Considered for several years now, the end of HDDs
is more seriously mentioned… by an SSD supporter, that said.
If the principle of storage units based on flash memory dates back to the early 80s, real SSDs as we know them today are hardly more than twelve years old. Their recent development has not prevented a remarkable speed of adoption.
The data center, the last bastion of the “HDD”
Today, it’s hard even to imagine a computer without an SSD, at least to manage the operating system and enjoy a start-up that’s out of all proportion to what the fastest hard drive allows.
More and more users have even switched to “all SSD” in order to limit the noise pollution and mechanical problems associated with “platter” hard drives, whose consumption and size are also significantly greater.
However, there are still two points on which the hard drive retains the advantage: storage capacity and cost per gigabyte. In fact, when it is necessary to have a large storage space, on NAS solutions for example, the hard disk is required. This is particularly the case in data centers, which are very space-intensive.
HDDs soon at tape level?
However, the capacity of SSDs has nothing to do with that of the first models, and there are more and more “extended” units. In fact, for Fupeng Zhang, vice-president of the division data storage from Huawei, the SSDs will still gain in capacity, so that they ” will push hard drives to the edge of data centers by 2025 “.
Fupeng Zhang estimates that SSDs will then have an 80% market share in the data center sector, compared to only 30% at present. The manager at Huawei indicates that the smaller footprint and consumption, but also easier maintenance, falling prices and a higher level of compression are the driving forces of the SSD.
Even more judge and judged than Fupeng Zhang, Jeremy Werner, vice president and general manager of Micron’s storage division, also goes there with his prediction in favor of the SSD. He points out in turn that the very high capacities and the increasingly reduced cost of SSDs will ” speed up HDD shutdown before comparing hard drives and tape storage.
Over the next ten years, they will be ” mostly pushed back to the same archival/low performance use cases many are using tape for today “. Jeremy Werner also highlights the technical progress of the SSD, which takes advantage of developments such as NVMe-over-Fabrics to further boost its development.
The future will tell us very soon if our two prophets of the day were right, but in the immediate future, the hard disk giants are not sitting idly by, with plans for 30 TB or 40 TB units planned for soon .
Sources: ComputerBase
, Hardware Counter
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