The end of the Hard Disks

[Picuino]

I have read several articles with the same title during the last years, giving the HDD as finished.
For me the HDD will still be indispensable for many years to come as a mass storage medium.

Forbes: Death Of The Hard Disk Could Come Sooner Than We Thought
https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2021/08/03/death-of-the-hard-disk-could-come-sooner-than-we-thought/?sh=6a27ded5146b

TECHTARGET: Hard disk drives to remain dominant storage media in 2022
https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/feature/Hard-disk-drives-to-remain-dominant-storage-media

Edit:Title

[kripton2035]

are you sure ?
samsung already sells 30TB ssd drives, whereas the biggest hard drive I know of it "only" 20TB in size.
ok the 20TB hard drive costs 10x less than the 30TB ssd, but in 5 years at most the ssd price will drop at the same level.
mass storage will come soon to ssd, and hard drives will remain only for their lower price.

[SiliconWizard]

Yeah, the end for personal devices - desktop computers, laptops, etc - sure. It has already happened for the most part.

But SSDs are still way too expensive per storage unit for large capacities, and the need for more storage is going to increase exponentially, at least on servers.

I don't know when the cost of SSDs will plummet enough to be a better alternative. But with the production issues we're currently experiencing in the semiconductor industry, I do not expect that to happen within 5 years. We still don't even know if things are gonna be completely back to "normal" within 5 years - not to mention being able to increase production several fold.

[bd139]

Not so sure about that. We stopped buying non SSD storage off Amazon about 2 years ago. We have no hard disks at all anywhere globally any more.

Think we have 500TB just in one amazon region...

[spostma]

harddisks are irreplaceable for long-term backups!

if you leave a MLC SSD unpowered and uncooled for some years,
you will see massive data corruption.

SSDs need to be powered up regularly, so the firmware can do a background refresh data of flash cells that leak.

[bd139]

Hard disks don't spin up either and have mechanical problems. Tape rollers degrade as well.

Keep your data moving and verified.

[Zenith]

The end of the hard drive is on the way. Who'd want a hard drive in a laptop, where the advantages of an SSD are huge, particularly in terms of robustness?

In desktops, if you are really determined to cheap out, I think there are some HDD only systems, but if you pay a bit more you get an SSD/HDD system with much faster boots and program loads. I can see why the cheap 1TB HDDs sell, but I can't see why 1TB Blacks are still selling, at a price well into SSD territory.

The niche for HDDs is where you want a lot storage and you are not bothered about speed, but cost is important. 4TB USB HDDs used for backups for instance.
Another is for surveillance systems, where speed isn't important, but the limited write life of SSDs is. I can't see SSDs ousting HDDs in those areas any time soon.

[Zenith]

harddisks are irreplaceable for long-term backups!

if you leave a MLC SSD unpowered and uncooled for some years,
you will see massive data corruption.

SSDs need to be powered up regularly, so the firmware can do a background refresh data of flash cells that leak.

The SSD problem gets worse as the TBW increases, and it's much worse with QLC.

You get bit decay in HDDs too, as the magnetisation patterns decay over time. It's as well to do a read/rewrite in place about every year.

[Bud]

HDD storage is provided by the Cloud operators as a service, do not think it is going to go away any time soon.

[xrunner]

All my PCs have been changed over to SSDs. The HDs that were the main drive are now relegated to holding a cloned image of the SSD for backup. But they are not connected at all until needed for a new clone or an emergency restoration.

[bd139]

HDD storage is provided by the Cloud operators as a service, do not think it is going to go away any time soon.

Might be surprised there. If you buy a few million SSDs they get rather cheap. HDDs require more power, more cooling and have lower density too.

Watch this space.

[rfeecs]

Well, there's always magnetic tape.

[bd139]

Rotting spindles and knackered transports. That’s dying too 

Print it out on archive and buy a fire safe 

Incidentally I know someone who works at the national archives here and this is a whole discipline which is really really deep.

[DiTBho]

Well, there's always magnetic tape.

just bought qty=12 DDS2 cartridges, just in case 

[Picuino]

harddisks are irreplaceable for long-term backups!

if you leave a MLC SSD unpowered and uncooled for some years,
you will see massive data corruption.

SSDs need to be powered up regularly, so the firmware can do a background refresh data of flash cells that leak.

And I don't trust cloud services enough to leave my information there. If I were in the management of a company, I would trust them even less.

[jorgeh]

Well, there's always magnetic tape.

just bought qty=12 DDS2 cartridges, just in case 

dds2 ? I would say why??, but probably for a heavy regulated industry.

and I personally do no longer sell any device that uses an HDD as the main drive. notebooks i just install SSD's. but as other said for large storage capacity as an end user I will choose an HDD.

[DiTBho]

The best ever is to have a fiber channel iSCSI engine combined with a ram-disk that exports things to a sATA interface or directly to the PCI.
Basically, you don't have a storage device locally, you just have a super fast optic link and a mechanism that gets and sends disk blocks over the optic fiber channel.

I saw it in an hack-camp meeting, home made with cheap fpga and low spec stuff, so ... relatively slow (25Mbyte/sec read/write), but impressive and I am still shocked for what one could achieve if done with high-spec modern technology (e.g. faster fpga than a poor SP6, 2GBps instead of 40Mbps optic trans-receiver, DDR4@xxxGhz instead of SDRAM@133Mhz, etc)


will it be the future of storage? or just too much cyberpunk? we will see 

[bd139]

All our storage was DAS because redundancy and distribution was at the software level not the hardware 

Latency is important. iSCSI is shit for that. Thus 64TB of DAS enterprise PCI-E SSD per node…

[DiTBho]

dds2 ? I would say why??, but probably for a heavy regulated industry.

They are cheap and funny for my SCSI media-tower, they are also usually good for six years, which is not bad for a temporary backup-media.

[Circlotron]

Print it out on archive and buy a fire safe 

Make sure you use acid free paper!

[DiTBho]

iSCSI is shit for that

yup, iSCSI is problematic when latency matters.

[Zenith]

dds2 ? I would say why??, but probably for a heavy regulated industry.

They are cheap and funny for my SCSI media-tower, they are also usually good for six years, which is not bad for a temporary backup-media.

DDS2 is only 4GB per cartridge, 8GB with usually achievable compression. It's amazing the way the amount of storage available has increased. As I recall they could only manage 4GB an hour.

[Zenith]

Print it out on archive and buy a fire safe 

Make sure you use acid free paper!

Vellum. British Acts of parliament have always been written on vellum because it resists decay.

[bd139]

Print it out on archive and buy a fire safe 

Make sure you use acid free paper!

Vellum. British Acts of parliament have always been written on vellum because it resists decay.

Waste of vellum.

[CatalinaWOW]

I think the tipping point is here.  I was surprised by how fast CRTs disappeared after introduction of LCDs.  Hard drives won't die quite as quickly, but I think if you look around in five years you will find spinning disks only in specialty markets.