As most of us computer users already know, Hard Disk Drives are getting retired because of the newcomer, Solid State Drive. This new technology has finally hit the market hard and by the end of 2010 to mid of 2011, prices will become affordable for all computer users. Right now, SSDs are very expensive but once this happens, there is no way for HDD manufactures to stop their inevitable future bankruptcy. If one may think that they will not go bankrupt just because they are big corporations, well take a look at General Motors and think again!
There are many HDD producers, such as Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, TDK and of course, the leaders of the HDD market: Seagate and Western Digital. Some say that SSDs are much more durable over time than HDDs and that they could last for years without failing, however others say that after 100,000 writes they will fail and that HDDs are still more reliable but who knows? Only time will tell. One thing is certain, until recently Seagate and Western Digital dominated the computer storage market for years with only little competition. The other HDD producers are in most cases just left out of the equation. Now with the arriaval of SSDs, there will be dozens, if not even hundreds of companies that will produce SSDs.
Both Seagate and Western Digital have sensed this threat and they have already started to produce their own lines of SSDs but this will certainly not save them from bankruptcy since there will be hundreds of SSD brands with years of experience in this area for people to chose from.
There is however a solution for HDDs to survive this massive attack… Seagate and Western Digital will have to make HDDs COEXIST with SSDs but in order to make this happen, they will always have to be with 10 steps ahead of SSDs.
For example, the largest 3.5 inch SDD on the market today is an OCZ at 1TB and the largest HDD is at 2TB. This is no big difference and most customers will choose a SSD instead of a HDD because SSDs are also 2 times faster than normal 7200rpm HDDs.
So in order for Seagate and Western Digital to survive the SSD attack, they will have to release a 4TB HDD in the next few months and by the end of the 2010 to release a 8TB one. Now since the largest SSD is only 1TB, people will continue to buy HDDs and will say “the hell with SSDs! HDDs are way ahead of SSDs so I will buy a 8TB HDD instead of a tiny 1TB SSD”. So like it was said, hard disk manufactures will always have to be with at least 10 steps ahead of solid state drive manufactures if they don’t want to get bankrupted.
When SSD producers will release a 8TB on the market (don’t know which year… probably 2015?), HDD producers will have to release a HDD of at least 60TB HDD and so on. If Seagate and Western Digital are to save themselves from bankruptcy, they will certainly have to release a 8TB HDD by the end of this year.
Now for Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, TDK HDD producers won’t be such a big loss since thats not the only thing they produce. Samsung will survive just fine with their huge sales in TVs, cell phones and their other products, Toshiba will survive just fine with its notebooks, TVs, etc. On the other hand for Seagate and Western Digital corporations will be a huge loss if they don’t do something quick because that’s the only thing they produce… Hard Disk Drives….
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Wow, what a completely uninformed load of rubbish. I’m looking forward to the benefits of SSDs over HDDs as well. Yes, SSDs will take over, but not this quickly. But there are so many generalizations, omissions, and inaccuracies in this article it’s hard to know where to begin.
First: SSDs obviously are still many times expensive per GB. A quick look at a popular site (newegg.com) shows that all four of their available 1TB SSDs each cost more than $3,000 US, while they offer a 1TB laptop HDD for $170. There are more than a dozen desktop 1TB HDDs available for less than $100. Are you saying that people will run out and pay 20-30 times more?
The price premium for SSDs goes down when you look at lower capacities–but it’s still a factor of about 10 for 160GB drives, for example. Of course this will get better over time, but there is no doubt that there will certainly be a huge difference for a least a couple of years, possibly for much longer than that.
For a LARGE number of applications where larger capacity is needed, SSDs will remain cost-prohibitive during that time. For those where HDD speed is “good enough” and the physical size isn’t an issue (both desktop computers and devices such as DVRs, where cost competition is a big factor), HDDs will be a perfectly acceptable choice.
True, there is a big “sweet spot” where SSDs are a great choice, and many people are happy to pay the higher price for speed they actually will see benefits from…and in those cases we are already seeing SSDs make big inroads. Of course the physical size/weight/power-consumption advantages for SSDs are already a big deal for many laptop and server applications.
The speed comparison in this article is incredibly general and oversimplified. SSDs have read speeds which are many, many times faster than HDDs, but with write speeds the performance/benefits vary widely. For a long time some SSDs were actually slower than fast HDDs for real-world write-performance, but newer SSDs (e.g. OCZ/Vertex) are much faster for writes as well and that should get even better in the near future.
The generalizations about “who knows” in regards to failure rate are laughable. What do you think engineers do for a living? Those who develop these products DO know: At the very least they have their statistical/measured MTBF data for various drives. Those vary widely, and yes, generally SSDs will usually have much longer mean time between failure. But you shouldn’t disregard the fact that SSDs have significant challenges when compared to hard drives: Attention must be paid when selecting an SSD to make sure it will work well for their application, and continue to work well for a few years at least. The author does not even begin to consider things such as wear leveling, TRIM, spare blocks, etc. Many early-adaptors of SSDs have found out the hard way that they fail too! Backups are still important.
Capacity-wise the best HDD will achieve this year is probably 3TB per drive. 5TH HDDs aren’t far off. Since 1TB SSDs are available already, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had 8TB ones well before 2015. That looks like yet another not-well-informed guess by the author. Of course the big question is how much SSDs of 8TB (and various smaller but still generous capacities) will cost at that time.
Finally, WD and Seagate do see the writing on the wall, and are trying to compete with their own SSDs. They have a ton of engineering expertise but you are correct that others have a big head start in the SSD arena. WD and Seagate certainly have their work cut out for them to adapt to a new world moving away from HDDs.
Potemkin is right… this article is wholly unsubstantiated. Anyone who knows a little about modern storage technologies will see right through it. A good example is the line: “Some say that SSDs are much more durable over time than HDDs and that they could last for years without failing, however others say that after 100,000 writes they will fail and that HDDs are still more reliable but who knows?” Clearly not the author of this article. Thankfully many people do know about these facts, and it’s the reason a wear-levelling feature was introduced with Windows 7 to combat this.
I would call this a piece of uniformed ‘journalism’.
The market for digital storage is still growing rapidly, due to the ongoing explosive growth of broadband, online video, PVR’s, and all other sorts of digital media. HDDs will ofer the lowest $/GB for at least some time to come. Eventually flash memory might become cheaper, but not in the time frame projected in the article.
BTW Samsung and Toshiba are also two of the world’s biggest flash memory producers, so they will be ok either way