Hard Disk Sector Consolidates Amid Uncertain Future 237
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The WSJ reports that Western Digital will buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for about $4.3 billion in cash and stock, leaving only four key hard disk drive vendors — Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba and Samsung. The hard drive world has been seen as ripe for consolidation, particularly as the rise of tablet computers such as the Apple iPad — which don't use hard drives for data storage — is casting doubt on the future of hard disks. Compared to hard drives, solid-state drives promise greater power efficiency, performance, resistance to physical shock, and run more quietly since they contain no moving parts. But one area that solid-state drives do not improve on their spinning predecessors is in their inevitable movement towards failure. 'SSDs are going to fail just like hard drives will,' says Chris Bross, Senior Enterprise Recovery engineer at Drivesavers Data Recovery. 'Every storage device will have issues regardless of their underlying technology.'"
Future not so uncertain anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
After it seems clear the rewrite count is going to hell - 5000/cell for 32 nm, 3000/cell for 25 nm, SSDs are going to have a helluva time catching up in cost/GB. People will still want huge storage disks, data centers still need storage, hard disks aren't going away. The SSDs do rock for speed and is making huge performance gains but that doesn't bring the cost down. The combination of a blazing fast 100GB SSD and huge, slow 2TB HDD seems to be the way forward.
Re:No harddrives in the future (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to duck if you're an AC :]
But AC's point was that datacenters will still use alot of spinning disk until SSDs get a comparable $/byte ratio. Building a 100TB SAN array out of SSDs would run many times that of doing it with traditional spinning disk.
I'm not saying it won't happen, just saying we're probably 3-5 years away from it.
Re:Punny! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:HDDs not going away (Score:5, Insightful)
Raid is not a backup, FYI.
Parent said he was using RAID to mitigate failure, not to provide backup. One might use a RAID setup as part of a data backup system, but this was not described by the parent post.
And if you bought them all at the same time from the same place, chances are, when one finally dies from old age, more than one may perish simultaneously.
The likelihood of two devices failing at the same time due to old age is incredibly small, unless by "old age" you mean something like "a meteorite striking the storage system".