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No Cheap Replacement For Hard Disks Before 2020

Posted by timothy on from the we'll-see-in-10-years-about-that dept.

siddesu writes with disappointing news to anyone who'd like to see solid-state storage dominate in the near-term future. "A new study of storage technology by the former CTO of Seagate predicts that hard disks will remain the cheapest storage technology in the next decade and probably beyond."

4 of 346 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by chuckymonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So these people can predict the future now?! Really, you never know what is going to happen for sure. Look at current HDD tech, IBM made the GMR breakthrough and BAM! Huge storage capacity in drives. What makes people think that there cannot be another such discovery with solid state or some other yet unknown tech?

    --
    "Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
    1. Re:Huh? by Forge · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There is another factor.

      Flash is faster and more energy efficient than spinning disks. This creates a demand for flash which reduces the incentive of manufacturers to drop the price per GB.

      Also try to understand the gap we are dealing with.
      Flash is around $1.87 per GB while Hard drives are closer to 7c per GB.

      That's 26 times the price. Sure SSDs are getting cheaper every day but so are hard drives. I am sure they will get so close that the price gap becomes less important than all the other features which separate them. Some time after that, SSDs may even become cheaper, or both SSDs and hard drives will be supplanted by some other technology. It just won't happen right away.

      Is one more decade too pessimistic an estimate? Only time will tell. What I do know is that where SSD's advantages are more important the change has already started. You can buy a portable computer with only SSD storage today.

      --
      --= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
    2. Re:Huh? by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No. There is English. And then in 1066 the damn French invaded the island and polluted the language with their messed-up words. True English died with Beowulf.

      What exists today in both Britannia and America is a mongrel mess of Germanic and Latinate words. No wonder the spelling and rules make no sense. Damn French.

      (I'm chust joking. Put down the guillotine Mr. Frenchman.)

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  2. Re:Fragmentation by BikeHelmet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You're correct, but I have two nitpicks.

    First, don't confuse NAND used in SD cards and stuff with the same NAND used in SSDs. They're quite different qualities.

    I've had SD cards drop 1/8th their capacity after days of heavy use. SSDs, however, have higher quality NAND and wear-levelling controllers. For Linux, they have better filesystems, too.

    Second, up until the newest generation, most SSDs were susceptible to debilitating speed loss after some usage. To be safe, you had to half the benchmarked results. With TRIM and smarter controllers, this is mostly solved, but very heavy usage for extended periods will still result in speed loss. Remember, on an HDD deleting is basically a free operation, but on an SSD it has to physically erase. This would be most noticeable for say... a security camera box recording a dozen or more streams 24/7.