A few months ago, the CEO of Pure Storage assured that hard drives would become extinct in less than five years. Disagreeing is Rainer Kaese, Director of Hard Drive Business Development at Toshiba, who believes that “the hard drive has a bright future“. At least in data centers.
Faster and smaller SSD drives have dropped significantly in price, so they are now replacing hard drives in virtually all personal and business computers.
Hard drives have been relegated to systems that need massive data storage, such as backups, collections, or data centers.
The bright future of hard drives
Rainer Kaese explains in Blocks & Files why hard drives are not going to go extinct. We know some reasons, but others are quite curious.
According to this executive from Toshiba, one of the main manufacturers, “hard drives maintain a difference in cost per capacity with SSDs of around a factor of seven. This advantage continues to be the lifeline of HDDs… HDDs can reach 40 or even 50 terabytes at a lower cost.”
Indeed, those are the two great advantages of hard drives: They have much more capacity than SSDs, and cost much less. SSDs barely reach 4 TB, but there are already 30 TB hard drives in stores.
Hard drives are much slower than SSDs, but they can reach enormous speeds when working in parallel. Toshiba has a rack of 78 18 TB hard drives, which work at a speed of 17 Gbps.
Another advantage of hard drives is that they can be written many more times than SSDs, so they are ideal for data centers, where files are constantly moved.
Lastly, quote recycling: “Hard drives are made of aluminum and copper, so they are much easier to recycle than the printed circuit boards, chips and plastics of SSDs.”
Rainer Kaese acknowledges that one of the things to improve is electricity consumption necessary for the hard drive to spin. Hard drives filled with air consume 10 W, and those that use helium, between 7 and 8 W. He assures that his engineers are working to reduce these figures.
We are all clear that hard drives have already been relieved in tasks such as playing video games or editing video. But it seems that They can have a long life when storing huge volumes of data, especially in data centers.
