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SSD capacity could quadruple by 2029 — 8Tb NAND will bring big and affordable SSDs to the market
(www.tomshardware.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
are HDDs finally dying?
Not yet, unless the higher capacity comes at a much lower price. HDDs are fine for the price currently
it'll be interesting to see what happens, but i've been hoping that at some point SSDs will simply hit a cost point that is lower, whereas HDDs won't be able to go below that (due to physical tolerancing and complicated manufacturing) whereas with an SSD it's literally just chips on a board. You put more of them on the board it has more storage, simple as that.
Although i think before that, HDDs would likely become extremely competitive since they would actually be forced to lower cost some substantial amount.
I think you have it backwards. The SSD manufacturers are always going to see their product as better than HDD performance wise so they'll likely always have a higher price per capacity.
that's possible, but idk. I don't really see why i would want an 8TB ssd that can run at 4GB/s unless im literally a data center, so i think at some point the higher capacity ones are just going to have to be cheaper and more affordable. I.E. probably slower.
Yup, I use HDDs for my NAS and SSDs for my desktop and laptop. HDD for cheap storage, SSD for fast storage.
Not when 20TB drives are becoming cheaper :)
oh shit, you might be right, this might actually make HDDs more affordable as flash starts to catch up.
I doubt it will be this much. But at least it could lower the price, assuming it's not already a thin margin for the manufacturers, and they will instead resort to using SMR instead of CMR
High capacity SMR drives are already a special hell, those wont get much market share for the average HDD use case outside of archival usage, which might be the intent to begin with lol. I believe SMR drives are already cheaper anyway, not sure how much that is due to R&D and production or just existing in a special market space right now, but it's one of them.
nar. HDDs don't require power to maintain their state. So that's an advantage they'll always have over SSDs, which means there will be use-cases where HDDs are the better choice.
SSDs can reliably hold charge states for years, and there are storage media that are more reliable than HDD.
HDD's would still find a niche, probably, as a balanced option, but said niche will likely get smaller and smaller over many years.
It will probably be a choice of quieter, faster, expensive vs loud, high capacity, pretty cheap.
Unless we start with 3.5" SSDs (pls), HDDs will always be storage kings.
Imagine 3.5" SSDs with 3-4 layer sandwiched PCBs...And inexpensive NAND...
Why is 3.5" preferable? You can always use a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, and even 2.5" casing is mostly empty anyway
More volume for more NAND-PCBs
Does this count for the higher capacity drives (e.g. >2TB)? Preferably TLC?
Proud owner of 1TB Samsung 860 Evo.
Pretty much yes, it counts :D
Moreover, iirc, there are 64TB 2,5" SSDs and 100TB 3,5" available for enterprise users, and 8TB M.2 SSDs on consumer market. Space is really not a constraint.
I believe the 100TB SSD is the one LTT showcased a few years ago?
My problem with M.2 and high capacity is them vharging an arm and a leg for it. The cheapest I can find on the quick side is a WD black 8TB for 698,99€ with tax.
You know how much storage space I can buy from 700€ in spinning rust? Quadruple the space of the single stick of nand.
Surprisingly a SATA TLC SSD is even more expensive at 814,93€ (Kingston DC600M). But SAS will cost you your whole arm.
The constraint may not be the size but the cost certainly is.
And if they put lower capacity NAND on the PCBs we could reduce costs
HDDs will probably always be useful for media storage, where quick access time isn't required and it isn't being used constantly. They should die for PCs though.
Exactly. I haven't used a HDD in my PC for years, yet I bought HDDs for my homelab NAS. Unless SSDs get a lot cheaper, I'll keep buying HDDs for on-prem bulk storage.
doubt it would matter much, if you need long term storage you're using LSO tapes anyway.
HDD might be nice for a bulk backup or just mass storage, but i think the primary driving factor for them is going to be cost.
SSDs are not flash memory.