Will HDD become extinct?
 

If SSD can reach TB easily at lower cost:

Probably.

For someone who put down that he is a senior lecturer it surprises me that you don't provide a link to the full article and tell us where it come from.

There are 10TB platter drives around the corner and 100TB drives at universities being worked on. I have a 24TB NAS that will be 40 before the end of 2014 SSD's can't get cheap enough fast enough. There is the issue of data recovery, TRIM kinda eliminates the ability to recover from a corrupted drive. SSD's will replace platter drives platter drivers in the consumer space before long say '15..

Consider that tape, as a storage medium, is not extinct.

Some Corporates are still using tape to store data?
For home user, I think 1-2TB SSD will be enough,
I will choose SSD instead of HDD, in the next few years when I upgrade my PC.

Yes.

What is the advantage of using tape?
I think the magnetic tape will spoil easier?
How big is its capacity?

These are all things that you can easily find out yourself.

u tell me, save my time :D

Reliability[edit]

Tape failure typically result in the loss of some hundreds of megabytes of data, while disk failures can cost terabytes. CERN has experienced failure rates 10^6 higher data losses on disk-based data.[1]

Durability[edit]

Tapes typically last decades, while disk storage is rarely reliable after 5 years.[1]

In 2011, Fujifilm and IBM announced that they had managed to record 29.5 billion bits per square inch with magnetic tape media developed using the BaFe particles and nanotechnologies allowing for an uncompressed tape drive of 35TB.[20][21] The technology is not expected to be commercially available for at least another decade.

Look like tape has its superiority.

Will HDD become extinct?
 

At least for my system, HDD is a thing of the past. SSD all the way.

Imagine, one day we'll tell our grand kids when we used HD drives and the 5 miles of snow and etc :)

Why do you say so?
Do u have enough storage with your SSD? How many GB?

My work desktop machine uses 256Gb SSD and that's plenty of space as I don't need to store anything other than work and some music. Currently have around 100Gb free on it.

At home I'm a packrat, I have documents and software and images of old PCs dating back close on 20 years (including a VM of a Windows 3.11 machine) so I have standard SATA drives for that (2 x 2Tb).

So, to answer the OP, YES, HDD will become extinct, as to when.... not for a good few years yet. It'll only really be when the capacity and cost/Gb of SSD drops below that of spinners. Even when SSD replaces spinners I think tape will still be around for long-term backup.

SSD's will become extinct too. I suspect a 3D sort of storage maybe optical or such?

Or the world will almost end with the few left ignoring technology, just trying to survive.

I worked in Seagate before, the processes to make a HDD are so awesome,
many parts require high precision technology, very labor intensive,
need clean room facility.
I hope a simpler product with simpler processes can replace HDD.

The big issue is cost. yes you can buy a SSD today thats 1TB but you'll spend $500-$1000 for it and I can buy a 1TB HDD for under $100. If the cost per size for SSD comes down to close to HDD then they can be replaced but you'll see them until then.

Things change. Floppy disks are still around, but are certainly obsolete for mainstream use. Tape is still around, but not in really widespread use. Eventually spinning magnetic drives will be obsolete, but it's not obvious how long it will take. Flash drives are fast and reliable, and have had data recovered from them after severe physical damage. That is likely to be the way things will go in the near term, but other technologies might replace them. Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to see very far into the future. It is easy enough to see into the past, but many people don't want to look.

Maybe HDDs won't get extinct, perhaps they just get better, faster and larger with time.

I currently use a 32DB SSD drive just for the OS and a HDD for my home partition.

I'd like to see mechanical drives die out altogether (archival storage aside). The noise, vibration and need to spin up make them a bad choice for mobile devices and even on a desktop they take up a lot more room than the equivalent in chips.
In the same way swapping is almost obsolete in mid to high end desktops I hope the HDD goes that way too.

How long can a desktop's HDD last?
After 5 years, do I need to buy a new HDD to backup my important data?

All your important data should be backed up as a matter of course anyhow -- off site if it's really important.
I've noticed that after 5 years or so hard drives do seem to have noticeably deteriorated and mine certainly seem noisier and are all showing SMART errors with the odd bad sector. Nothing terminal but enough that I'm replacing my drives at the moment.
Replacing my home drive with an SSD has meant Google Earth and second Life are a little quicker when using disk cache though for some reason Icedove and Firefox loading times haven't noticeably sped up.

Linux doesn't seem to react as positively to SSD's as the other OS's. This discussion was happening on OCN not long ago.

AFAIK
cycle life of SSDs is about 1/10,000th that of magnetic drives
used a swap space they will die in in less than an hour
magnetic drives will be around for at least the next decade or 2

Wow, the 300Gb one that's in my Windows desktop at work with 8Gb for swap that's been running pretty much 24/7 for 8 months must be a miracle! :) :) :)

Yea my now 4 year old vertex with 8GB of swap space is still going strong

Any studies?
My recollection of the "reliability" of magnetic drives is less than impressive. Of course, you can be lucky and they will last for far longer than their expected life but magnetic, spinny drives are no less falliablle than anyh other technology.

