When we will finally see downfall of HDDs?

[Dean0919]

Title says it all... How do you think, how many more years we will need to see the downfall of HDDs?

[Herobrine2909]

I dont know. With servers it could go up for thousands of years.

[Kilrah]

Not anytime soon, while small-ish consumer SSDs are currently only about 2-3x the price per capacity it's suspected it's only due to temporary overcapacity and won't last, high grade large drives are still in the range of 10x more expensive than HDDs. And HDDs are still evolving.

[Eigenvektor]

Only you can prevent HDDs from being used

 

Seriously though, my PC contains no HDDs. So... right now?

 

But if you need a ton of storage for cheap, it'll likely remain the way to go for a lot longer

[Needfuldoer]

Hard drives won't completely disappear until NAND flash can consistently beat it in storage density and cost in every market segment. I think mechanical drives about 1 TB and under are effectively obsolete in consumer applications, but compare 20 TB of enterprise-grade SSD to a 20 TB server hard drive in cost. For bulk storage applications that don't need a ton of IOPS, mechanical hard drives are still very much relevant.

 

Even magnetic tape still has its niche. You can get an 18 TB LTO-9 tape for less than half the price of an 18 TB mechanical hard drive. Granted, tape is nowhere near fast enough for online storage, but it's a perfect format for deep storage (in a tape library) or offline backups. Yes you need an expensive tape drive to actually use LTO tapes,  but a a large enough scale you make up for the drive cost in media savings.

 

My home server has a dozen 12 TB SATA hard drives in it, so my desktops don't need mechanical drives of their own. If I were to build an array that size out of eighteen 8 TB SSDs today, it would have cost three times as much as it did (which already stung a little).

[BetteBalterZen]

I guess as soon as enterprise solutions using flash than harddrives becomes cheaper [than harddrives], it will happen

[Schnoz]

50 minutes ago, Dean0919 said:

Title says it all... How do you think, how many more years we will need to see the downfall of HDDs?

It all plays down to a battle of cost/GB. HDDs are king and queen in this regard, beaten only by niche formats like magnetic tape storage (which comes with its own whole host of drawbacks). Also, HDDs can stay relevant for a long time even if you don't see a lot of innovation on the surface of "oh just more TB". Features like OptiNAND, dual-actuators, random-write caching, etc. etc. all help to supplement the unbeatable value of HDDs with reasonable performance.

[Levent]

I wont live to see it.

[Doobeedoo]

Depends how you look at it. For general consumers, already has. They don't need TBs of storage in general. Also couple of TBs for more enthusiast users is still solud price wise anyway. The server and business space that is different. But really just looking at consumer world, if you don't need many TBs for archive/mass storage or offloading stuff, no reason then. Another thing also, finally, games are requireing SSDs too, software that is the largest in terms of capacity even.

[venomtail]

Define downfall. That they're no longer an option when buying new parts cause no one buys them so no one sells them or when will they never be used again? People still use tape and floppy disks...

[ewitte]

This will only happen if $$ is lower AND it is more reliable.  Or if gets close enough that people stop buying them and production is stopped.  Its very easy to go all SSD for a worktation but I have 48TB in my NAS and there are people with WAY more not to mention businesses.

[ianm_ozzy]

It seems not for a while.

Right now it seems pointless buying a hard drive less than around 2TB.

I only get 8TB+.

 

For much higher capacity, it is still worth it.

Very high capacity hard drives are on the way - 20TB plus.

 

After a quick check, the The best SSD fr performance/dollar is this:

https://www.samsung.com/au/memory-storage/sata-ssd/ssd-870-qvo-sata-3-2-5-inch-8tb-mz-77q8t0bw/

 

It is still much more expensive  than the cheapest hard drive  with the same capacity (8TB).

It also has qnand flash ( 4 bits/cell), with terrible longevity.

When writing to it & the slc cache fills, the write speed drops below most hard drives.

 

Even if this was available a the same price as a hard drive with the same capacity, would avoid it.

 

For typical users, hard drives may not be that useful in the long run, but  guess data centres to use them for a while.

 

So for me: - Hard drives for best value/storage

NVME for performance.

 

As for sata SSDs - no thanks. 

 

 

 

 

 

[wseaton]

I'm still getting servers with the obligatory 1TB spinner installed. I have stacks of these things. We use them as coasters, poker chips, etc 

 

I imagine Dell and HP have warehouses full of them. 

 

SSD still has a scaling problem like RAM. 

[Tan3l6]

It is slowly happening already. Won't be any actual date.

[NobleGamer]

2.5" HDDs are in a "downfall" in laptops because at 2 TB, budget 2.5 inch HDDs are the same price as budget M.2 NVME drives from decent brand names! M.2 SATA drives are similar in price to NVME.

M.2 SSDs also save precious interior space and might draw less power than 2.5 HDDs.

 

The same cannot be said of 3.5" HDDs, as budget NVMEs are still 2x the price at 1 TB, and the cheapest ~500GB SATA 2.5" SSD is still 50% more expensive than a 3.5" HDD.

 

It is going to take much cheaper SSD tech to drive it down to 3.5" HDD prices - At least a decade or maybe longer in my opinion before a consumer desktop PC HDD downfall.  Much longer for server use.