Shark Bait

Knowledge Centers

Operating Systems

Networking & Internet

Mobile & Wireless

Security

Storage

Business Intelligence

Servers & Data Center

Computerworld Reports

Industry

See your link here

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Cyber Cynic

Good-bye hard drive? Will PC hard-disks die next year?

27 comments

TAGS:data storage, hard drive, SSD, storage
IT TOPICS:Emerging Technology, Hardware, Servers & Data Center, Storage

I'm old enough to remember when some of the first hard drives, such as the IBM Winchester-two disks with 30MBs each, hence 30/30, thus Winchester after the 30/30 rifle-showed up. I can also recall using cassette-tapes and 8-inch floppy disks on PCs. I've met people in their twenties who are unclear about what cassette-tapes are exactly and floppy disks are rapidly falling away from our collective memory. Now, it looks like hard-drives will soon be following them into history's dustbin.

Sound impossible? Actually it's all too possible. SSD (Solid State Drives) have gone from being small and pricey to being roomy and affordable. At the year's beginning, you could only find 4 and 8GB SSDs on inexpensive, Linux-powered netbooks or a 64GB SSD on the expensive Rolls-Royce of laptops, the Macbook Air.

As 2008 comes to a close though. It's a different story. The drives are getting bigger and cheaper. 128GB drives are now common, 256GBs are on their way, and Toshiba will soon be selling 512GB drives.

You say you want top performance? Then you really want a SSD. In a recent ComputerWorld review of the Intel X25 SSD, a 2.5-inch form factor 80GB drive, zipped by a Western Digital VelociRaptor. The VelociRaptor clocked in with a 250.2MB/sec. burst speed and 105.6MB/sec. average read through using the HD Tach speed tests. That's a great time. The X25, though, beat it with a 256.7MB/sec. burst speed and what's far more interesting, a sustained 230.2MB/sec. transfer speed.

SSDs aren't anywhere close to their top performance though. Micro claims that their next generation of SSDs, due out in the first quarter of 2009, will hit 1Gb/sec. throughput.

Put it all together and I can see SSDs putting hard drives out to pasture by 2009's end on desktops and laptops. After that it may not be long before they start replacing hard drives on servers. "Impossible!" You say? Think again. It seems Google is already putting SSDs into service.

It's been nice knowing you hard-drives, but it looks like we'll be saying good-bye to you soon.

Email this

Digg this

What People Are Saying

Add new comment

SSD WILL OVER TAKE HDD

Submitted by james braselton on March 27, 2009 - 7:29 P.M.

HI THERE WITH ALIEN WARE OFFERING 512 GB SSD IN A RAID ZERO FOR $899 HARD DRIVES ARE JUST WAY TOO SLOW FOR HARD CORE GAMERS AND ARE NOT RELIABALE ENOUGH FOR LAPTOPS

Reply | Report this comment

Accelerated adoption of SSDs

Submitted by SanDisk on January 13, 2009 - 9:49 P.M.

There are 3 factors that will drive accelerated adoption of SSDs: reliability, performance and energy efficiencies. As the market trend for declining flash prices continues, side by side with technological advancements, SSD capacities even higher than 16GB are expected to cost less than HDDs.

SanDisk has created a website called the SSD Academy that offers consumers and professionals a lot of information on the SSD market as well as general flash usage. www.sandisk.com/ssd. There's also an educational video on SSD vs. HDD that you may want to check out. http://driveyourlaptop.com/video/ssd-vs-hdd

Reply | Report this comment

It is not a "Yes or No" question.

Submitted by Koby Biller on January 5, 2009 - 9:55 A.M.

The point, in which users will choose SSD over the old technology, is the price - but the overall price, and not just the product price.
Once more we tend to forget the maintenance cost, which is too high to neglect.
One difference that will have to be considered is the rate of activity of the disk, combined with the pattern of data used on it.
We believe that the way developed in Disklace to measure quality of data on disks is going to be the method that will be used to decide which technology to use where. A disk with a high fragmentation and a short lifecycle will always use the old technology. Read-Only disks are welcomed to use SSD.
Koby Biller
www.disklace.com

Reply | Report this comment

SSDs may not be the future hard drive replacement.