While I have had an excellent run with my HDDs only requiring replacement because they slowly become to small (apart from 1 back in the mid 1990s) I have not really heard that SDDs have the problem you have mentioned. I to would be interested in what studies you base this on.

For sure, all that laptops that only feature a SSD, not a mechanical drive, that come pre-installed with Windows, using the system partition to store the swap file died after an hour, without exception. Sorry, but do you have any link to a study that supports those claims?

To be honest, who knows for sure. They are still improving HDD speed and performance which is a sign they are not going away anytime soon.

Records are not completely extinct yet, they're still around, they're just not widely used as compact discs and digital mp3s. I believe HHDs will be like records in the future, still around but not extinct.

scroll down to memory ware
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_flash#NAND_flash
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/s...ce-of-tlc-nand
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html
http://www.ssdperformanceblog.com/20...ment-and-raid/

None of those articles is even near to supporting your claims.

1ooo to 3000 P/E cycles per bit cell for consumer grade chips 10,000 enterprise grade chips
that's a pretty damn short life compared to magnetic storage
and the greater the chip density the fewer the P/E cycles for all chips
the more of the drive's capacity you use the shorter the life of the drive

I would only use an SSDs for the O/S and put log files , swap space and user data on a magnetic drive

OK I was way off on the drive life I was right on the bit cell life
in spite of that my point is SSDs will not make magnetic drives a thing of the past any time soon
maybe never

Actually no, it is not. Projected lifetime for all of my SSDs is well over 10 years (and yes, I have swap on the SSDs, why should I swap to the slow magnetic disks?), a time when they will be obsolete anyways. Usual lifetime for magnetic disks is not much different, mostly even shorter.

Yes, exactly, since my spinny drive doesn't have a wear-rate the spindle isn't worn and it isn't spinning up in about 1000% the time it used to. I've also no problems with any other magnetic-storage drives showing bad sectors.
Nope, only the SSDs will have any problems.

1ooo to 3000 P/E cycles per bit cell for consumer grade chips 10,000 enterprise grade chips
that's a pretty damn short life compared to magnetic storage
and the greater the chip density the fewer the P/E cycles for all chips
the more of the drive's capacity you use the shorter the life of the drive

I would only use an SSDs for the O/S and put log files , swap space and user data on a magnetic drive

OK I was way off on the drive life I was right on the bit cell life
in spite of that my point is SSDs will not make magnetic drives a thing of the past any time soon
maybe never

my bet of the cause of the death of magnetic HDDs will be this http://www.laserfocusworld.com/artic...tal-media.html

8 billion cells for an 8GB drive, times 3000 cycles, that takes a long time.

Don't the Xbox One and the Playstation 4 both have rotary hard drives?

They have. With SSDs that large their price would almost double.

Indeed it's like asking "don't IKEA use MDF" it's hardly an endorsement.

it's really short compared to magnetic drives
multimedia work maybe 1 month
for data base or spread sheet work maybe 6 months
computer programming work maybe 1 year
swap space could kill it in a week
it's what the applications are doing that accounts for 95% of the read write cycles less than 5% are the user saving to long term storage

No, I've been using a revodrive for years as scratch.

You cannot write to every cell on a drive even 1000 times in a month. Cannot be done, not enough time, even if you run something that writes at maximum speed 24/7.

Any evidence of this happening?
I admit I'm still a little sceptical of SSDs despite having used them in this EEE for years but, as I see it, spinny drives have their own problems with things like overheating, bad sectors, bad bearings and the like that mean in use they're no more stable.

You're giving the answer yourself. IF... If the cost per byte for HDD stays the same and SSD can catch up with them, SSD will probably replace them. But till now the cost/byte for HDD has be going down and it looks than it will be following this trend for the comming years. So SSD is still in the catch-up fase.

As for the enough storage capacity. There was a time that 20MB was more than enough, then 200MB was a lot, now someone mention that 250GB is enough. In a few years people probably will pity you if you tell them you have less than 2TB in your system. :)

Besides the real use for HDD is not the home user but the big data centers. And I dont think Google or facebook are going to replace all their harddisks for solid state, unless there is a very compelling economical reason.

When will we reach that point, I dont know. I remember that when floating point processors were still an optional item, someone calculated that the price of the copro had to be less than 1/3th of the main processor before people added them to their systems.

There is probably a compareable price point where people decide they going to replace their HDDs with SSDs. Mind you, I'm talking about replacing not adding to. Most people that replace their system disk still keep 1 or more terabyte harddisks around for storage of their data.

And to quote the great writer Samuel Clemens - 'The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.'

Cheers

I remember when standard storage was on floppy disks, and 10MB HDDs were huge. MS also decided about that time that 640KB of memory was more than anyone would ever need, so that became the standard. Things aren't the way they used to be, and they never were. I suspect that something will replace the HDD eventually, but I'm not prepared to say what it will be. Probably something we haven't even thought of yet.

If HDD becomes obsolete, many workers in factories will be laid off.

Or maybe they will be retrained to make SDDs instead and keep their jobs.

Here some real numbers: http://techreport.com/review/25889/t...t-500tb-update
You should update your views on SSDs.