Some say that in five years hard drives will stop being sold and SSDs will conquer everything. seems difficult

Shawn Wosemarin is vice president of research and development at Pure Storage, an American company that has been developing mass storage solutions based on SSD drives for years. that is already a key starting point to understand his singular vision of the storage market, because according to him, the days of hard drives are numbered.

“In 2028 hard drives will stop being sold”. This expert seems to be clear that in five years the traditional mechanical units will cease to make sense. For him, the argument that explains everything is energy consumption: “everything comes down to the cost of electricity”.

And the cost per GB, what? The truth is that there is a second factor that is also relevant: the cost per GB is becoming more even, especially when we talk about medium or low capacity SSD drives. Prices for these units have fallen staggeringly in recent months, and that trend is expected to continue through 2023.

outdated technology. As Wosemarin noted, “Hard drive technology is 67 years old.” Although he acknowledges the striking advances such as HAMR technology — which puts a laser on top of the head in order to heat the plates — he believes that “we are at the end of that era. VAST Data, another company similar to Pure Storage , posits that hard drives are slow on I/O and caching doesn’t work to the level that SSDs do.

Nothing of that, say others. Those who make conventional HDD drives disagree. Seagate already assured in 2021 that SSD drives would not kill HDD drives. Infinidat —which deploys massive storage systems based on HDDs— already responded to VAST in 2021 arguing that “they must be kidding” and highlighting that the software they develop allows for spectacular I/O throughputs. Meanwhile, data from the consulting firm Gartner estimates that SSDs will have a 35% share of the business market in 2026… so that death announced in 2028 seems unlikely.

More efficient data centers. For the manager of Pure Storage, it is important to consider that data centers are responsible for approximately 3% of energy consumption worldwide – other sources aim for 1%— and a third of that is due to the use of hard drives. Eliminating them, he says, “would reduce consumption by 80 or 90%, and this, together with the fact that the price of NAND continues to drop, makes it clear that hard drives will disappear.”

a biased view. Rosemary’s comments are conditioned by her company’s own orientation, which is specifically dedicated to the field of enterprise SSDs. That is a problem. The other is that the consumer market also counts, and although it is true that today SSDs are protagonists in our PCs and laptops, hard drives continue to be a good support when one needs a lot —or a lot— of storage capacity, something that for now is still cheaper with traditional HDDs.

Image: Art Wall – Kitten print

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