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By Toshiba, Why HDDs Will Remain Relevant?

Will not die out any more than tape has.

Rainer kaese Toshiba Electronics EuropeBy Rainer W. Kaese, senior manager, HDD business development, Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH

 

 

Although we are seeing HDD drives disappear from many end devices, it doesn’t mean the end for this storage medium.

Rapidly growing amounts of data push storage space requirements in data centers and the cloud to the very limit, which means HDDs remain relevant and important. 2020 saw a total combined capacity of over 1ZB in HDDs delivered to the market for the first time.

Tape storage should no longer exist. When tape drives disappeared from desks in the 1990s because computers were equipped with internal HDDs large enough for archiving purposes, many experts predicted the imminent end of the technology – but that did not happen. Even today, there is a stable market for tape storage, as it is still essential for efficient and cost-effective archiving of data.

Tsh061 Why Hdds Are Relevant

The HDDs that replaced the tapes back then are in a similar situation today. With the rise of flash memory, the decline of HDDs began, specifically if we look at current end devices supplied with SSDs and flash modules. This might suggest that the end of the HDD is imminent. Only inexpensive computers still rely on HDDs today, while portable devices have been equipped exclusively with flash for several years. The initial gens of MP3 players were equipped with HDDs but quickly replaced by SSDs.

On closer examination, we see that HDD drives are retained in some devices because they are the ideal data carriers for specific applications. These include for example NAS that have high storage capacities but do not have to deliver extreme performance. SSDs offer too few advantages in this segment to justify their higher price per capacity. Most video surveillance recorders also utilize HDDs due to their strength and ability to store sequential data streams and large amounts of data.

However, the main application area for HDDs is in the data centers of companies and cloud providers. Rapidly advancing digitization means they must process ever-larger amounts of data and they mainly use HDDs for this, which leads to new records set every year. In 2020 HDDs with a total capacity of more than 1ZB were shipped for the first time – an increase of 13% compared to 2019 [1]. In comparison: only one-fifth of this capacity was made available on SSDs last year.

HDDs score on price and availability
The most important reason HDDs have remained popular in data centers is their price. SSDs are currently around 6x as expensive per capacity unit and therefore are only used in selected places. These include for example boot drives, local storage of compute servers and smaller capacity storage with low latency requirements. HDDs bear the brunt of storage capacity needs and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Although the prices of SSDs are continuously falling, the further development of HDD technology ensures that the price curves of both media are almost parallel. Industry experts assume that thanks to new recording methods such as HAMR and MAMR) the storage capacity of HDDs will increase by around 2TB per year for a few years at a similar cost. This means that HDDs will remain the more economical medium, in the medium term. But even if SSDs could compete with HDDs in terms of price, flash memory would not overtake the HDD quickly because the production capacities are far too low. To double the current flash output alone, investments of several hundred billion dollars would be required – to set up new production facilities and expand existing systems. However, the additional capacities would only be available in 1 or 2 years and then would not even cover half of the requirements for 2020 – let alone those for 2023, which will be many times higher.

The many networked machines, smart devices and new IoT sensors are currently causing a data explosion. The growth forecasts for the global amount of data of 45ZB in 2019 increasing to 175ZB in 2025 [2] clearly show that storage alone or mainly with SSDs is not affordable. Production capacities for storage devices must be expanded to cover this flood of data. This can be done much more quickly and cost-effectively for HDDs because less clean room production is required than for flash semiconductor production.

Performance is teamwork
In end devices, SSDs are usually the storage medium of choice over HDDs, because of their speed advantage, compact form factor and mechanical robustness. In data centers, the performance comparison of individual storage components is not important since many storage media are installed in one system and work together. In addition, HDD manufacturers have prepared their drives, which have long been trimmed for sequential performance – now also for better random access through firmware optimization. Today, individual enterprise HDDs achieve over 400IO/s, depending on the model – no comparison to an SSD, but a storage system with several dozen HDDs in a RAID-10 delivers more than 10,000IO/s and can compete with flash memory-based solutions. At the same time, it provides a higher storage capacity and offers the combination of storage space, performance and economy for the new data age.

Other arguments, such as high-power consumption or lower reliability, are often used vs. HDDs; however, these are not sustained on closer inspection. Modern HDDs with helium filling are quite ‘humble,’ while high-capacity SSDs have an enormous power consumption and expensive cooling needs, especially under load. In addition, HDDs achieve MTTF values similar to SSDs despite their moving parts. And unlike SSDs, they are subject to hardly any restrictions on the amount of data that can be written onto them during their lifetime. As a result, HDDs are equipped for current and future requirements, so most of the data stored in data centers and the cloud will end up on HDDs for years to come. This belief is also reflected in market researchers’ and analysts’ forecasts. IDC, for example, assumes that by 2025 more than 80% of the capacities delivered to cloud, core and edge data centers will be on HDDs, and less than 20% on SSDs and other storage connected via NVMe [2].

People and machines produce much data today, and will continue to do so in the future, that we all need storage technologies to control the flood. For this reason, HDDs will not die out any more than tape has, and so are set to be there for a long time to come.

(1) TrendFocus, February 2021
(2) IDC Data Age 2025, May 2020 update

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