Over time, hard drives have become more and more in the background. This has happened mainly due to the push of SSD drives, a type of storage solutions that offers very important advantages compared to traditional hard drives, and that go beyond performance and reliability.
SSD drives contain no moving parts, that is, They do not have mechanical elements. They are made up of NAND Flash memory chips, some also have DRAM memory working as a cache, and they come with different controllers that offer very different levels of performance. This already translates into a more reliable design that is less sensitive to things as simple as movement and vibration.
SSDs offer much higher performance, have much lower access times and latencies, and their consumption is clearly lower, which in the end makes them outperform HDDs on almost every possible front. There is only one where the latter are still ahead, the cost per gigabyte, but this has been adjusting notably in recent years, and in the end that difference is becoming more and more diluted thanks to the advantages of SSDs that we have already mentioned.
According to Shawn Rosemarin, vice president of R&D in Pure Storage’s customer engineering division, the days of hard drives are numbered, to such an extent that believes that in 2028 the sales of this type of storage units will cease completelyand that the entire technology industry will switch to using only SSD storage units.
The truth is that in recent years there has been a significant drop in the popularity of these types of units, and Shawn is right when he says that the lower power consumption of SSDs is such a significant cost of ownership advantage which, in the end, allows the greater investment made in SSD units to be profitable. All in all, I think his prediction sin of ambitious, and that HDDs are not going to disappear in five years, in fact by 2027 the arrival of units with a capacity of 40 TB is expected.
These types of units continue to have an important weight in the professional sector, especially when we talk about cold storage, and its low cost per gigabyte continues to be a very important advantage when facing numerous projects, a reality that will not change in five years. On the other hand, in the general consumer sector they also hold remarkable value, especially when used in NAS or as a secondary drive alongside an SSD.
