Will SSD's make HDD's extinct?

[Dave3000]

Games are getting bigger and bigger these days. In my opinion, 512GB is too small to have many modern games installed these days. I recommend at least 1TB for games/os and a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB is around $350 and a WD 6TB Black HDD is around $300. That's 6 times more storage capacity and cheaper and yet cheaper as well by picking the 6TB HDD. I right now have a 512GB SSD with only around 35GB free space and I only have Windows 10 and my most frequently played games installed. I don't know if I can justify spending $350-400 on a 1TB SSD so I can at least have my backlog of games installed as well, but still 1TB is not even close to storing every single PC game I own, I would need at least 2TB for that and a 2TB SSD is like $700-900, when I can buy a WD 4TB Black HDD for around $200. Now if I were rich, I would buy a Samsung 850 Pro 2TB SSD for my games/OS.

 

[Topweasel]

Games are getting bigger and bigger these days. In my opinion, 512GB is too small to have many modern games installed these days. I recommend at least 1TB for games/os and a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB is around $350 and a WD 6TB Black HDD is around $300. That's 6 times more storage capacity and cheaper and yet cheaper as well by picking the 6TB HDD. I right now have a 512GB SSD with only around 35GB free space and I only have Windows 10 and my most frequently played games installed. I don't know if I can justify spending $350-400 on a 1TB SSD so I can at least have my backlog of games installed as well, but still 1TB is not even close to storing every single PC game I own, I would need at least 2TB for that and a 2TB SSD is like $700-900, when I can buy a WD 4TB Black HDD for around $200. Now if I were rich, I would buy a Samsung 850 Pro 2TB SSD for my games/OS.

But you have to look at the ramp down on $/GB on SSD's and the their storage density vs platters. SSD's are catching up to HDD's very quickly and if I was to guess it will be in 5 years with 10TB SSD's being with a few bucks of similarly sized HDD's. Now there are a couple techs that they are working on that might lead to a rejuvenation of HDD Platter density, but then again 3d nand is going to drastically lower the implementation costs of new densities. So density may go up faster on SSD's faster than their current pace.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

You must be a couple of decades younger than me ... five years.

 

[Topweasel]

You must be a couple of decades younger than me ... five years.

Probably. I am just going by computer pacing. 5 years is 5 years. In tech its a huge gap in time. The question was "will" not "when" or "if so will it be soon". It probably will and in 5 years. By extinct I mean that there are so little use cases for it that it only is used in very niche circumstances. It will take decades for it to disappear from use.

 

[StrangerGuy]

The GB/$ argument only makes sense if your tasks makes local storage capacity a real constraint, for which the vast majority of users isn't especially now with the widespread prevalence of streaming and clouds. They do however benefit a ton more from SSD speeds than needless storage capacity.

 

[Topweasel]

The GB/$ argument only makes sense if your tasks makes local storage capacity a real constraint, for which the vast majority of users isn't especially now with the widespread prevalence of streaming and clouds. They do however benefit a ton more from SSD speeds than needless storage capacity.

The point is that consumers are cheapskates. Or where performance doesn't matter so are companies. When HDD's are more expensive than their SSD drives counterparts for a given size (regardless of performance) that is when HDD's become extinct. Why would people pay more for a drive with less space and is slower?

 

[tweakboy]

Not anytime soon for companies. gl

 

[cbn]

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/4-terabyte-ssd-under-500-usd.html

The moment of death approaches near. Who gets to call the time of death? I'd like to be that guy. I'll be watching closely so I can declare to the world that HHD's are finally and officially dead. With a 4TB SSD for under $500, that time is coming quickly. HDD's are taking their last few breaths now. Won't be more than a few years.

Interesting that it uses two SM2246EN controllers in a single 2.5" enclosure.

Now there's a trick they apply though. The product will be fitted with SM2246EN controllers. Typically, these max out at a 2TB limit (per controller). However add two of them with two seperate NAND partitions in an SSD and you can double them in JBOD.

It kind of atrick as you might as well just add two SSDs and JBOD these right ? Anyway, the interesting part really is the price level at $0.13/GB. Once controllers get support for 4TB and higher, the cost would go down even more.

 

[Hulk]

While SSDs are amazing and I have quite a few of them for many users, myself included, there are attributes to hard drives that as yet SSDs can't match.

One of course is price. A 4GB hard drive is nearly a factor of 10 cheaper than an SSD of the same size.

The other thing is data retention. Can you remove a SSD, put it on a shelf and 3 years later will the data still be there? I'm not sure. Hard drives are very robust in this regard.