Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D (Customer Engineering unit) of Pure Storage predicts that no more hard drives will be sold after 2028 (opens in new tab) (so from 2029 onwards). This is due to the rising cost of electricity, which could be the final factor leading to the end of the proliferation of hard disk drives in hyperscalers. It’s also because of the impending arrival of PLC (penta-level cell) technology and the low Terabyte cost for SSD.
It’s worth noting that Pure Storage sells AFA (All Flash Array) storage equipped with its proprietary SSD called DFM (for Direct Flash Array), so the company has a vested interest in encouraging everyone to move beyond hard disk drives.
Pure Storage plans to introduce 300TB models by 2026 and a 600TB model coming by 2029. Over the past few years, it’s been observed that economies of scale mean that hyperscalers, not the consumer market, are driving innovation in hard drives. That would explain why 2.5-inch hard drives have been stuck at 5TB while their 3.5-inch counterparts have reached 30TB.
Consumer hard drives have already seen their innovation stall. Toshiba doesn’t sell to customers, Seagate’s largest Barracuda drive (an 8TB model) was launched in 2017, and Western Digital’s capacity stalled at 8TB for its consumer range. For the future, users would need to buy from enterprise, prosumer, or business ranges for larger capacities, but even that won’t last.
Seagate and Western Digital have long started selling SSDs while Toshiba has been quiet about its SSD plans. Hard drive recyclers like MaxDigitalData or Water Panther that refurbish hard disk drives from hyperscalers will likely service the niche market for prosumers (primarily NAS). There’s currently enough hard drives in data centers across the world for this ecosystem to thrive for the foreseeable future until hyperscalers move on to something else, be it DNA, SSD, or something else.
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