Some people have begun promoting the idea that hard drives will go extinct in just a few years. Speaking to Blocks & Files, Shawn Rosemarin, Vice President of R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure Storage, a flash memory company, gave some of his predictions about the future of storage, making the bold claim that no more hard drives will be sold after 2028. Rosemarin believes that the demise of HDDs is inevitable because of their higher electricity demands, which don’t mesh with the quotas that more and more countries are apparently setting, among other reasons.
“Our CEO in many recent events has quoted that 3 percent of the world’s power is in datacenters. Roughly a third of that is storage. Almost all of that is spinning disk. So if I can eliminate the spinning disk, and I can move to flash, and I can in essence reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90 percent while moving density by orders of magnitude in an environment where NAND pricing continues to fall, it’s all becoming evident that hard drives go away,” Rosemarin said.
“We’re already seeing countries putting quotas on electricity, and this is a really important one… we’ve already seen major hyperscalers such as one last summer who tried to enter Ireland [and] was told you can’t come here, we don’t have enough power for you.”
“Today, it’s economically unfeasible for many customers to run their entire estate in hard drives. But it’ll actually become impossible. You’ll actually be limited from a density and power consumption perspective of how much data you can actually support. Now (CIOs) go to your organization and say that, based on our power footprint, or allocation or quota, these are the projects I can support. And you now need to constrain how much data you consume or how much data you need.”
From a Block & Files post:
HDD vendors sing a different tune, of course. Back in 2021, HDD vendor Seagate said the SSD most certainly would not kill disk drives. There’s a VAST vs Infinidat angle to it as well, with the former also stating disk drive IO limitations would cripple the use of larger disk drives in petabyte-scale data stores, with Infidat blasting back that it “must be joking.” Gartner has had a look in too, claiming that enterprise SSDs will hit 35 percent of HDD/SSD exabytes shipped by 2026 – though that would make Rosemarin’s 2028 cutoff unlikely. Pure recently stated SSDs would kill HDDs in a crossover event that would happen “soon.”
Discussion (18 replies)
Join Discussion →I call bullshit, unless we get some disk(flash) based hardware level encryption going... you won't see spinning disks go away completely.
It will be SEVERELY reduced, or security requirements will be such that bitlocker or the equivalent is enough.
I dont see price and data density being there in 5 years.
Its not like hard drives arnt also still in development and getting better every year.
I wonder what new disruptive technology is headed our way to obviate both SSD's and HD's?
It's possible that datacenters will move to SSDs, but not entirely and not in 4 years. And there are other uses where power consumption isn't a significant factor like cold storage and backups. I don't see that market drying up for HDDs, unless they are still price gouging flash memory and he knows they could sell them much cheaper than they currently do.
People still buy tape - just sayin'
Never gonna happen. Not as long as flash is so damn expensive (at the sizes of 8+TB)
I was about to make this exact point. Cost for offsite storage using tape is SO low by comparison to everything else....
Eventually, perhaps. By 2028, I don't see it happening.
For desktops / home use? Maybe. For datacenter / mass storage? Not likely. And like Brian mentioned, tape is still a thing.
We have some AFA (all flash arrays) SAN units at work.... but they are more costly and store considerably less than the disk SANs. They have their place though, for high IOPS stuff like massive databases. Just not needed everywhere.
Anyone still using floppies or punch cards? Well I know in the whole world that is a yes, I am asking more specific to here? Oh and other than I.
I mean I still have some and a usb floppy drive.... but I don't think I've touched them in the last 15 years
Funny you should ask. For my job, no but I was just training somebody on a database that we still have to use and it has a 3.5" icon for the export menu. Heck, at this point I personally try to avoid even having SATA, and/or optical, drives but I know that's an ocd thing.
LOL
Not going to happen in datacenters. Not for a long long time. Flash has two issues. Density and cost. Show me viable 20+ TB SSD's at similar cost to HDD's and I'll bite. I just don't see that happening in 4 years.
I can get a 600 TB - 1 PB HDD shelf right now for the cost of a 250 TB SSD flash shelf. There's no way the delta is going to close in 4 years.
Uhhh. I wouldn't say that. Today there are very expensive mom generic 32 tb nvme ssd drives from Samsung you can get. In 5 years I could see that in a relatable more geneic drive setup with 1 pb in a 2 u drawer. But... It would still be expensive. In 10 years 1pb will probably be down to a single enterprise drive.
No way, dude. Wooden-state punched-card drives (WSPCDs) are the future of storage.* Why? Software developers (especially those that work with filesystems) are already comfortable working with trees, branches, and leaves, so it's only logical to conclude that a paper-based storage medium is optimal. WSPCDs are also biodegradable and can be recycled, so they're environmentally friendly. Connectivity is defined by the Paper Express Host Controller Interface (PEHCI) specification. Version 1.0 of the specification is available in hardcover or can be downloaded and printed on paper locally.
Every so often someone from their respective storage industry makes an outlandish prediction (e.g., we're all going to return to spinning rust by 2030) and somehow it becomes news. It's just a way to generate free publicity for their business.
*Full disclosure: I'm a suicidal tree.
Up to a few years ago, I don't know the exact date. The official media for submitting certain data to my government was still using Floppies.