Goodbye hard drives and thank you for everything. The last mechanical hard drive is likely to be sold in 2028, ending the era of magnetic storage.
At least that’s what Sean Rosemarine of Solid State Drives, Pure Storage, thinks. And him arguments quite unexpected.
3% of global energy consumption comes from data centers. About a third is data storage. Almost all of these are spinning disks. So if I can move away from disks, move to flash, and thereby cut power consumption by 80 or 90 percent, increasing data density by orders of magnitude in the face of declining NAND prices, it becomes obvious that hard drives will disappear.
— Sean Rosemarine
If he’s right, by 2028, roughly 75 years of hard drive history will be over. The first commercially available computer running a magnetic disk hard drive was probably the 1956 IBM 305 RAMDAC, a tube-powered machine rather than transistors.
The first drive was equipped with 50 24-inch magnetic platters with a total storage capacity equivalent to approximately 5 MB. And its size was comparable to a small room.
Just over 50 years later, in 2007, the first 1TB hard drives were introduced. The most capacious hard drive today is the Western Digital 26TB model. The largest drive you can put in a PC is the Western Digital Red Pro 22TB SATA III model, available for just $500.
In comparison, the largest SSD, ExaDrive EDDCT100, has a capacity of as much as 100 TB. Of course, its cost is appropriate – $ 40,000. Therefore, the ratio of cost to storage capacity does not look very convincing. But it demonstrates that SSDs have already won the data density war. It remains only to work a little on the cost side.
In any case, whether the last hard drive is sold in 2028 or the technology lasts longer, it’s already almost completely obsolete in desktop PCs. While GPU prices remain uncomfortably high, SSD prices have dropped significantly over the past few years.
Flash memory prices are expected to continue to fall this year, and it’s not hard to imagine that by 2028 there really won’t be any arguments left in favor of these strange rotating magnetic platter devices.
