SSDs have dominated the consumer PC market, but HDDs aren’t going away anytime soon. Although the reading and writing speed of Solid State Drives is considerably higher than that of Hard Disk Drivers, this will not always be the most important requirement when buying a data storage unit. Recently, Toshiba executive Rainer Kaese said in an interview with Global Security Mag that SSDs are unsuitable for certain types of work and therefore HDDs will reign supreme for quite some time.
Rainer begins his speech with the number of HDD sales in 2021. According to TrendFocus, “259 million HDDs were sold last year”, reaching a capacity of 1,338 Zettabytes, an increase of almost a third compared to 2020. according to Statista, 258.9 million units were sold in 2021, 2% less than 2020 (260.3 million).
In 2010, 650 million units of HDDs were sold, and the numbers have dwindled since then as the PC market increasingly uses SSDs. However, the force with which the exchange of an HDD for an SSD in computers has decreased, as the drop in cost per Terabyte of the SSD has decreased and is more or less parallel to the amount paid per TB on the HDD.
In the interview with Global Security Mag, Rainer Kaese says:
SSDs are not expected to completely replace hard drives any time soon. As the need for storage space is growing virtually everywhere and only HDDs can provide the high storage capacities at low cost that datacenters, cloud and other applications require, both media will continue to co-exist for years to come. .
The sectors that most use HDDs
According to Rainer, the sectors where HDDs stand out in front of SSDs work with datacenter and cloud storage. He says that HDDs are “the most cost-effective medium for these large online storage facilities; their capacity is constantly increasing due to advancing technology, while the price per Terabyte is continually decreasing. Flash memory is much more expensive and cannot be produced in sufficient quantities, so it is mainly used as a cache when the data transfer rate of hard disk arrays is insufficient.”
Another area where HDDs are used a lot is storing data by connecting to a network. NAS (Network Attached Storages) are used both in companies and in homes to access files more easily, as they allow access to data over the internet.
The reason HDDs are used in this scenario is that “they can comfortably handle the transfer speeds on most home and corporate networks where the high performance of flash memory would only be noticeable when transferring many small files. In this case, a Cache SSD, which some NAS systems have a separate slot for, is sufficient,” says Rainer.
What did you think about the points cited in favor of HDDs over SSDs? Have you thought of all these applications where they are more advantageous than SSDs? Comment below and share your opinion with us!
