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When will hard drives no longer make sense?

curiousmind34
By curiousmind34
in Storage Devices
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SSDs have been rapidly increasing in size and decreasing in price, and it seems inevitable that they will wipe out hard drives at some point, because there is going to be a time where printing silicon is more efficient than creating a complicated mechanical drive. In fact, SSDs are now what makes sense to use as a boot drive for nearly any budget. It looks like they will eventually take over from hard drives in bulk storage. Will hard drives still serve a purpose years from now? If so, where? If you think that hard drives are going to become obsolete, when?

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29 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

When data recovery off a failed SSD is economically feasible.

 

To add to that, also when SSD's are available in every size a hdd is but at lower prices. 

 

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I'm guessing ~5 years before they match HDD's for price per TB.  At that point, they will no longer make sense for 99% of uses, there are some niche applications, of course, but just like tape drives today, they still exist, but they are niche, where many years ago, most of us had them in our PCs.

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For laptops, it have happened already.

For desktops PCs, very very soon.

For home NAS, (or if you use desktop for it), longer, sone years.

For some type of servers, quite a lot of years probably, at least if the technologies that HDD manufacturers are working on becomes reality and is as good as they say. They claim they will make 50TB HDDs by 2026 or something like that.

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. 
It matters that you don't just give up.”

-Stephen Hawking

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1 hour ago, Mihle said:

For laptops, it have happened already.

For desktops PCs, very very soon.

For home NAS, (or if you use desktop for it), longer, sone years.

For some type of servers, quite a lot of years probably, at least if the technologies that HDD manufacturers are working on becomes reality and is as good as they say. They claim they will make 50TB HDDs by 2026 or something like that.

Yeah, for most general purpose personal computing, its already happened. Running a hard drive in your gaming PC at this point is just daft.

 

Home NAS and Big Data storage, they still make sense.

 

Many servers are already moving to full SSD, as big business are simply less cost sensitive.

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25 minutes ago, Aragorn- said:

Yeah, for most general purpose personal computing, its already happened. Running a hard drive in your gaming PC at this point is just daft.

It has use in desktop PC if you don't have a NAS but also do things that need quite a bit of storage, aka something with video recordings or similar.

Or if you are on a stricter budget with gaming PC it can still make sense, but every year that budget line move lower and lower.

25 minutes ago, Aragorn- said:

Home NAS and Big Data storage, they still make sense.

 

Many servers are already moving to full SSD, as big business are simply less cost sensitive.

Yes, but there are still many that are more cost sensitive, it depends what part of the server market you look at.

 

YouTube most likely have both servers with SSDs that they use for the most popular videos at the time, and HDD servers for videos that isn't as popular.

 

When you have so enormous amount of data that much if it isn't accessed that much but still accessed some, HDDs is still king for quite a few years, if 50 TB HDDs come that will continue to be the case for many many years.

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. 
It matters that you don't just give up.”

-Stephen Hawking

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SSD's are increasing in size, but not proportionately decreasing in price. That decrease only goes up to around 4TB at the moment. Anything past that has pricing so ridiculous it makes no sense. The bar for that is significantly higher with HDD's.

 

Good compromise when going with really high capacities is considering using hybrid approach. 18TB HDD (360€) paired with 2TB SSD (200€) is the best combination at cost of 560€. This is the biggest combo you can think of at the moment. I wouldn't go with smaller cache for such capacity, though it may vary depending on needs. You cannot find any SSD of that capacity even remotely close to the price you'd pay for this. With usable performance metrics very similar to an actual SSD. It is however only choice for really high capacities. Such capacity extremes still very much favor HDD's. But things are slowly changing. 2TB used to be very exotic SSD several years ago. These days, it's nothing special and it's average at best.

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remember that generally, ssd's, even sata ssd's is limited to 8 tb in a single drive. This is just a general idea, so technically there are ssd that have a higher capacity, but not exactly viable or reachable in the hands of general public. where as HDD capacity can be had at 18 TB, and it is still technically possible to buy for the general public. Not only that. the an 8 TB ssd can cost over $1000, where an 18 TB seagate drive can be had for less $800 CAD (+ tax). Sure HDD uses more power but at a fraction of the cost. I am not a huge fan of HDD either as it does create a lot more sound, compared to SSD, but I can argue with the cost savings upfront.

 

To put it more in a financial perspective, 6 x 10 TB of NAS Drive storage can cost me $2000. Where as a full SSD array of equivelant amount of storage will cost me $6900. And I havent even included drives for parity yet. the ssd array may even use more power overall as well.

 

Long story short, while for the average consumer, it is very possible to have an all ssd only build, for people who are looking to have a ton of storage, like NAS owners or servers, HDD is more economically viable, by a long shot.

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On 3/14/2021 at 9:48 AM, curiousmind34 said:

SSDs have been rapidly increasing in size and decreasing in price, and it seems inevitable that they will wipe out hard drives at some point, because there is going to be a time where printing silicon is more efficient than creating a complicated mechanical drive. In fact, SSDs are now what makes sense to use as a boot drive for nearly any budget. It looks like they will eventually take over from hard drives in bulk storage. Will hard drives still serve a purpose years from now? If so, where? If you think that hard drives are going to become obsolete, when?

When SSDs are cheaper for the same capacity hard drives. As well as having even better endurance.

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