If you’re able to get enterprise ssds, you could get 16tb ssds… But no clue what minimum order sizes are like for that kind of thing. But of you wanted to use 16tb ssds instead of buying a house 100% down payment, that’s an option probably.
As I said, as they become available (read: affordable) then I’ll use them. Until that point… mechanical drives have worked well for 50 years and are fine for me. I can accept a margin of problem, it’s the reason I use RAID.
I don’t understand why more people don’t do this, but if you go to pcpartpicker.com, go to start a build, go to storage, and sort by price per gb, you’ll get all the info you need. I’ve purchased Seagate Exos X20 20TB drives for under $350 us dollars this year. I buy off Amazon US and ship to my country, Honduras. I believe ebay has them at $319 or something.
For reference, that’s around $0.016 usd/gb with some smaller drives going for as low as $0.011 usd/gb (you can get a 6tb Seagate enterprise drive for $64 us dollars), whereas the cheapest SSD you can get is still going to cost you at least twice to three times as much, at $0.037 usd/gb for the cheapest SSD on pcpartpicker, which is still a 2TB SSD for $75 us dollars (crucial p3 plus), amazing value for an SSD but still has a hard time competing with HDDs.
I don’t trust shipping internationally. More chance of damage, plus import duties, plus tax, plus difficulties for RMA or warranty.
The conclusion is similar tho: SSDs are only 2 times more expensive (not 7 as the article claims) and that makes it worth it for me given all the advantages the offer.
The last set of NAS drives I bought for my home server were ~$120 for 8TB, and while random access may not quite measure up, I’d put them up against your $50 Inland white-label drive for sustained R/W any day of the week, especially once the SSD’s write cache is saturated. That’s not even comparing like-for-like – consumer hard drives using SMR are quite a bit cheaper than the NAS drives I bought, and enterprise-grade Flash storage costs 2-4 times as much as low-end consumer flash.
There’s absolutely still a case to be made for mechanical drives in near-line storage, and that’s not likely to change for quite a few years yet.
I just bought a microcenter brand 1 TB SSD for less than $50. Can a HDD compete with that on price and read/write speed?
Also recently bought a gaming PC that does not have a HD, only a 1 TB SSD.
I think HDDs day as boot drives is over. Unless they get a lot faster which I think is unlikely.
HDDs are certainly useful for larger amounts of storage, though. Self hosting, data centers, etc.
ETA: I don’t think any of the responses read my entire comment. See the LAST SENTENCE in particular, friends.
My NAS device has 80TB of usable space (6x16TB, raid5). Equivalent would’ve cost tens of thousands of dollars in drives alone.
Once 16TB SSDs are even available I will probably start migrating them in, but for now mechanical drives it is.
If you’re able to get enterprise ssds, you could get 16tb ssds… But no clue what minimum order sizes are like for that kind of thing. But of you wanted to use 16tb ssds instead of buying a house 100% down payment, that’s an option probably.
A 16TB, a single one, right now is $1800.
As I said, as they become available (read: affordable) then I’ll use them. Until that point… mechanical drives have worked well for 50 years and are fine for me. I can accept a margin of problem, it’s the reason I use RAID.
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And this isn’t an enterprise thing. It’s my home NAS. For business things I just use AWS like any sensible person.
A 4TB SATA SSD is 200 EUR. For 96 TB you would need 24 (probably less for 80TB usable). It would cost between 4k and 4.5k. Prices are going down fast.
And a way to have that many drives connected at once, which means more cost.
Ok, like 100 bucks for 16-18 SATA controllers, assuming the mobo comes with 6.
5 20tb HDDs in raid5, for about 1.2-1.5k
But how much is 5 100TB HDDs?
I have seen nowhere near 250-300 for 20TB disks in Europe. Maybe in the US the SSDs will also be cheaper…
I don’t understand why more people don’t do this, but if you go to pcpartpicker.com, go to start a build, go to storage, and sort by price per gb, you’ll get all the info you need. I’ve purchased Seagate Exos X20 20TB drives for under $350 us dollars this year. I buy off Amazon US and ship to my country, Honduras. I believe ebay has them at $319 or something.
For reference, that’s around $0.016 usd/gb with some smaller drives going for as low as $0.011 usd/gb (you can get a 6tb Seagate enterprise drive for $64 us dollars), whereas the cheapest SSD you can get is still going to cost you at least twice to three times as much, at $0.037 usd/gb for the cheapest SSD on pcpartpicker, which is still a 2TB SSD for $75 us dollars (crucial p3 plus), amazing value for an SSD but still has a hard time competing with HDDs.
I don’t trust shipping internationally. More chance of damage, plus import duties, plus tax, plus difficulties for RMA or warranty.
The conclusion is similar tho: SSDs are only 2 times more expensive (not 7 as the article claims) and that makes it worth it for me given all the advantages the offer.
The last set of NAS drives I bought for my home server were ~$120 for 8TB, and while random access may not quite measure up, I’d put them up against your $50 Inland white-label drive for sustained R/W any day of the week, especially once the SSD’s write cache is saturated. That’s not even comparing like-for-like – consumer hard drives using SMR are quite a bit cheaper than the NAS drives I bought, and enterprise-grade Flash storage costs 2-4 times as much as low-end consumer flash.
There’s absolutely still a case to be made for mechanical drives in near-line storage, and that’s not likely to change for quite a few years yet.
Nobody is buying $50 drives for a datacenter. What matters here is how this compares with 16TB+ sizes.