[ad_1]
This article is part of a series on the subject of advanced computing made possible through the funding of Intel. This coverage remains entirely independent, and Intel has not indicated how this article was reported or written.
For storage disks, solid state drive (SSD) technology has been widespread over the last decade. Since then, analysts have kept a watchful eye on the number of hard drives (HDDs) and SSDs sold, as well as on the performance efficiency and price per gigabyte of each type of drive. SSDs offer much better performance than hard drives, but they cost a lot more per gigabyte.
The analyst charts indicated that at some point, there would be a parity, if not a crossover point, at which point the SSDs might kill the hard drives.
The current switch from the Serial ATA interface (SATA) to the NVM Express (NVMe) interface, which now offers five times the performance, only serves to soften the proposal for SSDs.
Hear this sound? This is the death knell of hard drives … no?
Not so fast
Yes, hard drive shipments are struggling and their slower performance compared to SSD technology is largely responsible. The biggest bomb to drop in this area is probably the one that took place in 2018 with the financial information provided by Nidec, which manufactures most of the world's hard disk spindles. Nidec's graph speaks for itself: in calendar year 2020, the industry is expected to move about half as many hard drives as in 2014.
Statista figures correspond to Nidec, showing that SSDs (360 million) exceeded HDD (330 million) for the first time in 2021. These figures correspond almost exactly to the same crossings and levels revealed by monitoring the SSD market. and IHS hard drive storage in July.
But take a closer look at this Nidec chart and you'll see why Seagate and Western Digital hard drive manufacturers will not be closing. Despite the explosive growth of SSDs in the enterprise market, data center hard drive shipments are actually growing.
Where do the data live
Remember 10 years ago, when digital home video recorders provided much more video to consumers than streaming services. (According to Nielsen, this crossover arrived in 2016.) When a program is broadcast on television, millions of people can record it for later viewing, which generates millions of copies of programs on millions of hard drives. Today, streaming services make the DVR useless. Millions of users can get millions of views from a relatively small number of copies distributed on global servers, requiring a tiny fraction of the hard drives required before.
The video sadly consumes the lion's share of the stored bytes, but the same type of consolidation and deduplication, if you will, spills over the entire dataverse. Fewer people need to keep the content locally, especially in the consumer area, which is why Nidec is seeing the biggest hard drive erosion in the consumer market. As consumers, we need some elements processed at maximum speed, such as operating system files, game-level loads, files being processed, etc., and a relatively Low SSD storage is perfect for all of this. In short, the volume of the C: drive works better and faster on SSD.
Most of the "cold" or archive data, as well as backup data, can live in silent darkness on connected USB hard drives. (Again, note that Nidec shows the stability of external shipments.) Otherwise, all this cold data can also stay in the cloud. Why not? It is inexpensive, universally accessible, very reliable and often easier to share than local storage.
In other words, those who are comfortable with external disk storage will continue to use it, but these numbers will remain relatively stable. Customers using client systems will increasingly use SSDs for the terabyte or two of the high-performance files, and transfer everything else to the cloud. This applies to both homes and offices, even for those who want the cheapest systems. At the moment, $ 50 can buy you an SSD of about 500 GB or a 2 TB hard drive on Newegg. For the needs of a PC user placing most data in the cloud or on a connected USB storage, SSD and HDD disks are virtually equivalent to the price, so why not buy the option faster?
Lifeline of the hard drive
Surely, the DVR example above is misleading. While this type of video consolidation results in a 1,000: 1 reduction in the number of bytes consumed, capacity savings are largely offset by the explosion of other types of content on the market. Think of surveillance video, which quickly passes SD and HD resolutions at 4K resolution. Think about the Internet of Things and its billions of devices powering data in the cloud for analysis. Think about the growth of analysis, with the need to aggregate ever more numerous and bulky databases. Add to that smart homes, smart factories, smart cities, etc., and the need for high capacity storage keeps growing.
