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How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive
itwbennett writes: For too long, it looked like SSD capacity would always lag well behind hard disk drives, which were pushing into the 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB. That seems to be ending. In September, Samsung announced a 3.2TB SSD drive. And during an investor webcast last week, Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Meanwhile, hard drive technology has hit the wall in many ways. They can't really spin the drives faster than 7,200 RPM without increasing heat and the rate of failure. All hard drives have now is the capacity argument; speed is all gone. Oh, and price. We'll have to wait and see on that.
Well, the Samsung 3.2 TB drive claims that you can read/write the entire drive every day for five years before failure.
Such statistics are meaningless in my book. Light bulb manufacturers claim their bulbs will last five years or seven years but when you look at the fine print they say that's given under the idea you're turning the light on, leaving it running for 3 hours, and turning it off once per day -- nobody uses light bulbs like that.
Under common usage patterns, you can expect up to 25 years life for first-gen SLC, 15 years for first-gen MLC, 10 years for current-gen MLC, 5 years for current-gen TLC. MTBF is lower due to defective cells and such, but that's also true for HDDs.