SSDs are definitely less expensive than before, but if you run a NAS at the SMB or enterprise level, you don't necessarily want to spend the extra $/EUR/what-have-you for a SSD. For example, a 10 TB Western Digital Red is $285 (USD). For comparison, a 7.6TB SSD (biggest single drive I could find) is over $1300. That is definitely not cheap enough.

The thing to remember is a NAS is often times bay limited too. For example, the Synology line maxes out at 8 bays without an expansion chassis. That means that you could fit 80 TB of WD Red drives or at most 60 TB of SSD storage. And at the prices above that means $2,300 for HDD vs $10,400 for less SSD-based storage. That is a massive difference.

So, the TL;DR for your question is people who need volume storage or high-density/high-volume use HDD.

Lots and lots of lime ...

Wait ... too soon?

Reading this story and the other like it reminded me of the old joke about what it would be like if Microsoft made cars. (found in full here: https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pn...), quoting in part:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

Sounds like the Microsoft of old is starting to make planes across the river in the Seattle area.

That may be, but again, things they design rarely fail, especially for commonly built things (again the physical equivalent of a database-backed application). They also have some sense of civil liability if something were to go wrong (https://www.nspe.org/resources/professional-liability/liability-employed-engineers). This may drive them to be conservative, but I also believe Engineers understand something developers may not: their work can kill if done improperly. While a dev's work is unlikely to have a direct life-or-death consequence (save medical, aeronautical, automotive or other machinery), it can often have equally bad financial or other consequences (ahem ... Equifax, OPM, etc ... ahem).

Call it CYA if you want, but it works. It may not be 100% efficient or live on the ragged edge of "good-enough", but it saves lives. And I would argue that it's only a matter of time before the costs involved in SW-based disasters (again see Equifax, et al) begin to be unbearable by society as a whole. When that happens, we will see this make it fast/cheap and to hell with the consequences attitude change.

I've been thinking about this for a few years and have come to the conclusion that we will continue making the same mistakes until we can create a set of rules that everyone can follow. If you look at what civil engineers have done you will see that they have reduced much of what they do to equations and repeatable patterns (for lack of a better term). When someone sets out to build a bridge or a building, they start by designing it with an architect and then they pull out the equations and key tables to ensure that they have the load, weight, use, wind and all the other elements take into account. This is coupled with a very strong set of building codes that dictate minimum strengths, materials and designs to ensure safety. Setting aside the occasional corner cut in construction or neglect, when was the last time a building or bridge just collapsed? (Ok, we know the bridge in Minneapolis, but that wasn't design it was neglect)

It's this level of discipline and rigor that ensures what engineers and architects design and build will work as planned. Couple this rigor with government and professional group mandated licensing of practitioners (try getting a building built without a professional engineer stamp on the design certifying the design is sound) and you can ensure that those designing and building something has a minimum level of training and understanding of the basic physics and processes to ensure sound design.

Until software development can create those same sets of rules and patterns, we will be doomed to repeating the same errors over and over. What we're doing right now is the equivalent of showing someone geometry, basic physics and some sense of writing and then expecting them to design and build the Empire State Building, Burj Khalifa or an Airbus A380. If our physical counterparts did the same, then no one would even think of flying or sleeping in anything other than a tarp strung from trees.

Nope, just pointing out the double standard. Road projects can go over budget and no one ever calls for cancelling it or starting a new one, but if it's rail, suddenly it's a boondoggle, useless or a disaster.

I know people are gasping at the $68b possible price tag. I would like to point out that Boston's Big Dig, basically a tunnel an inner-city highway ended up costing $22b. So, a state-of-the-art high-speed rail line from LA to San Fransisco will only cost 3x what a 2 mile tunnel and urban highway cost. Oh and they highway did nothing to reduce congestion, all it did was induce demand for more drivers and push bottle necks outside the city.

Put that way, this is a relative bargain.