND price per gigabyte to reach 4.4 cents in 2019. I would expect for HDD to still be 1/10th to 1/20th of that price. Most likely 1/10th, since we expect for NAND flash to be in a significant oversupply at that time and will be selling at cost.

If HDD prices continue to hover around $50, then a 2019 HDD price of 0.44 to 0.22 cents per gigabyte (1/10th to 1/20th of the price of NAND flash) would imply an average HDD capacity of 11-23TB.

A couple of weeks ago, on December 2, 2015, Western Digital’s HGST introduced its Continue reading “Is an HDD/SSD Price Crossover Coming Soon?”

SanDisk Rolls Out InfiniFlash

The following post is an excerpt of an article Objective Analysis submitted to the Pund-IT Weekly Review for 11 March, 2015.

With a webcast in the style of the big system makers like EMC and Oracle, SanDisk announced its InfiniFlash flash appliance. InfiniFlash is a box that crams a whopping 500 terabytes into only 3U of rack space.

How big is 500 terabytes? It’s more bytes than SanDisk’s entire flash output for 2001.

SanDisk boasts that InfiniFlash is a “category-defining product”, and pointed to the fact that IDC, who provided support for the roll-out, created a new “Big Data Flash” storage product category for this device.

The system boasts performance of one million random-read IOPS, which is impressive, but doesn’t give much indication of how it performs in standard enterprise dataflow, which is generally assumed to consist of a 70/30 split of reads and writes. (I should mention here that Objective Analysis published a survey of users’ IOPS and latency needs which can be purchased on our website.)

Price is a major focus for this product. SanDisk says that it will sell systems bundled with software at less than Continue reading “SanDisk Rolls Out InfiniFlash”

WDC’s HGST Intros 12G SAS MLC SSDs

In case you didn’t have enough abbreviations in your life, The SSD Guy brings you the headline above, with the promise that the news below is really interesting: HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technology, but now a division of WDC – Western Digital Corp.) has brought out a new line of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs based on MLC flash. These are a part of the UltraStar line.

Whereas HGST’s first-generation UltraStar SAS SSDs used SLC flash, the new SSDs are based on 25nm MLC flash but offer the same warranties as HGST’s prior generation. Even so, performance for the new SSDs is significantly faster than that of their SLC-based predecessors, with no reduction in wear or lifetime specifications.

These SSDs are the first to support Continue reading “WDC’s HGST Intros 12G SAS MLC SSDs”

Avnet’s SSD Virtual Summit

On April 3 & 4 Avnet Embedded will host an on-line conference called the SSD Virtual Summit. This free on-demand seminar will feature a keynote by Yours Truly, The SSD Guy, and presentations by leading SSD makers and related firms including Adaptech, Crucial, Dell, HGST, Intel, Kingston, LSI, Micron, OCZ, Rorke Data, Seagate, SMART Storage, STEC, and Toshiba.

Come join in to learn the latest information on SSDs.