Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Are Hard Drives DISAPPEARING?”.
It’S no secret that SSDs are slowly but surely displacing hard drives and consumer PCs and why not they’re, faster, smaller, lighter and less prone to failure when they’re being thrown around the only obstacle has been the price, and even that is becoming less of an issue with One terabyte SSDs now under that magical $ 100 price barrier. So then, given their woes, is there a very real possibility that hard drives might disappear for good? To answer we reached out to our friends at Seagate who designed both SSDs and hard drives to provide us with some industry insight. Let’S start by looking at what is driving SSD prices down. Ssd manufacturers are getting better at packing more and more capacity into the NAND flash chips that actually store your data. You can learn more about that up here, but for this episode, what you need to know is that the cells that the flash chips are divided into used to be limited to a single bit per cell, but can now hold up to four bits.
Each and with upcoming penta level, cell or plc technology, that number will increase to five reducing the price that you pay per gigabyte. However, at the same time, hard drive, manufacturers are also working hard to increase areal density, which is how much data can be crammed onto a hard disk platter. So thanks to technologies like heat, assisted magnetic, recording or hammer which you can learn more about right up here, manufacturers are pushing for ever higher capacities with Seagate expecting a 30 terabyte drive next year and a 50 terabyte model by 2026. So as awesome as SSDs are for speed, the continued research and development that goes into hard drives means that SSDs won’t be catching hard drives in terms of the cost per gigabyte.
Any time soon and the continued affordability of hard drives is still more relevant than you might think. A recent study from the International Data Corporation indicated that the amount of digital data worldwide will grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to a hundred and 75 zettabytes in 2025. That is a I fold increase in just seven years. In case you didn’t know guys.
A zettabyte is a billion terabytes, all that data has to go somewhere, and while some of it can be archived to tape if it needs to be accessible, live from the web. Tapes not really feasible, because tape drives are so incredibly slow and it just isn’t cost-effective to put all of it on SSDs, even among cloud storage providers who increasingly store more and more of the world’s overall data having 90 percent mechanical storage and 10 percent. Solid-State storage remains a very common set up.
Take Facebook, for example, a highly access piece of content like a viral video, might remain in solid state storage or even RAM as long as it’s popular, but once a new fad takes over, it typically gets moved automatically to hard drive. Storage then call back again if it gains popularity. In this way, sites like Facebook can keep their access times, quick without breaking the bank and then, of course, there’s the endurance question. You see. The flash cells in an SSD eventually wear out once they’ve been overwritten a certain number of times, which you can learn more about here, and the SSDs that store more bits per cell, actually wear out more quickly, so cheaper SSDs won’t last as long as enterprise-grade ones.
That store fewer bits per cell. That means that low-cost SSDs need to be deployed selectively and they are mostly used in situations where they don’t have to be written to as much a streaming. Video service, for example, might keep its frequently watched content on SSDs because it doesn’t matter if a few hundred writes is gon na kill that drive. If you’re only refreshing your library on a quarterly or a monthly basis and most of the drive activity is just from people watching movies.
Now there are solutions to these problems. Intel’S obtained 3d crosspoint solid-state storage boasts better endurance and performance than even the fastest NAND flash, but it also comes at a cost per gigabyte that is greater than NAND flash. So it’s not really a drop-in replacement for regular SSDs as much as it’s like an additional tier of storage hardware to supplement flash, SSDs and, of course, hard drives. So, even though it’s becoming less common to see hard drives in home computers, they still have plenty of applications that keep them in demand. So whether you need extra space for your Steam games in your gaming, desktop low cost external drive to backup an SSD, only laptop or even a place to put 4k video footage from your hobbyist drone. There is still some need for affordable local storage bottom-line.
Then I definitely don’t expect the hard drive to go the way of the dodo anytime soon they might just end up in places where you don’t see them as often unless you frequently pull late nights as assistant min somewhere speaking of pulling things out of nowhere check Out today’s sponsor privacy, comm slash tech wiki for a free, easy-to-use service that hides your credit card number. How it works is privacy, comm creates a virtual card number, that’s actually locked, whichever merchant you’re shopping at. So, even if that merchant gets hacked the bad guys won’t be able to take that card and use it anywhere. They please. This is cool if they try you’ll actually get a push notification so that you’re always in the loop and you can cancel the card immediately. Privacy comm is PCI, DSS compliant uses military-grade encryption to secure your information and offers two-factor authentication and because they make their money from the merchants.
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