Man who runs "Entertainment Storage Alliance" writes white paper claiming that people need lots of storage, so HDDs aren't going anywhere, makes charts to illustrate his feelings, presents no analysis.

Whitepaper store link (I have to assume the description isn't updated for each new issue...?) https://tomcoughlin.com/product/digital-storage-technology-n...

Entertainment Storage Alliance: http://www.entertainmentstorage.org/

I agree that HDDs aren't going anywhere, but this is a nothing article on an apparently nothing whitepaper.

Maybe not yet, but eventually?

HDD manufacturers do seem to see trouble brewing. Eg, one interesting thing to me is that hard disks are getting more complex. We now have:

* Helium

* HAMR

* SMR

* Dual actuators

Helium and HAMR improve density, but add cost. SMR improves density but results in drives that need special handling. Dual actuators improve performance, but increase points of failure.

Things like HAMR and SMR seem to be a sign that there's not that much more density to squeeze out without taking special measures.

One problem is that as drives get larger and larger, RAID sync times keep on growing. Even assuming faster RPM drives and multiple actuators it seems we're getting quite closer to where this becomes a serious problem.

People who do data storage/archiving for a living, do SSDs have predictable durability? I know that with magnetic media you can plan to copy them every so often to prevent loss, but is that information well known for TLC/QLC flash? I also know that SanDisk made an archival worm SD card that was supposed to be durable for 100 years, but haven't heard of rates like that for SSDs.

I own a few SSDs, but for me, HDDs still make the most sense for the majority of my storage. It's not even close. High-capacity HDDs are half the price of high-capacity SDDs.

Both make good arguments. If the total cost of an SSD is indeed cheaper than spinning rust in five years, then sure, I can see them getting phased out for enterprise.

But what about consumers? They don't consider TCO the same way. They don't look at energy or space constraints. They only look at cost per megabyte. As long as SSD is more, they will keep buying spinning rust for backups.

The fact that Costco always has backup disks on the shelves tells me that it's a pretty popular item amongst consumers.

No one deletes data: HDDs are useful for tiered storage and bulk bits.

A number of file systems also support transparent tape usage: a stub is left in the directory structure and if anyone tries reading it the bits are fetched from a robot.

This article seems like it is an AI summary of another document. It doesn’t offer anything new, just restating someone else’s analysis. And that analysis comes down to… storage demand will outpace SSDs price point enough that the demand will be met by both SSDs and traditional spinning platters.

Which isn’t surprising as even today there is demand for tape. The question is how long the demand will remain vaguely mainstream vs when it will become more niche. The 2028 estimate of storage being dominated by SSDs seems vaguely reasonable to me.

Pure’s bravado of staying zero hard drives will be sold after 2028 seems silly but inline with what a flash storage company would say. But from a directional standpoint it probably is right that many use cases will get further eroded by SSDs. One big challenge with hard drives is access speed (throughout and latency) compared to nvme, and hard drives being used more as cold and near line storage is definitely going to continue. Write once access never in many cases.

Flash is down to "only" 2x price of regular harddisks for several TB. Sure new HDDs are large, but they're expensive, and it seems unreasonable to me the new HAMR tech will be different.

Simple extrapolation puts the crossover a few years into the future last I checked, though there are other aspects as well.

Will HDDs die next decade? Surely not. But given flash can go 3D surely its just a question of time until HDDs are like tapes now.

SSDs had vast improvements in cost over the past decade due to (a) the switch from 2-bit MLC planar NAND to 3-bit (TLC) 3D NAND, and probably (b) the growth of the SSD market - 10 years ago most flash went into iPods, phones, etc., so pretty much all flash chips produced were optimized for that use case, and it cost more to make SSDs out of them.

