I can haz?

Hi there
This might be fine for servers -- but the price will have to come down a long way for home users.
Also if your "Server farm" is supplying a number of "Virtual Servers" to their customers then this undoubtedly makes sense - provided that the network connections are fast enough to benefit from remote server access time via an SSD rather than a spinner.

Huge DB's would also benefit from this --resulting in much faster query results --but Home Users !!! not at these prices.

In any case home users who build their own rigs usually have plenty of bays for storage so the idea of a 2TB SSD seems rather pointless given the fact that one is usually only running a Single user system with a single OS on it. Typical 2.5 inch SSD's especially 240 GB are just fine even in a desktop.

On a laptop it makes even less sense to have a 2 TB SSD as you'd have to increase the laptop size to get a 3.5 inch device inside rather than the thin 2.5 inch devices we are now using.

In a Laptop you can still get away with a 120 GB SSD. Laptop users don't normally run a load of concurrent VM's either --if you run just one or two on a standard Windows installation a 120 GB SSD will be fine -- and switch to a 240 GB one when prices shift downwards a bit.

I like technology -- but I'll sit this one out for the moment -- the concept of Non Moving Storage media however is a real step in the right direction.

(Why a MacBook pro or any other home computer would benefit from a 2 TB SSD just escapes me -- for simple DATA storage it's a waste of an expensive resource --for the OS and programs and possibly some scratch space like Photoshop work areas an SSD is ideal - but how many of you have an OS size of more than about 40 GB anyway).

Cheers
jimbo

Considering OCZ is selling a 1 TB SSD in a 2.5" form factor (never mind it is overpriced and a dog compared to most 500 GB SSDs), 2 TB in a 3.5" form factor seems like a waste of space. There is room inside a 3.5" form factor for far more than that. Since they said all of the 1 TB is on one board, why not add a second or third board; maybe even include a controller that would let the boards run in a self-contained RAID 0 for mind blowing speeds as well as capacities?

I see the day coming when multi TB spinners will be replaced by 3.5" SSDs with even greater capacity than achievable by spinners but that will be quite a while and prices will have to drop dramatically for them to be practical.

I fully expect the price tag to be composed of 4 digits.

linnemeyerhere said:

Imagine the capacity you could stuff into a 5.25" drive bay form factor.....4-6TB's ? Of course it would only cost like 5 thousand bucks each, but for the right power user if the productivity is there it just pays for it's self.

Actually, I can see them stuffing that (and more) into a 3.5" form factor. Think about it; two 2.5" drives have the same footprint as a single 3.5" drive if they are turned sideways. 3.5" drives are 25mm thick. Some 2.5" SSDs are only 7mm thick so three layers woould be only 21mm. Strip away the unneeded casing and it might be possible to jam in a fourth layer. Since 1TB 2.5" SSDs exist already, that could mean as much as 6-8TB in a 3.5" case. Staying with a 3.5" form factor at first would make more sense than 5.25" because of all the existing cases that have plenty of 3.5" slots but only a few 5.25" bays.

The price would be that high at first but, eventually, it would come down. I forsee monster SSDs like that being more economical than the equivalent spinners someday (shortly before they scatter my ashes).

linnemeyerhere said:

Imagine the capacity you could stuff into a 5.25" drive bay form factor.....4-6TB's ? Of course it would only cost like 5 thousand bucks each, but for the right power user if the productivity is there it just pays for it's self.

Hi there

with a 5.25 inch you are looking not in TB but in PB (1000 * 1 TB) ranges -- Moore's law will make the price drop and capacity increase in smaller form factors but until these things happen, for single HOME user systems the cost isn't likely to be worth the performance gain in any case -- also do you need very fast I/O for simply playing even HD / Blu Ray quality video or doing email.

In fact not only Texting but even email as a communication medium is beginning to pass its sell by date. Using Social media (although I don't really like things like facebook etc) will become more and more of the norm --and even at work now if I need something I'll use our online chat system (Ms Lync) instead of wasting my time with loads and loads of pointless company e-mails - and I think this is a general trend - especially amongst the younger set bought up with smart phones and tablets. So that's one huge chunk of data we don't need anymore --email backups / archives etc.

Even Online shopping -- More people are now using "Instant Chat" as well as the e-commerce websites so again the amount of this type of data we need to store is actually diminishing.

I reckon now apart from Music and other multi-media stuff I store LESS data now than I used to - my peak was probably 2 or 3 years ago -- now I rarely keep emails for more than a week or so and most of my documents I need I convert to PDF or EPUB depending on the content and save on an E-Reader -- hardly SSD type of speed needed there.

Very fast SSD's will come into their own for huge data base searches (Interpol, FBI, CIA, Google even) and of course server farms where huge numbers of Virtual servers can supply thousands of customers with "Their own machine" images at decent speeds.

For continuous cloud backup perversely you don't need mega fast storage which seems to be contrary to what you probably would expect.

But THINK about it for a minute. Your continuous backup strategy would develop a decent algorithm on LRU (Last recently used) which would be backed up conventionally -- on the CLOUD where you would have two sorts of storage --faster staging storage where the LRU item was stored with it being backed up or migrated to slower longer term storage after its last used period had passed a certain threshold time period since being last used. So frequently used data (usually a very small subset of what you actually store on your computer including external HDD's etc) would be saved on faster SSD type devices while the rest on conventional HDD's.

As a user you wouldn't have to know or even care when the Cloud data was migrated between the two sets of devices -these tasks would be performed as scheduled jobs in the background without any interaction needed from the user.

For recovery the most recently used items would be on the faster "staging" storage -- while if you needed a file that hadn't been used for a long time --this would be on slower conventional (and cheaper) storage -- recovery would take a little longer but for the price factor I don't think it would trouble the users too much as over 80% of their data that they needed to recover or store -- which as I said before would only be a TINY fraction of the total data the user owns would probably stay on the faster staging devices.

Cheers
jimbo

Good points, jimbo, but speed isn't the only advantage of SSDs. Reliability, durability, less power use (also meaning less heat to deal with), and less physical space needed are also important parameters for SSDs.

Affordable cloud storage is slower than local storage (note I said affordable) which isn't a problem for sending data to but becomes a huge problem when needing to recover huge amounts of data, such as after a total local data loss. Business plans are usually faster (and more expensive) but can still take days (or even weeks) for recovery to be completed. Many plans, both business and home, get around that by shipping the data on HDDS (that is often done for initial backups as well). Another way companies get around the time it takes to recover from a total data disaster is to put their entire operation online until the data has been recovered. The electricutility I retired from had a plan similar to that. They did a test shortly before I retired and it was business as usual except inputting and retrieving data was annoyingly slow. Still, it was better than a total shutdown.

The "cloud" isn't failure proof so redundant backups are still needed. The cloud is just an easy way to have up to date offsite storage in case a disaster causes the onsite backups to fail. The better business cloud backup plans employ redundant storge on servers in widely separated locations (hundreds to thousands of miles apart) to help ensure against loss. Still, loss has been known to happen.

I use a cloud backup plan (Carbonite) for my own data but I also have two onsite backups and another offsite backup (HDDs in a safe deposit box). If I were to lose all my data at home due to fire, theft, etc. retrieving all my data from Carbonite would take weeks and would probably thoroughly tick off my ISP due the the amount of bandwidth I'd be using. However, I can retrieve the HDDs in my safe deposit box and get just the data that changed since the HDDs were put in the vault from Carbonite. Total recovery would be much faster that way.