Neil Cameron
在新加坡举办的2014年亚洲云博会上，我负责公司的展台。但很快，我感到很无趣，因此开始四处游逛，想看看其他展览会上其他厂商都在展示什么。
我发现了几点：
1. 由于我佩戴的徽章上显示的是“展方”，大家都不肯给我任何免费冰淇淋。
2. 展会上几乎找不到一块硬盘。
展会上有很多硬件厂商，存储设备占据了这些厂商展示中的很大一部分，有些盘片厂商也在同时展示旋转式硬盘驱动和SSD的种种款型，但鲜见这些设备应用于其他厂商的解决方案当中。
闪存/SSD……几乎是所有人唯一关注的焦点。包括我们公司在内，就算是在宣传我们的控制器上的maxCachePlus分层及缓存软件，我们的宣传条幅上也赫然写着“闪存真棒！”，展会中其他公司也无一例外打出了类似的口号。这一现象不仅引起了我对未来硬盘格式的思考。
1. 2.5″或小型SSD
2. PCIe SSD (及基于PCIe的新存储层级，可以置放于闪存和内存之间，容后再议)
3. 3.5″大个头HDD
我听到一个硬盘厂商说，他们将在两年内推出2.5’’旋转硬盘的市场。起初，我感到些许震惊，但回过头来一想，这也很合情合理。随着SSD逐渐侵占了2.5’’盘的市场，同时价格日减而尺寸日增，留给旋转介质的唯一领地就是超廉价、超大尺寸或者两者兼备的市场。
因此，1TB 2.5’’旋转硬盘的价值何在呢？——还不如直接用SSD。随着如SanDisk这样的厂商为其960Gb的产品推出震撼性的10年质保，实在就很难找出购买2.5’’ HDD的动因了。看起来，硬盘厂商也得出了相同的结论。
那么，如果要选用旋转介质，它必须是大容量/廉价的——目前的选择是3.5’’。看起来规格这个指标就成了选择介质的分水岭——SSD会占据小尺寸的半壁江山，而庞大的HDD将占据大规格的另一半。
这一点，显然将给机架厂商带来巨大的压力。客户将开始要求服务器中带有2.5’’和3.5’’的硬盘插槽，虽然任意两家客户的需求都不尽相同，但我估计，在未来的服务器设计中，将采用模块式的方法，设计不同尺寸的硬盘插槽（不久前，我在中国看到一家主流OEM推出了类似的产品，我猜他们是领先一步了）。没错，是可以将2.5’’硬盘插到3.5’’的插槽里，但在如今高密度服务器的潮流中，显然是一种空间的浪费。
这将是未来两年值得关注的一个趋势。
While manning our stand at the Singapore Cloud Expo Asia 2014 … Iquickly get bored of that so go wandering to look at the offerings of all othervendors at the show (as you do of course).
Several things came to light …
1. They wouldn’t give me any free ice-cream because my badge had“exhibitor” on it
2. It was hard to find a hard drive in the building.
There were a lot of hardware vendors in the place, with storagecomprising a fair percentage of those vendors, and some drive vendors showingoff all models of both spinning hard disk drives and SSDs, but when it came tofinding those using in another vendor’s solution, it was a totally differentstory.
Flash/SSD/Flash (then a bit more SSD) … that’s pretty much all anyonewas showing or talking about. Even we were promoting maxCachePlus Caching andTiering software with our controllers, so we also were on the “Flash is Great’bandwagon along with everyone else in the building. This made me stop and thinkabout the future of drive formats.
1. 2.5″ or small SSD
2. PCIe SSD (and the new tier of storage that will be PCIe based thatfits inbetween Flash and memory, but that’s another story)
3. 3.5″ thumping big HDD
I heard a drive vendor say that they would be moving out of the 2.5″spinning market within 2 years. That rocked my socks at first, but it sort ofmakes sense. With SSD taking over the 2.5″ market, getting cheaper and largerat the same time, the only real play for spinning media is in the very-cheap,or very-large, or very-large-and-cheap marketplace.
So what is the point of having a 1tb 2.5″ spinning drive – you may aswell get an SSD. With vendors like Sandisk offering a mind-blowing 10-yearwarranty on their 960Gb product it’s pretty hard to understand why I would wantto buy a 2.5″ HDD … and it seems that the drive vendors have come to the sameconclusion.
So if it’s spinning, it has to be big/cheap – and that (today) means3.5″ form factor. It would seem we are headed for a class split at the formfactor level – with SSD taking over the smaller side of town, while HDD will dominatethe large form factor with massive drives.
That, of course, is going to put the chassis vendors under somepressure. Customer will start to want combinations of 2.5″ and 3.5″ bays intheir servers – and of course no two customers have exactly the samerequirements, so I’d guess a modular approach to different size bays will bethe go in future servers (I saw something like this a while ago in a major OEMin China so I guess they were ahead of the curve). Yes you can put a 2.5″ drivein to a 3.5″ bay, but that is a waste of space in today’s current trend ofhigh-density servers.
This should be interesting to sit back and watch over the next twoyears.
原文地址：http://blog.csdn.net/pmc/article/details/43730843
