SSDs is likely to be the defacto storage customary on laptops and gaming PCs, however spinning disk drives are nonetheless the predominant storage medium for datacenters. Predictions estimated that this conduct will stretch till 2028 when exhausting drive gross sales have been predicted to fall in favor of SSDs. However a new report from Blocks and Recordsdata counters that prediction, estimating that tough drive gross sales will maintain sturdy to 2028.
Blocks and Recordsdata reported on a forecast made by Coughlin Associates estimating that the present rise in SSD gross sales could have minimal affect on tape and HDD shipments. The primary drivers behind this conduct embody AI, the Web of Issues, media, leisure, and the medical industries. Every of those improve demand for giant capability exhausting drives.
Two charts have been shared, exhibiting the annual projected progress of exhausting drives by kind issue and exhausting drive shipments when it comes to capability. The previous revealed that the expansion of three.5 inch exhausting drives and a pair of.5 inch exhausting drives mixed have been anticipated to speed up from 150,000 models bought in 2024 to simply over 200,000 in 2028. (The graph additionally projected 2.5 inch drives dropping in reputation to three.5 inch as nicely.)
The latter revealed an exponential progress in exhausting drive shipments, sorted by exabytes shipped. In 2022, roughly 1500 exabytes of exhausting drive capability have been shipped out, by 2028 Coughlin’s projections estimate that quantity will develop by six instances, amounting to 9000 exabytes shipped.
Coughlin additionally reported that it expects head and media demand to double by 2028 if the nearline-storage market recovers this 12 months or early subsequent 12 months. Coughlin goes on to say that the expansion of high-capacity nearline drives for enterprise and hyperscale functions will lead to extra drive parts which can present the largest demand improve for heads and media. Nearline storage is a storage technique that balances the road between offline archival storage and always-accessible on-line storage. Nearline exhausting drives are able to being housed utterly offline — indifferent from a pc however will be made out there rapidly with out intervention by IT.
There are undoubtedly deserves to this report, earlier exhausting drive projections that we coated didn’t cowl the potential restoration of the Nearline storage market which may undoubtedly prolong exhausting drive dominance by a number of years. Nearline-capable methods do not want SSDs to carry out nicely since information would not should be accessed instantly like an always-on answer. A very powerful facet of a near-line-storage system enterprise will care about is the cost-per-gigabyte.
We have additionally encountered one other storage-related report claiming that tough drives can use much less energy than SSDs beneath heavy-enough workloads. If that is true, this might additionally significantly prolong the lifetime of the exhausting drive trade much more.
However 2028 remains to be a number of years away, so we have now to take any predictions with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, the rising quantity of stories exhibiting favorable market traits for exhausting drives may spell the delayed domination of SSDs till the 2030s or longer.
