In September 2021, I blogged about choosing between hard disk and SSD (Solid State Disk) as digital memory options. Fast forward 1.5 years, and I think it’s safe to say that hard disk (HDD) is history for general users (very soon anyway). SSD has plenty of advantages over HDD- it’s much faster (like 10x), more durable (as it has no moving parts, hence an excellent choice for carrying around), much quieter, and smaller (now like a couple of slices of chewing gum). The only disadvantages (compared to HDD) are more expensive and typically has smaller capacity limits. However; these down points are being diluted with the latest price drops in SSD coupled with the availability of larger capacities. The latest SSD can go up to 100TB but is expensive. Let me focus on the scenarios for typical general users- those who should be pretty happy with a storage of say 2 to 4TB- which incidentally can hold photos and videos, bearing in mind that nowadays, one can check and search almost anything from the internet, hence obviating the need to store a lot of data which will be superseded quickly anyway. And let’s not forget about the availability of cloud storage which has also a bunch of attractive advantages (see my other post).
One can easily find 1 to 4TB SSD say on Amazon for around US$50-80/TB, with read speeds of around 1GB/s (which is around 10x that of HDD- some literature quoted 100x, but it depends on which scenario). Such SSDs compare well with HDDs of similar capacities at around $25/TB, but with read speeds of only around 70MB/s. SSDs at such relatively cheap prices, it seems that no one needs to wait for your computer to boot for many minutes anymore.
Now having said the above which I stress again- is for the general users. It should fairer to say that HDD is not dead yet, nor very soon, especially for some special users and the industry. For example, data centers still use a lot of HDD (again for reasons of larger capacities – e.g. typically like 22TB each, and very cheap – like $20 per TB); also there are a lot of applications that do not require very high speeds and can easily use mixed solutions (combining SDDs and HDDs (or even LTOs – Linear Tape Open, yes the old and faithful magnetic tapes on reels!)) with great commercial sense. As a matter of fact, hard disk technology is still being researched – e.g. energy-assisted technologies such as MAMR and HAMR may keep hard disk drives competitive in an evolving secondary storage market.
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