Gartner noted in April 2019 that "continuity [HDD] Decreases in unit volume will be profitably offset by richer mixes of larger capacity hard drives in all markets. Toshiba developed this forecast in a report on storage trends in 2019, stating, "Not only is the amount of data we store still growing, growth is faster than expected. It was expected that as the proportion of data stored on flash and SSD increases, the amount of data stored on hard disks and tapes decreases. However, it is clear today that all three technologies continue to develop simply because there is so much data to store. In 2019, it can be assumed that 90% of the capacity of typical cloud computing applications will be realized with hard disks, some of which possibly on magnetic tape, and that only 10% will be implemented with SSD. "
According to Eddie Ramirez, senior director of product marketing and data center peripherals at Western Digital, the company is sending approximately 500 petabytes (PB) of hard disk storage to corporate data centers, compared with 68 percent on SSD – a Disparity greater than 7: 1. The entire sector of NAND flash memory (storage media within SSDs) should dramatically increase its production to move the hard drive, even if price comparisons per gigabyte were equal. This output capability does not currently exist.
Ramirez also indicated that hard disks now oscillate around 1.8 cents per gigabyte, while SSDs range from 13 to 15 cents per gigabyte, which is a 7 to 8-fold difference between the two technologies. . The camp's common argument "Hard disk drives are dead" is that Moore's law continues to increase the storage densities of SSDs, which benefit from semiconductor manufacturing technologies, faster and faster. Disk densities, they say, can not keep pace.
Western Digital introduced its 20TB data center hard drive last June. This allowed to double the hard disk of 10 TB arrived four years ago. Ramirez said WD had a 30 TB hard drive in mind, thanks to new technologies such as microwave and heat-assisted recording, and that the company will reach 30 TB capacity in a shorter time than it has gone from 10TB to 20TB. Of course, these high-capacity drives will generate extra cost per terabyte, but they will still be a fraction of the cost of SSDs at the same capacity.
Will the gap between the hard drive and the hard drive SSD in the data center be significantly reduced, as it has been in the mainstream market? Some experts say that it will not happen any time soon. According to Ramirez, the delta price-per-gigabyte between the two technologies is expected to further hover around 6: 1, even until 2030. And even the slightly more critical Joseph Unsworth, vice president of research at Gartner, says that the price / capacity gap will persist beyond the next decade.
So no, HDD technology is far from dead. On the contrary, its capacity advantages only become more critical in data centers.
Importance for businesses
As cloud providers continue to benefit from ever-increasing storage capabilities, economies of scale prevail. Storage becomes cheaper, allowing businesses to store more and more types of data. Expect cloud providers to offer an increasing number of services around these repositories.
Storage levels of cold, hot (intermediate or "near-line") and hot (fast) are now suitable for different types of applications at ever-increasing price levels. Analysis and artificial intelligence services can, for example, compare the data sets of today to those of the previous decade, and extract the impact of trends and trends. tactics. Also expect different levels of protection for different levels of data, especially when businesses are increasingly being asked for longer retention periods. For example, about five years ago, most organizations had to store surveillance images for 30 to 90 days. Today, in Georgia, the video of the police force must be kept for at least 180 days. California requires video evidence to be stored for one to two years.
Navigating the fine pricing for storage services can be daunting, but the key idea remains: in the foreseeable future, hard drive technology will remain in place. It may have lost its performance luster (note the disappearance of the 10K and 15K fast models for businesses), but high capacity, reliability, and low cost per gigabyte compared to SSDs will keep hard drives as an option. a must-have storage for data centers, led by businesses and consumers who increasingly need services and more and more data.
That's why these old predictions that SSD technology was eliminating the hard drive were so misleading. Certainly, SSDs offered a better total cost of ownership, seen from the perspective of IOPS per watt. But this is the wrong measure for a world struggling to keep up with double-digit data growth. Sometimes, size is what really matters, and SSDs will not catch up with hard drives on that front for many years to come.
[ad_2]
Source link