Will SSDs Replace HDDs? Experts Weigh In

Is There Still A Future For Hard Disk Drives? The cost of HDDs and SSDs will continue to fall, while capacity will continue to increase in both. The capacity for solid state drives (#SSDs) keeps going up while the price per terabyte keeps falling, sometimes raising questions about the future for hard disk drives (#HDDs). Will the cost of #SSDs per TB eventually become so low that they will totally displace HDDs? Barry Pangrle decided to ask a couple of experts in the field, Jim Handy from Objective Analysis and Thomas Coughlin of Coughlin Associates. He was looking for a comparison projection for HDDs and SSDs that would go about five years out into the future. Jim had performed such an exercise back in 2017, WDC: No SSD/HDD Crossover,but I needed something more recent. Jim had his SSD forecast data, shown in red in Figure 1 and Tom provided the HDD data shown in blue. The slope is steeper for the #SSD data, but it does not look like we’ll see a crossover in the next 5 years. The green $4.75/TB point was placed there by Barry to show readers where that falls on the plot and to use again later in another chart.... A very big thank you to Barry Pangrle , Jim Handy , Thomas Coughlin and Semiconductor Engineering for this very interesting full comparison/article with more background and insights via the link below 💡🙏👇 https://lnkd.in/eKTxfR7P #semiconductorindustry #semiconductor #technology #tech #chip #chips #it #datacenter #technology #memory #storage #computer #ssd #hdd

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When kept disconnected for long, do the SSDs loose data.

3.5" enterprise HDDs are already at 40TB and heading towards 100TB. Per Drive. Factor in data centers' insatiable appetite for capacity. It's gonna be a while, folks.

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Thanks for sharing, Marco

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It’s increasingly evident that SSD pricing is heading toward a near-term inflection point driven by oversupply and intensifying price competition. Major players from Korea, the West, and now the formidable entrance of China are poised to escalate the market dynamics, each vying for strategic advantage at precisely the right moment. Simultaneously, hyperscale data centers are approaching saturation faster than anticipated, which may dampen demand elasticity and shift investment priorities. On the GPU front, even the most advanced architectures continue to grapple with persistent limitations—issues that remain unresolved in the foreseeable horizon. Compounding this, the operational strain on existing power grids is becoming a critical bottleneck. Infrastructure simply cannot scale at the pace required to support these high-performance systems, and the resulting surge in running costs could stifle momentum across several fronts of technological progression.

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