I have a little theory that the hard drive market will collapse fast once SSDs become 2x the price per GB. My reasoning is that a lot of these setups for large data storage are using four drives on RAID10. With SSDs, those can become just two drives on RAID1 for the sake of redundancy; the speed advantage of adding RAID0 to the mix will be inconsequential. So they can cost twice as much when you're buying half as many.

We're not that far away from this point.

[–] valek879@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Actually I would assume that most people with 3 or more drives are running some form of RAID 5.

With 4 drives and this structure I receive the capacity of 3 drives. The final drive is called the "parity" drive which keeps some kind of copy of the information on it. If one drive fails then I can replace it with a new drive and rebuild the data from parity. This is a long process that requires the data off the parity drive and the other two drives. But you can do this with any disk, from any other three disks.

It's really cool. Sure there are speed benefits but the real kicker is the size of the pool. With current tech I can fairly reasonably get four 18TB drives SSD's have a long way to go before they affordably reach that kind of capacity.