When will HDDs leave the market, giving up all shares to Solid State Disks (SSD)?

This question´s answer relies on the exact knowledge of the customer’s application. The gating item remains to be the I/O access profile. The full insight though depends on a few more factors.

This question is being asked for many years now, lots of good arguments paving the way for SSDs within the storage media world, hence especially the high capacity HDDs still have their swim lane and customer share. The upfront answer looks pretty easy and straight forward: SSDs vs HDDs exhibit lower audible noise, power consumption is much lower, vibration- and shock robustness is much higher and I/O performance is way higher than HDDs. On the flip side, SSDs do have their price and the capacity points are behind those from HDDs.

So, the fundamental outlook is just gorgeous for SSDs: Component price will corrode further, adoption rate increases, market shares increase therewith. Moving to 3D NAND technology with more and more shrinking lithography dimensions helping will help to further increase the capacity points and finally line up with those from HDDs.

So far, the internet logic as you can google it. But how does the two digit numbers of R&D invest for HDD technologies make sense? Some traditional HDD makers do plan in their roadmaps for extended life time of HDDs, how can this be?

Now the searching engines do count lower outputs.

Very obvious there are swim lanes of storage media applications, where you either can´t proof economic scale on the application layer or it´s just a matter of endurance:

SSDs tend to wear out, if I/O traffic has too much WRITE in it, wear out is coming into play, as smaller the SSDs capacity as earlier this factor comes to daylight.

For a conclusive answer, there are several aspects to consider: the interface, nature of the I/O application, the corresponding write amplification factor (how much more does the SSD write vs what the host does want it to write) and the really needed I/O performance, all those factors together plus the question of longevity of your storage solution will give the answer if HDD or SSD makes sense. So, there is no such thing as the single answer.

TECODI did analyze and listened very carefully to all those arguments and trend analysis reveals into the following:

Over the next years, there will be customer applications in the benefit for HDDs, the overall main stream of data storage media though will move for SSDs. Hybrid solutions, carrying the benefit of both worlds will be less important is a few years believed.

TECODI-good to know what´s coming up.