Is Spinning Disk Going Extinct? Experts Weigh In

There’s no doubt about it: Spinning disk is getting squeezed. As fast solid state drives ( #SSD s) get cheaper and tape drives get bigger, the sweet spot where spinning hard disk drives (HDDs) make sense gets smaller every year. But will spinning disks be totally extinct in five years, as some storage experts predict? The jury is still out. You can find backers of the “Spinning Disk is Dying” camp in many places in the IT landscape, including executives and managers with prominent storage vendors like #IBM (NYSE: IBM), #Dell #EMC, and #NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP). “I believe the increasing density and steadily dropping cost of SSD technology will quickly outperform mechanical drives from a $/GB perspective in the next couple of years,” Eduardo Rivera, a senior storage architect at NetApp, wrote earlier this year. “When this comes to pass, there will be no incentive to buy HDDs anymore.” “15k RPM drives are going away,” Gary Albert, business line executive for IBM Storage, tells Datanami. “There’s going to be one more generation [of 15K RPM drives], but we’re not even going to qualify it, because the cost differential between buying that and buying Flash is minimal. Why would anybody buy a spinning disk that has moving parts and is destined to fail, when you can buy something that has no moving parts and is proven to be more reliable, and uses less power?” “I don’t see much in the way of spinning disk anymore,” says Ed Fabiszewski, an IBM i practice manager with Dell EMC, which recently launched its first entry-level all-Flash #VMAX array. “I’m not saying we’re not going to have spinning disk for [VMAX]. But I think what it comes down to, is what you see being configured in the field for customers” is Flash. The popularity of Flash storage in the consumer electronics space is changing the economics of storage for the enterprise, and that means that spinning disk doesn’t make as much sense as it used to, according to Jeff Barber, the vice president of high storage at IBM.
https://www.datanami.com/2016/10/25/spinning-disk-going-extinct-experts-weigh/