What do you think is happening with the storage market? We've all seen the markets fall apart and valuations go down - but did anyone notice how far Seagate went down?
Many people predict that disk storage companies will face troubles as SSD advances. Margins on spinning disks continue to drop, and with the economy the way it is speculation is that drive sales are down.
Personally I believe that companies like Seagate will continue to push the density and capacity of spinning disks and Western Digital will experiment with faster spinning drives for high performance machines. Both companies will do well as home storage servers continue to grow in popularity. People are downloading more content, from movies to music to photos - and therefore storage is fast becoming the center of the home. As medicine goes online and large medical images are stored we'll also see a need for mass storage clusters in hospitals, eliminating the paperwork. I also think there is a future with hybrid SSD+HDD drives. The fact is we simply cannot get enough storage!
I believe SSD drives will grow in popularity - but the prices are still very high. ...and though I never thought I'd see a faster SSD than Intel's latest drives, Samsung's 250 Gig SSD is insanely fast (like 4x faster than Intel's in some cases!). I think we'll see higher end notebooks use SSD's, and more external storage via regular spinning disks. In my opinion SSD's have no place as a large storage solution - they're great for boot up performance though.
At some point Western Digital and Seagate will need to acquire and/or create some sort of SSD hybrid, and I imagine that day is coming soon. In the meantime, economic crisis aside, the demand for mass storage will continue to grow - and these guys need to invent a hybrid to help bring their margins and excitement up.
What do you all think? Will HDD companies come back strong?
4 blogger comments:
Personally I think that SSDs might take over, and leave HDDs as a piece of computing history. Think that you could fit up to 16GB in an M2 card. That's less than the size of a fingernail, and just as thick. Divide 1024 by 16 = 64. Imagine 64 fingernails = One Terabyte. Those 64 cards equal about half the physical size of a hard drive. SSD flash is the way to go - speed, physical size, storage space and reliability. Since SSD is the same technology as memory cards, Hard drives (or SSDs can be way smaller and no longer require 3.5" bays. There a lot more reliable to, in fact I put my phone in the washing machine, the phone died but the memory card kept my things intact. Anyway, I think that Seagate, Hitachi and so on will have to go on to the SSD market to keep alive.
Great post, BTW, I found myself thinking about that (SSDs) a while now.
Raul I think you are right on. There's just no way that SSD gets to any kind of cost parity with HDD on a cost per GB or TB basis. It's too expensive for use in mainstream applications and will pretty much only serve a purpose in niche functions (Tier 0 Enterprise, extreme mobility, high-end gaming, etc.).
This reminds me of the (now historical) debate on the choice between plasma displays and LCD displays. Common wisdom was that whatever happened, LCDs would be too expensive to manufacture for any decent size: plasma would rule the foreseeable future. In the end, as we now know, LCD won the day. Why, because LCD has clear energy and performance advantages; and because with enough demand, prices will go down. I feel the same will be true for SDD vs. HDD: the former has such clear advantages, that rather sooner than later HDD will be a historical artifact. SDD winning over HDD fits in the trend of the decline of mechanical components in computing systems (and that included LED backlights).
Yes I agree with you that some day in the very distant future, SSD will take over HDD. But we still have a long way to go untill the prices goes down to the levels of the HHD and for a comparable size disk. I mean the biggest selling point of HHD over SSD is capacity and SSD is nowhere near the capacity offerings, at least not now, and maybe in the next 5 years...
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