A Look Into The Hard Drive's Future

Market Opportunities

Hitachi took IDC data for its forecast, but you’ll find similar numbers and statements from various sources, as many developments are obvious. According to IDC, there is a constant annual growth rate of 10%. This is interesting, since the global market for bare hard drives doesn’t grow that much by itself. While IDC only expects small growth for desktop and mobile hard drive, it sees better opportunities for enterprise storage, in consumer storage, and external storage in particular. While enterprise storage requires dedicated products, consumer storage and external storage products are a good way to recycle existing product families and hence to sell more units.

The enterprise market and small form factor applications in particular are seeing the largest relative growth—blade servers and high density computing solutions are the main drivers here. Thanks to the SATA and SAS interfaces, 2.5” enterprise hard drives have become a perfect fit for high density storage, providing fast and efficient performance at medium capacities.

What about Flash SSDs?

Hitachi doesn’t see flash SSDs gaining significant market share before 2010. The existing flash SSD generation is only capable of replacing drives in the high end such as for notebooks like the Apple Macbook Air or Lenovo’s X300.

Flash SSDs are currently attacking the hard drive market both from the very high end, where excellent products such as Samsung’s 2.5” 64 GB SSD SATA-2 drive deliver better performance at much lower power consumption than any other 2.5” drive. It is, however, extremely expensive, at around $1,000—compared to a 320 GB hard drive at $150 this is many times the cost per GB. The second point of attack is the low end, as low-cost netbooks and other simple PC solutions can be equipped with 8 to 32 GB of flash-based storage. In such a case, a $60 hard drive still is too expensive and flash offers a cheaper alternative, even if performance suffers with these budget solutions.

Flash storage has another disadvantage, which it won’t be able to overcome soon: capacities are too small for anyone who does more on the PC than just surfing. Notebook hard drives have reached 500 GB capacities, which is almost 8x more than the average 64 GB flash SSD can offer. Though flash drives will continue to double capacity faster than hard drives, conventional drives will also keep growing, as you will read on the following pages. This means that users will continue to buy hard drives to answer their basic storage requirements. HD movies, 12 megapixel photos, music archives, favorite TV series…all of this requires a lot of storage, which flash just cannot provide.

Right now, flash SSDs are far from becoming mainstream products. Although all major vendors offer flash-based hard drives, most of these are still several times more expensive than hard drives offering similar capacities, and not all of them are actually much faster than conventional hard drives. Even if flash-based drives were closer to becoming mainstream products, they still could not replace the good old hard drive, as there isn’t enough flash memory production capacity to match the demand.