TECH

Maybe HDDs will disappear completely by 2028?

According to an executive at Pure Storage, hard drives will only be available for a few years.

Lightning-fast flash storage and the SSDs based on them have spectacularly conquered the consumer segment in recent years, as they are much faster and more reliable than the decades-old hard drives with moving parts, i.e. HDDs.

Despite this, the latter genre does not seem to be dying either, since it is still the cheapest solution for backing up large amounts of data, and of course various HDDs work in the mushrooming server parks as well. However, at Pure Storage, which travels in flash technology, they believe that the current picture is deceiving, as we are actually already within arm’s reach of the death of the HDD.

This was said by none other than Shawn Rosemarin, vice president of research and development of the department responsible for consumer products, on behalf of the company. Blocks and Files in an interview with a trade magazine. Rosemarin believes that from 2028, i.e. in just five years, no one will be selling hard drives, primarily because of the drastic increase in energy costs associated with their operation.

“Our CEO has quoted at several recent events that 3 percent of the world’s energy is used by data centers. About a third of that is storage, almost all of which is spinning disks. So if I can switch to flash and essentially reduce that by 80-90 percent power consumption, while density increases by orders of magnitude in an environment where NAND prices continue to fall, it becomes clear that hard drives are going to disappear.”

– explained the vice president, who says that the generative artificial intelligence services that have just exploded will only worsen the situation, as huge server capacity will be required to operate them and store the content they create. Rosemarin believes this could completely upend our calculations of how sustainable data centers are in their current form.

Of course, hard disk manufacturers do not take this position, and they are developing new technologies one after the other, with which even larger capacities can be achieved. For example, Seagate announced the arrival of 30 TB HAMR HDDs in January, and the company wants to cross the 50 TB mark by 2026.

Horváth Péter