If there’s one recurring theme that’s constantly heralded, it’s the end of the hard drive era. Normally these predictions come from analysts and we have tried them over the years, but they never end up coming, which always sows doubt. But now there are two device manufacturers, one of them NAND Flash, which is very clear: there is end date of hard drives and it will be soon.
Why always the same refrain on the end date of hard drives? Well, there are enough indications that, as happened with tapes at the time and with other technologies, HDDs as such are the past and SSDs are the present and the present. immediate future, but what are they based on this time to be final?
Huawei and Micron publish the same forecasts
Last month we saw Backblaze add SSDs to its massive server count again and the move to HDDs was gradual, but steady. The Mobile World Congress is a niche of declarations and arguments more than of technology, because it is not in vain that what has been said generates headlines and forecasts that will be analyzed.
Huawei Chairman Zhang said the following:
“By 2025, the cheapest flash memory could be 2.5 times more expensive than the cheapest hard drives, but it could also allow 2.5 times more compression, so the costs would even out. Consequently, SSDs will push HDDs to the edge of data centers already at early 2025“.
On PC, the system is clear, where HDDs have moved more in the NAS environment than to be present in new equipment or as a simple upgrade, except in a few cases where capacity and cost are still not accessible. for SSDs. But as for the advantages of SSDs, they are so clear that Zhang assures that in 2025 they will go to 80% of servers
Date at the beginning of the end thanks to NVMe-oF
What is it about NVMe-oF
“With the proliferation of shared storage NVMe on fabric High-performance cloud computing and composable infrastructures will increase the demand for high-capacity, cost-effective SSDs. In many cases, these replace shared hard drives because the total cost of ownership is lower when using flash memory than when using hard drives. »
“These savings in power consumption, footprint, secondary hardware pooling, reliability, and relative endurance are well recognized today, but as memory partitioning becomes more powerful, this trend will accelerate in 2022.”
“HDDs, on the other hand, today struggle to reach entry-level performance levels and don’t scale performance to capacity as well as SSDs. This will largely push HDDs in the same archival device enclosures that many use today on tape, all within the next decade.”
Not much can be said about this with all the data we’ve seen. The year 2025 seems to be, finally, the date for the beginning of the end of hard drives in all sectors, especially taking into account that Micron itself has almost ready its 176-layer QLC with which we should multiply new abilities and controllers PCIe 5.0 They are about treats.