Submitted by motie38 on December 24, 2008 - 5:25 P.M.

While SSD technology has it's place, and is becoming a viable storage medium with reasonable capacities, the MTBF compared to magnetic hard drives is questionable, and depends mostly on the application. Read performance is superior on SSDs, but they can only handle so many write operations before they fail. There are two types of SSD technology, single-level cell(SLC) and multi-level cell(MLC). SLC has better write characteristics, but is also considerably more expensive, so MLC is what usually ends up in consumer devices. Where SSD has it's best future is in portable applications where it's superior shock resistance is needed. Another good fit for it is in high performance database searches, because, as SJVN pointed out, random access read performance is so much better than hard drives. However, write performance is not only less reliable(in terms of lifespan), but significantly slower than hard drives, and has to be boosted by cache and parallel write operations(which adds to cost). So SSD is not such a good choice for databases that get written to a lot.
Also, on Tom's hardware there are a couple of articles that bring into question whether there are actually any power consumption benefits for SSD over hard drives, and that's been one of SSD's big selling points for battery operated devices like laptops and netbooks.
Thirdly, hard drive technology isn't going to stand still, and SSD will have to work hard to catch up, if they ever do, to hard drive capacities.
All that said, check out IBM's Millipede project which could be the technology that ends up replacing both hard drive and SSD technology, unless it gets eclipsed by holographic storage.
Oh, and the answer to SJVN's question is "No."
By the way, when I got my first computer, it had two 360KB floppy drives. I remember clearly saying "If I could get a hold of a good used 5 or 10 MegaByte hard drive, that's all I'd ever need!" Now I carry around several GigaBytes of storage, SSD no less, in my pocket at all times, on a couple of thumb drives, and my iPhone.

Reply | Report this comment

old computers

Submitted by Anonymous on March 31, 2009 - 2:58 P.M.

You must be a just out of diapers...My first computer had 1 external floppy drive, 256K. In fact 5 of us shared it and we each, yes EACH...had our OWN floppy disk!!! I believe they were 5 1/4 inches and were in fact floppy.

It was a Sol Technology computer. We had an 8" monitor!! It ran CPM which was part of the system the guys in Seattle stole to create Windows.

Ah the good old days...

Reply | Report this comment

Disk drive mfgs. will use

Submitted by I Doubt It on December 29, 2008 - 7:59 P.M.

Disk drive mfgs. will use the same trick they have every time their doom has been predicted. Double (or more) the capacity for the same, or lower, price. Are people really going to buy that 500G SSD or the new 2TB disk drive, given the same price? Who knows we may even see a merger of the two with a small SSD smart buffer drive, for it's fast throughput, coupled with a standard huge disk drive all in one package.

Reply | Report this comment

Correction

Submitted by Matt on December 24, 2008 - 12:33 A.M.

Did you mean 1GB/s throughput? Great post!

Reply | Report this comment

Yes, please! Get your b and your B correct

Submitted by motie38 on December 24, 2008 - 4:02 P.M.

There is still a difference in the two by a factor of eight, and you just claimed they are coming out with new SSD data rates that are slower than the current ones, but on par with ethernet.

Reply | Report this comment

I applaud author using units correctly

Submitted by Anonymous on January 2, 2009 - 12:30 P.M.

Typically, storage use B(ytes) and transfer/communications use b(its) as units of measure.

Reply | Report this comment

The first paragraph really got me

Submitted by Anonymous on December 23, 2008 - 9:13 P.M.

I was under contract at IBMs AdStaR division when they were celebrating the 35 year anniversary of the DASD (Direct Access Storage Device,) developed in 1956 and what we now refer to as a disk drive. It had multiple platters, a single read write head which moved on a pnuematic arm and was the size of a refrigerator. Capacity? 10 MB.
It took 35 years for disk drives to shrink to the 3.5" form factor with 40 MB capacity and another 17 for that capacity to climb to 1 TB.
Technological advances used to arrive in identifyable, discrete steps but now seem to arrive in a blur.
Having said all that, I don't think hard drives in PCs will disappear in 2009. It will probably be more like 2010.

Reply | Report this comment