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Will SSD's make HDD's extinct?

moonbogg

moonbogg

Lifer
I think they will. Soon, Samsung releases a 4TB 850 EVO. It will cost some money, but in just a year or two an SSD of that size will be quite affordable, if recent history is any indicator. 2 years ago a 1TB SSD for under $300 was unthinkable.
The advantage HDD's have are price and capacity. SSD's are catching up fast. SSD's are based on technology that can advance further than a mechanical drive can, even in terms of capacity.
 
No. SSDs are a poor solution for cold or near-cold storage.

HDDs for storage servers, enterprise SSDs for transactional servers, and regular SSDs for client systems.
 
Cold storage is the only thing they are good for, and by cold I mean like at least 10 years or longer. I know this because I skimmed a few lines of some anandtech article that said something about 10 years and this and that. SO! Once they fix SSD cold storage issue, HDD's won't be seen again until distant future archaeological exploration uncovers them from the cold dead crust of the earth.
 
The 4TB HDD I bought earlier this year may well prove the last system hard drive I ever buy. Assuming I get 3 years out of it I'd be amazed if SSDs aren't competitive at larger sizes by then. And there's 3D XPoint to consider as something that might shake the entire storage market up again, would be funny to see good old nand/flash SSDs get marginalised by that just as they relegated hard drives to being old tech.

Still for backups and archiving HDDs are going to be with us for a while I think. I'll be interested to see how far HDD capacity could be pushed with the 8TB helium drives coming out, it might turn out that those being suitable more for archiving is no problem if that's the only role left for them.
 
moonbogg said:
Cold storage is the only thing they are good for, and by cold I mean like at least 10 years or longer. I know this because I skimmed a few lines of some anandtech article that said something about 10 years and this and that.
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Actually retention can be as low as a matter of days. Unless something significantly changes with SSD tech, I'll never trust it for cold storage.

If you can't rely on a backup then it's useless, plain and simple. OTOH unpowered magnetic media is already proven to be able to preserve data for years.
 
BFG10K said:
Actually retention can be as low as a matter of days. Unless something significantly changes with SSD tech, I'll never trust it for cold storage.
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Only if you wrote your data at 10 degrees C, turned it off and put the drive into a 55C room. It's not a realistic scenario.
 
We got tape storage for cold backups.

Eventually, HDDs will have no place and will die into obscurity :whiste:
 
IIRC there's been development on the non-volatile RAM front, perhaps SSDs and HDDs will be phased out before SSDs could perceivably replace HDDs?

Is there any well-known research regarding how well tape and HDD media stand up in long-term storage scenarios? Just curious, I'd like to read up on the topic.
 
It will happen eventually, but it will take many more years still. Out of the ~10 TB of storage in my main rig, only 500 + 120 GB are on SSDs at the moment. It will be many years before I can replace all 10 TB with SSDs.

Also SSD development might run into technical issues and brick walls, but then again, so have HDD's (Helium filled drives and SMR seem like desperate last ditch attempts).
 
Someday, something will replace both hard drives and SSD's, but I don't see hard drives going away anytime soon. Of course, seeing how quickly film photography disappeared, you never can say for sure. At this point, SSDs don't have the capacity or price point for bulk storage but the price is dropping.
 
moonbogg said:
I think they will. Soon, Samsung releases a 4TB 850 EVO. It will cost some money, but in just a year or two an SSD of that size will be quite affordable, if recent history is any indicator. 2 years ago a 1TB SSD for under $300 was unthinkable.
The advantage HDD's have are price and capacity. SSD's are catching up fast. SSD's are based on technology that can advance further than a mechanical drive can, even in terms of capacity.
Click to expand...
yes eventually mechanical HD's will disappear and SSD's will take their place for all aspects of computing.
 
moonbogg said:
I think they will. Soon, Samsung releases a 4TB 850 EVO. It will cost some money, but in just a year or two an SSD of that size will be quite affordable, if recent history is any indicator. 2 years ago a 1TB SSD for under $300 was unthinkable.
The advantage HDD's have are price and capacity. SSD's are catching up fast. SSD's are based on technology that can advance further than a mechanical drive can, even in terms of capacity.
Click to expand...