Hard drives spent a decade in the wasteland, with little growth in per-platter capacity (google "superparamagnetic limit" for more info) and gains mostly due to packing more platters by filling the enclosure with helium to reduce aerodynamic drag. (fun fact - cast aluminum is porous to helium, which caused no end of trouble)

With HAMR and other recent energy-based workarounds to those density limits, hard drives have a number of years of major TB/$ gains ahead of them, while flash is in the optimizing stage - going from e.g. 96 to 144 3D layers, and diminishing returns (at the expense of big performance costs) going from 3 bits per cell to 4 bits ("QLC") for a 33% boost in capacity. (QLC to PLC only gains an additional 25%, at an even higher cost)

If you're managing an exabyte of data or more, HDD is probably an important part of your storage mix for a good number of years going forward - devices are currently maybe 5x cheaper than big QLC drives at the moment, the ratio is probably even better when you price out the systems that house them[*], and HDD $/TB is probably going to improve faster than SSD $/TB for a number of years.

I started my career working on Asynchronous Transfer Mode networking; ever since then I'm highly skeptical of anyone saying "our technology will eliminate <entrenched technology X> in five years". Unlike ATM vs Ethernet I think it's quite possible that HDDs will fade to irrelevance in 10-15, but 5 years is ridiculous. If you narrow the statement to "no one will sell 3rd party HDD-based storage systems", it might be true - HDDs will go into AWS, Google, big Ceph deployments, etc.

* it's actually a bit difficult to spec a system that doesn't add close to 100% to the cost of the drives themselves for either HDD or SSD, and it also depends on how CPU- and memory-efficient your storage system needs. (e.g. Ceph can be a pig, and note DRAM prices didn't fall in the 2011-2021 decade) There are a number of competitive capacity HDD systems on the market - typically 4U 60-drive machines - while the EL.1 SSD format has just come on the market and you'll probably pay a big premium for systems optimized to house them.

I know spinning disks are fragile, but I've had more problem with cold storage of SSDs. They just seem to forget information or flip bits when they're not kept powered up. Don't ask me why.

Since I need cold storage, I hope that hard disks continue to be around.

I don't see disk drives going away. They serve a different purpose. As much as I love SSDs, I feel more comfortable storing data on a disk drive for the long term. I don't need performance on network storage either.

It's kind of ridiculous that you can get 2TB of SSD storage now for $60 (even if it's not the fastest)

https://www.newegg.com/intel-2tb-670p-series/p/N82E168201674...

For the majority of consumer use cases even 1/4 of that is pretty generous, and Apple just bumped up the MacBook Air from 128GB to 256GB.

Even our fancy pants enterprise storage arrays have a 30:1 or 40:1 ratio of HDD to SSD (cache). But of course, those prices aren't coming down anytime soon!

The introduction of SSDs leading to SSD only personal computers accidentally set computing back about a decade. It's crazy that top tier computer manufacturers are actually selling computers with un-upgradable storage of only 256GB (and only 8GB of ram) in 2023. Then these users end up having to juggle a handful of external drives which are far more unreliable and likely to cause weird problems. The vast majority of my tech support is helping people with tiny SSDs deal with the problems of external drives and cloud storage.

There are still a lot of workloads that perform mostly sequential writes and reads that aren't a huge win for SSD. Even if you look at random write workloads many of those start by journaling to a WAL now, so it is possible for the WAL to be on a separate HDD.

I assume a lot of this comes down to "object storage": S3 and similar services. As I understand it, these would do actual data storage in HDD (or other cheaper medium for glacier and slower access storage). Metadata caching could use SSD.

When I recently upgraded my setup, I had to choose whether to convert my local backup processes to SSDs or stick with HDDs, albeit newer and faster HDDs than their snail-like predecessors. I did the usual research into which option made more sense when strictly for backup purposes rather than frequent “live” data access, and decided HDDs were my better long-term choice. YMMV.

As a terabyte SSD is enough for everything I need random access to, and hard drives are not particularly reliable for backups storage, I wish we just had cheap reliable tape storage to put backups on. But small-scale tape storages appear to be more expensive per terabyte than HDDs are.

Magnetic tape is still being used for niche applications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-tape_data_storage#Via...

They absolutely will if they ever reach similar $/GB price points. That's the only reason I can think of to buy spinning disk storage in 2023.

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