May 11, 2023
According to Shawn Rosemarin, the VP of Research and Development in the Customer Engineering division at Pure Storage, Hard Disk Drives (HDD) will completely disappear from the market by 2028.
Rosemarin explained that the rising costs and limited availability of electricity will ultimately prompt this shift. He emphasized that the cost of electricity is a crucial factor that outweighs the declining costs of Solid State Drives (SSD) and the competitive pricing of Pure’s Direct Flash Modules (DFMs) in comparison to disks.
While recognizing the impressive advancements in hard drive technology over its 67-year history, Rosemarin praised the transformative progress that has taken place, from five-megabyte devices the size of a room to the present state. However, he argued that the era of hard drives is drawing to a close, despite recent innovations like HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording), which uses lasers to heat up the platters.
Gartner has also entered the discussion by forecasting that enterprise SSDs will make up 35 percent of the total HDD/SSD exabytes shipped by 2026. However, this prediction seems to contradict Rosemarin’s timeline of hard drive extinction by 2028.
The sources for this piece include an article in BlocksandFiles.
