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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's maybe three things.

1. The industry is retooling from HDD To SDD, but they apparently can't keep up with demand for SSD's. So the prices are artificially high.

2. Demand for faster, denser, and lower power SSD's are coming from the cloud providers. So rather than incremental price decreases over time, we're seeing the prices are staying the same, and we're getting incremental technology improvements. The V-Nand technology is the hot new thing, enabling 2TB of storage on a single chip.

3. There's no more serious innovation on the HDD's since SSD's will likely eclipse HDD's in 2021.[1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/285474/hdds-and-ssds-in-...

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Can we really use SSD for long term storage?

Long term storage (archive) of sequential data is still being done on tapes in many circumstances. Tapes are more reliable than hard drives, cheaper, and have a faster write speed.

Sony announced their highest density tape at 201Gbit/in^2 last year.[0]

You can use SSD for long-term storage assuming the data is stored on redundant drives and drive health is checked. It's really only cost effective if you need the data frequently or if you are only archiving a small (1pb or less) amount of data.

[0] https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201708/17-070E/inde...

Just to clarify: you’re saying that 1pb - 1 petabyte - 1000 TB - is small?

We're very close to being able to fit 1PB of flash in a 1U server. So yes, 1PB is a small-scale archival project. Current generation tape libraries start around 1PB and scale up from there.

I'm saying less than 1 petabyte is a small amount of data for long-term storage.

30TB is large if your talking about daily network activity or your personal photo collection, or the size of one SSD that can fit in a laptop.

Many businesses have digitized records 50+ years old. Even newer businesses can hit the 1pb mark. Older businesses might primarily store accounting records. Businesses in Machine Learning are interested in much more data.

Can you use mechanical drives for long-term storage? I would expect that any long-term storage would involve a strategy including backups and redundant devices.

As long as the machinery for HDD's and SDD's keep plugging away, the software exists to duplicate, verify, and repair large amounts of data across many many devices.

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