[tw04]

> How much does maintenance cost (replacing drives etc.)?

The maintenance on enterprise storage is generally a percentage of purchase price. So it's actually cheaper.

>How much do you pay to keep those HDDs powered per TB per year?

4.5 watts idle/8 watts max for a spinning drive vs. 4.5 watts idle/11 watts max for a large capacity SSD (15TB Samsung). The power consumption thing was a much better story comparing 3.5" 15k RPM drives. 7200 RPM drives it's basically a wash unless you're talking about relatively small capacity SSDs.

>How does the low IOPS of those drives affect your workload?

That's really the crux of the issue. SPINNING drives are not dead. FAST spinning drives are dead. 10k/15k drives are going to see the end of their useful life in the modern datacenter far faster than anyone predicted 2 years ago. Outside of legacy systems I would expect sales of 10k RPM drives to fall off a cliff if not completely disappear before the end of 2020.

[lostlogin]

Thanks. To add another layer to this, presumably SSD read/write is faster so there would be less time at max usage?

[tw04]

On paper, yes. But it really depends on the workload. At the end of the day, if you're architecting appropriately it's apple's and oranges. SATA/NL-SAS drives excel at large streaming workloads - think video rendering, storing large ISOs, video surveillance, database dumps.

SSDs are highly transactional workloads like databases or most back-end systems for applications or virtual machines.

You RARELY see the two used for the same type of workload unless someone has money to burn and wants to standardize on SSD and doesn't care about cost. SATA/NL-SAS being used for a workload that should be on SSD generally results in someone getting fired and the original system being forklift replaced.