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HDD vs. SSD: Is there room for disk in a solid-state world?
This article is part of the Storage issue of August 2017, Vol. 16, No. 6
Hard disk drives are hard to like. This 60-year-old device is slow and accesses data clumsily, but it stores volumes of data at a price that's hard to beat. Since the middle of the last decade, solid-state drive advocates have argued that SSDs would completely displace HDDs over the following few years. Yet here we are in 2017, and the HDD vs. SSD controversy continues. HDDs still play a greater role than SSDs in PCs and servers, and HDD unit shipments aren't much below 2005 levels. Why hasn't flash SSD taken over the market? In a nutshell, it's because HDD replacement isn't how to make the best use of SSD technology. Figure 1 shows a continuum of memory and storage that fits into a tidy hierarchy. HDD vs. SSD technology plays a significant, but not the only, role in that hierarchy. Let's walk through this continuum and perform a detailed analysis to see why. The chart represents price per gigabyte on the horizontal axis and bandwidth on the vertical axis. The axes are labeled in orders of magnitude -- 103 = 1,000, 104 = 10,000,...
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Features in this issue
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Disaggregating network, compute and storage allocation demystified
Explore the ways disaggregation concepts and principles are being applied to create and allocate pools of compute and storage resources to serve applications on demand.
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Disk still rules enterprise backup hardware roost despite competition
Organizations continue to demand scalable, easy-to-implement disk-based data backup storage devices over cloud or tape when increasing backup storage capacity.
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HDD vs. SSD: Is there room for disk in a solid-state world?
Although SSD vs. HDD speed is vastly different, for the foreseeable future, hard disks will have a place in our increasingly solid-state and even DRAM-centered data centers.
Columns in this issue
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Software-defined storage products don't negate hardware's importance
Software-defined storage, positioned as the cure-all for vendor lock-in, suggests that hardware may not be as important to IT infrastructure as it once was.
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When it comes to the role of tape, don't count it out just yet
Tape data storage is very much alive as a means of seeding clouds with local data and as the main method for storing and archiving the tsunami of data facing all of us.