For our next storage expansion it's ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash/SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don't have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.
SSDs may not win in every area yet, but if you only look at purchase price, you're not getting the right picture.
I took a look and the NAND chip trend lines, and I predict that by mid 2018, 256gb of NAND (which is enough space for an average consumer) will cost less than a 1tb drive. At that point, all the cheap laptops will drop spinning drives too.
But then you jump to mechanical disks to get above 32 until like you said mid-range where it's all proper SSDs.
A 2TB harddrive is just way to cheap compared to a 2TB SSD, even if they fail and need more power, atleast for archiving or large storage in consumer terms.
Primary storage may switch to SSD though.
Turned out to be a defective batch from manufacturer. SSDs are normally reliable but in my experience are not immune to problems.
I also had a RAID 1 array where both SSDs failed within a couple days of each other (due to wear). That was a rude surprise. They were only six months old.
You know the read and write IPOs. You know when they fail.
Considering I was a college student at the time, it cost me a lot of money to replace my failed Seagate drives (after RMAing them and having failed replacements). I've never bought another Seagate product and never will, regardless of claims that they've improved.
I have no legal experience and I'm thinking completely from the point that the judge would want his job to be easier.
So not everything that came out of Maxtor is terrible, if it means they let you flash HDD FW under Linux now.
The laptop drive thickness is the abnormality for the rest of the storage world.
"[the factory's] closure will significantly reduce the company’s HDD output"
...but a few sentences later:
"the plant no longer makes products"
How can a plant that no longer makes products would reduce the company's output if closed?
