That’s why there won’t be any hard drives in 5 years

Slowly but surely the era of hard drives over. If it were up to the head of development at the flash memory specialist Pure Storage goes, this end will no longer progress insidiously for a long time, but will come more suddenly than expected. Shawn Rosemarin prophesiedthat no more disks after 2028 more are sold.

The decisive factor for this, however, is not the falling price per GB in the private customer area. Here is already the price difference between HDD and SSD so low that you are happy to pay a little more for the advantages of an SSD. A cheap but good Seagate Barracuda hard drive with 1TB costs e.g. at Amazon 48 Euro. There is a Crucial SSD with 1TB for 57 euros – and it has a significantly higher reading and writing speed.

Data centers as the sticking point

But the more storage you need, the more the prices vary. To stay with the above example, the 4TB version of the hard drive 80 eurosone 4TB SSD from Crucial but 247 euros. And these are end customer products that are cheaper than professional hardware for data centers.

And data centers require a particularly large amount of storage, also because more and more applications are moving to the cloud. With so much storage capacity required, initial cost is a big factor. According to analysts, the end of the hard drive will only be sealed when SSDs with large capacities beat the price of HDDs with large capacities – which, depending on the calculations, could take decades.

The power consumption seals the end of the hard drive

Rosemary disagrees. Precisely because of the data centers, the end of the HDD will come sooner than analysts and HDD manufacturers suspect. The reason is that a lot lower power consumption of SSDs: “Data centers account for 3 percent of the world’s energy requirements. Roughly a third of that is memory. Almost all of them are HDDs. If we eliminate the HDDs here and switch to SSDs, we can save 80 to 90 percent electricity.”

With the ever-increasing electricity prices, the switch to SSDs is therefore attractive for data center operators. In addition, there is already a shortage of electricity at some locations. As a result, some regions, including Ireland, which is a popular location for US companies in the EU, are not currently approving the construction of new data centers. Their high energy requirements would destabilize the power grid and possibly cause it to collapse.

Data centers must therefore inevitably save energy and/or generate the electricity themselves from renewable energies in order to receive a building permit. It is also conceivable that in the future laws be enacted, which oblige not only new but also existing companies and locations to save energy in order to relieve the power grids. This could be necessary to bridge the time until sufficient capacity to generate electricity from renewable energy sources is available.

The energy demand gap exists because there is already an urgent need Coal and gas power plants switched off in order to counteract a climate catastrophe. At the same time, however, a number of data centers are being built and expanded, which is partly due to the hype surrounding artificial intelligence exists, triggered by ChatGPT.

The end of the HDD is not set in stone

As usual, such predictions should be treated with some caution. Rosemarin’s arguments are valid, but the end of hard drive sales in 2028 seems like an “educated guess” rather than a forecast based on facts.

Pure Storage develops flash storage technologies and SSDs for data centers, so it is in direct competition with HDD manufacturers. By 2026, the company aims toSSDs with 300TB storage launch.

The high price of such systems would not only pay off in the long run because of the high electricity costs. SSDs also have a higher durability and need to be replaced less often than HDDs.