Who knows. Maybe they will.

Or maybe a breakthrough in read-write graphene/crystalline media makes them both irrelevant.

Or maybe a breakthrough in quantum computing or biologically based data retention makes the whole idea of binary storage with transistors a pleasantly old-fashioned idea. 😀
 
ronbo613 said:
Someday, something will replace both hard drives and SSD's, but I don't see hard drives going away anytime soon. Of course, seeing how quickly film photography disappeared, you never can say for sure. At this point, SSDs don't have the capacity or price point for bulk storage but the price is dropping.
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Eventually, yes. See me in 2025.
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That's about my spin on it. There will always exceptions, but I'm actually quite surprised at how far SSD prices have fallen, along with how quickly SSD capacity has grown.

What's funny... in 2025 we may be proclaiming the obsolescence of SSDs as some new tech emerges. 😀
 
Really hoping SSDs will kill off hdd in the low end sector. These slow hdds in most entry level and buisness oriented machines I see make for a pretty poor (slow as molasses) user experience, to the point where I feel waiting for boot and updates cost a company more than just throwing a 64 Gig SSD in there.

For mass storage, HDDs are cheap, reasonably reliable, and have decent enough sequential read/write speeds. If another storage density breakthrough comes along there and surpass the 10-20 TB mark, they could be kicking around for awhile longer yet.
 
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HDD will continue to be the main storage device for a very long time. SSD are simply not cost effective for regular consumers and will not be for many years to come.

I've been hearing that SSD are about to overtake HDD in price for last 5+ years but that never happened. SSDs are still about 10 times more expensive than HDD. The issue is that shrinking transistors will always be more expensive that packing more bytes in to a magnetic platter.
 
Charlie98 said:
That's about my spin on it. There will always exceptions, but I'm actually quite surprised at how far SSD prices have fallen, along with how quickly SSD capacity has grown.

What's funny... in 2025 we may be proclaiming the obsolescence of SSDs as some new tech emerges. 😀
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...and maybe before it overtakes HDDs too.
 
SSDs won't be price competitive in theory for another ~5 years with HDDs for storage space assuming that nothing changes in HDDs over the next 5 years (unlikely). So realistically we are probably closer to 6-8 years to pricing parity on a capacity basis, best case.

As far as reliability for mid to long term storage, flash has significant issues, we don't know what retention issues might be ahead for other semiconductor based storage technologies either. So at least NAND flash based SSDs won't be a viable option except for hot data.

So it is highly unlikely that SSD's will make HDDs extinct...

Also be on the lookout for He based HASMR drives within that 6-8 year timeframe with upwards of 2-3x capacity.
 
hectorsm said:
HDD will continue to be the main storage device for a very long time. SSD are simply not cost effective for regular consumers and will not be for many years to come.

I've been hearing that SSD are about to overtake HDD in price for last 5+ years but that never happened. SSDs are still about 10 times more expensive than HDD. The issue is that shrinking transistors will always be more expensive that packing more bytes in to a magnetic platter.
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Well, look at 120GB SSD prices, versus 500GB and 1TB HDD prices. Those are what are generally specced for an entry-level desktop box. They are both around $40-50.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Well, look at 120GB SSD prices, versus 500GB and 1TB HDD prices. Those are what are generally specced for an entry-level desktop box. They are both around $40-50.
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There is no way. Most entry level PC come with 1TB drives now days. The majority of people are going to need more 120GB storage on a PC. Anyway, price/GB is not even close.
 
hectorsm said:
There is no way. Most entry level PC come with 1TB drives now days. The majority of people are going to need more 120GB storage on a PC. Anyway, price/GB is not even close.
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I suspect what will happen is that HDD price/GB will decrease at the same time that SSD price/GB does, meaning HDDs will still be cheaper per GB years into the future.

BUT... I suspect once SSDs get below the $100/TB barrier, we'll see a massive increase in their usage in consumer PCs. 1TB should still be enough storage in a few years' time, as the rate of increase in the amount of data we actually store on our PCs is rather low.

So I suspect it'll end up being SSDs for PCs and laptops, HDDs well into the future for bulk storage.
 
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