HDD sales have been in decline for years. Pure Storage stated earlier this year that the end of this ancient storage medium is near, after which many parties made the case for the continued survival of the hard disk drive. Can we ever say goodbye to the HDD, and if so, when?
Pure Storage’s message in June of this year was “Disk is done.” No one would be left selling new hard drives by 2028, the company stated. At the time, we looked back at the growth of solid state storage, which has become both widely available and competitively priced, especially since the advent of QLC flash. Since Pure does not sell HDDs at all, they’ve got no desire to keep the HDD alive for long.
Read more: Pure Storage wants to make hard drives permanently obsolete
Plenty of parties have come out of the woodwork to refute this assessment. In fact, Seagate and Toshiba argue that the HDD is alive and kicking. Innovations abound, such as the development of advanced lubricants and technology for even higher capacities, a key strength that HDDs still hold over SSDs. This year, Seagate launched HAMR drives for the first time, initially delivering them in 32TB form and looking to produce them in bulk starting in early 2024. The hope is that such HDDs could top 50TB or even 100TB. But what are such breakthroughs worth if the price per terabyte of SSDs is still bound to drop below that of HDDs?
The catch-up continues, but not everyone agrees on its speed
The cost of both HDDs and SSDs is continually falling. The pace of that decline varies, especially since SSD components are also used for other purposes. For example, the demand for system memory (DRAM) affects the price of solid state storage because many SSD use DRAM for a built-in cache. Currently, the price for DRAM isn’t dropping very much at all, meaning SSD pricing isn’t falling as fast as it otherwise would. In the case of Pure Storage, they have a DRAM replacement for that with DFM (see our earlier article), but not all storage players have such a solution at the ready. In a general sense, the DRAM factor is helping HDDs to stay alive just that little bit longer.
The perception that SSDs will make HDDs obsolete within a few years is also contradicted by software company Scality. Scality is a rarity in that it can make such an assessment without any biases, according to CMO Paul Speciale. Its unique market position as a software vendor ensures that it has no preferred winner in the SSD-HDD battle. Indeed, it partners with a variety of storage players, so its business model isn’t much affected at all by any specific storage medium. According to Speciale, HDDs will still be five times cheaper per terabyte than SSDs by 2028.
Blocks & Files reminds us that this 5x ratio has been seen as a major inflection point for some time. Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers predicted in 2019 that enterprise customers will start to favour SSDs for general storage purposes when they’re less than five times as expensive as HDDs. The reason for this is that by that point, the benefits of SSDs’ speed and reliability outweigh any remaining advantages held by hard drives. Between 2017 and 2019, the price ratio dropped precipitously from 18x to 5x, but it’s currently remarkably stable around exactly that point. Speciale also states that power consumption, commonly cited as a major advantage of SSDs over HDDs, does not play a meaningful role in customer choice. Although a HDD in idle mode consumes more than solid state, an active SSD is a lot less economical. A QLC flash drive uses 5W in idle mode versus the 7W a HDD consumes, but write takes 20W for QLC versus up to 9.4W for a hard drive. The end result is that the comparative power consumption is much of a muchness in the real world.
Also, not all types of files are compressible enough to pull that 5x ratio further in favour of SSDs. For example, genome data in life sciences is already compressed beforehand, so it hardly benefits from all-flash versus HDDs, Speciale notes. He also claims video compression does not make files small enough to make SSDs competitively priced versus HDDs. Specific applications will continue to run on HDDs for a long time, he thinks.
Not just a capacity problem
Another key achievement is that SSD production capacity may not be sufficient to completely replace HDDs. A model to predict this capacity suggests that there will be 405 exabytes too few available to make HDDs obsolete, a shortfall of 5.7 percent of the projected market by 2029. However, that percentage is within the margin of error, so there is a chance that a full turnaround could be possible by then. Will there perhaps still be use cases remaining for the HDD?
Rainer Kaese, Senior Manager Business Development Storage Products at Toshiba Electronics Europe argues that SSDs and HDDs will be jointly utilized for years to come. He assumes that the price ratio per TB will remain in favor of HDDs, while also citing the possible capacity shortage of SSDs. Central data storage and backups will continue to suit HDDs, Kaese believes, while video surveillance with modern 4K and 8K content will continue to rely on this method of storage. External storage and archiving also remain legitimate purposes in which the raw capacity of HDDs is a major factor, according to Toshiba. Raener’s conclusion: “SSDs are not expected to completely replace HDDs at any point.”
Between tape and flash
Raener cites magnetic tape (LTO) as an example of a slower and older storage medium that is still alive and well. Indeed, tape actually became more popular in the past few years. It offers security advantages such as making data manipulation impossible. In other words, those who want to guard against ransomware can get by with LTO storage, protecting their data backups from even the most cunning online criminals. In addition, tape’s maximum capacity is growing at amuch faster rate than SSDs and HDDs, which grow linearly. Tape, on the other hand, offers exponential growth.
Why is this important for HDDs? The data explosion continues to rage on, while the usefulness of said data also increases. Tape isn’t the only suitable cold storage solution for this, because the data will no longer be immediately usable by computer hardware. There’s room for a middle-ground that offers more immediate access than tape, without the space constraints from SSDs. AI applications benefit from that setup. Admittedly, the read speed of SSDs makes it a more attractive medium to house data, but HDDs, as mentioned, will continue to offer more capacity for the same money for a long time to come. Not every AI workload is speed-dependent, so solid state isn’t always the most economical choice.
Storing lots of data that (unlike tape storage) you can still easily process afterwards will continue to increase in its importance. Or, as John Rydning, Research VP, Global DataSphere at IDC, puts it, “Enterprise organizations are expected to begin to realize more value from the unstructured data they generate, capture, and store as new data intelligence solutions including generative AI are adopted.” In short: there’s still going to be a niche available for HDDs.
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