If flash memory has indeed replaced platter disks in personal computers, the latter have more than ever their raison d’être in data centers and other servers. Places where their speed and access time is sufficient, and their storage/price ratio is unbeatable. At least for a while…
They have become invisible: neither your desktop computer bought at Christmas, nor your tablet, nor your smartphone carry a traditional platter hard drive. Only external disks and other personal NAS dedicated to personal or professional backup are still relevant, with some exceptions for those who mount machines and who still like to have a “good big HDD” in their lap (HDD = hard disk drive , the English acronym for hard disk). Yet according to Toshiba Europe storage division manager Rainer Kaese, hard drives are far from dead. They are even still unavoidable. “ It sold 258.9 million HDDs last year (in 2022, ed). Their total capacity amounts to 1,338 zettabytes, an increase of almost a third compared to 2020. Never have HDDs represented such a combined storage capacity wrote Rainer Kaese in a post published in Global Security Mag. A storage volume reading that is a bit different than the volume of units sold.
More storage volume, stable volumes
If we read the sales statistics for hard disks, after the peak of 2010 at 650 million units, the market was in constant decline until 2020. Since then, the volume of disks has remained stable at around 260 million units per year. Meanwhile, the market for these now very large and slow media compared to flash memory has been transformed. Apart from a few rare references still intended for the general public, hard drives have been ousted from the various consumer computer formats. After disappearing from walkmans (remember the first iPods and other Archos!), they ended up being kicked out of laptops and towers. First in high-end configurations, and now in all entry-level machines. Flash memory with inexpensive modules and capacities (64 GB eMMC configurations for example). What saves hard drives from scrapping is an ideal match between size, price, read/write speed and storage capacity. With a recurring market hungry for these arguments: data centers.
Cheaper than flash, faster than tape
Hard drives in 3.5-inch format rotating at 7200 revolutions per minute have a first major advantage: they can store a lot of data. Many references exceed 10 TB and we are even seeing capacities greater than 20 TB arrive. Space and energy consumption being the most expensive data centers, the fact that manufacturers manage to continue to pack more and more of data in conventional HDDs makes them ever more attractive. SSD disks, which are much faster, do not reach this level of density at acceptable prices for the development of mass storage represented by the generalization of the cloud and the collection of masses of data.
And compared to storage on magnetic tapes, also the “dinosaurs” of storage, the hard disk is much faster. If tape is a storage of choice in offline, long-lived archives, etc. Its mode of operation involving waiting for the cassettes to be loaded into a tape drive makes it impractical for storing data which is likely to be accessed frequently. This means that HDDs still have a bright future both in data centers and NAS, but also in video surveillance systems, which are becoming more and more widespread in many countries.
An inevitable long-term disappearance?
Passed through the brain sieve of our colleagues from Blocks and Files who echo Toshiba’s post, if the near and medium term future of “classic” hard drives is assured, in the long term their survival is perhaps less certain. . The reason being that flash memory designers are constantly playing on the number of layers of their NAND (another name for flash) memory modules, reaching today up to 176 layers. If for the time being the capacity/price ratio is against them, this technology has continued to see its price drop.
Read also: The future of mass storage is written on magnetic tapes 20 times thinner than your hair (January 2022)
Additionally, with sales volumes and capacities steadily rising for more than a decade, R&D investments as well as the ability to attract talent from flash champions allows them to improve at a faster rate than in the world of HDDs. A point of view shared by tape storage professionals like those at IBM that we met. Researchers and engineers who praise not only the security or the lifespan of tapes – several decades compared to between three and seven years for a hard disk – but also their storage capacity, which is growing much faster. Already displaying 18 TB per cartridge – and 45 TB in compressed format! – cassettes could go up to 580 TB within a decade. A progression that hard drives will not be able to provide.
Stuck between flash memory and magnetic tapes, hard drives continue to live their lives thanks to data centers. But could, unless there is a major technological breakthrough, end up being ousted in the medium or long term from our digital world.
Blocks and Files
