Are we on the cusp of SSDs making sense for most people?

[NickF]

Backblaze is the only one who will have that data, but they don't seem to report on it.

The SSD Edition: 2022 Drive Stats Mid-year Review

Andy Klein's much anticipated 2022 SSD Midyear Drive Stats Report is here. Read on to see the findings.

www.backblaze.com

This seems relevant here tho:

And the Winner Is…​

At this point we can reasonably claim that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, at least when used as boot drives in our environment. This supports the anecdotal stories and educated guesses made by our readers over the past year or so. Well done.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Does anybody have any real-world data on power/heat consumption for a flash vs rust pools of equivalent sizes? For locations where noise/heat is a consideration (home labs, small offices), I'd be curious if the noise and heat differences would be a worthwhile parameter to consider when trying to decide between flash vs rust.

I used to run 2.5" Enterprise HDDs x3 for OS pools, now run 2.5" SDDs x3. Power/heat are in the drive specs for the drive you choose, I run insanely fast Enterprise SSDs with the highest rewrite life available, and they use almost no power and generate almost no heat, though they do need active airflow. They make no noise vs. almost no noise for Enterprise HDDs (even my 3.5" x16 array of HGST SAS drives make less noise than the fans).

The consideration (in my opinion) is rewrites, as SDDs don't last as long as HDDs when rewrites are "high," typically, and that depends on many factors which requite a use-case study for your particular parameters. If your electricity rates are sky-high and you need fast drives, SDDs may make sense, perhaps in combination with HDD cold-storage.

For TrueNAS boot drives rewrite usage is typically low, so in that case my SSDs will far outlast the HDDs given I spec'd them to do so. My company will be money ahead as they won't have to pay for them to be replaced in 5 years which would accrue time/labor/parts/bookkeeping expenses. (and that's why I make so much friggin' money for basically sitting around doing nothing, because I'm saving my company money in the big picture)

 

[Constantin]

We will need some serious oversupply / construction re: SSD production before the prices come down significantly. The rate of data storage production by HDD supply still dwarfs that of SSD and until that balance swings, the HDD OEMs can simply lower their prices a little here and there in response to SSD threats to keep the large-scale storage market. Yes, there will be a swing at some point, but ATM, a 8TB SSD from Samsung still costs 2-2.5x of that of a 8TB external or internal HDD.

The advantage of SSD simply vanishes for folk like Backblaze and like enterprise backup pools when you consider how many banks of HDDs they can throw at a problem and how limited the bandwidth to and from the data center is. Locally, that may change a bit as 10GbE networks become more pervasive and folk once again use networked storage for film editing, etc. But those markets are pretty small, comparatively.

Anyhow, my now ancient 10TB He-filled HDDs continue to spin w/o issues, so I will simply let them continue to do so until they die.