Are Hard Drives (HDD) Becoming Obsolete?

Hello guys,

Today, I thought it would be fun to know whether Hard Drives (HDD) ever be completely replaced by SSDs and just go away.

_[1]

Obviously at this point in time, Hard Drives (HDDs) are an important part of computers because you really can't get the size of Hard Drives on SSDs, you got like 8 terabyte Hard Drives while SSDs pretty much only go up to 1 - 3 terabytes. They're always developing bigger ones but right now, if you want a ton of space, you got to go with the Hard Drive.

Obviously, SSDs are far superior in other aspects such as speed and durability, so are we going to come to a point in time where we're going to just use SSDs?

SSDs are superior in most ways but Hard Drives, you really can't beat that price currently. I really think that we probably will get to the point where SSDs will really be used for almost everything but I don't think we're ever gonna get rid of Hard Drives completely because each year, we always go up in both sides of Hard Drives and SSDs and I don't really see that converging at all especially because of the price.

It really just makes sense to get Hard Drive because if you want to get the same amount of space, you got to spend a lot more money on SSDs. If you have that kind of money, it's not really a problem but for most people, they don't really care and they might not know the difference between SSDs and Hard Drives, so there's still a very good market for Hard Drives especially if people don't know the difference.

_[2]

I don't really see Hard Drives going away any time soon but I think if you look really far into the future like 10 or 15 years, I really do think SSDs is just going to naturally become the standard for everything, maybe except for large data storage although I don't know. We might get to a point where you can't really store much more data on a Hard Drive than on an SSD and as that limit is reached, SSDs will still get cheaper for manufacturing and I think at some point, we'll probably catch up to SSDs.

There are some applications that a Hard Drive is better than an SSD like if you're reading and writing repeatedly a lot, SSDs have a limitation where you can only write to a certain sector a certain number of times before it can't be used anymore, so it becomes slower over time only if you're running a huge amount of data.

If you're just a consumer with a regular SSD in your hard drive and you're not hosting a data center, you're probably not going to ever reach that limit. You have to write like hundreds of terabytes before you ever reach the limit where sectors start having to be disabled but on Hard Drives, that just doesn't happen.

Would you ever get to that point where an SSD would fail?

For a regular person, you really don't have to worry about SSDs failing because if you've got to that point where you're writing that much data, it would be so old where the Hard Drive would probably start to fail or have failed anyway.

SSDs are not bulletproof, they're not indestructible and they do fail however, they are much more durable in the sense that there's no moving parts, so they're really good for laptops I think where you're moving it around.

Why might SSDs become standard?

I already mentioned reliability and speed however, for most people, they're not even using the maximum speed of an SSD but of course, they're a lot better at random access.

As for reliability, yeah! they're probably more reliable than Hard Drives but if you're backing up properly, a Hard Drive isn't necessarily that bad anyway because usually with smart sensors, you can usually tell when a Hard Drive is starting to go and if you have a backup which you should anyway, then you know you're probably not going to have any issues regardless.

For average consumers that doesn't really care about tech specs, it might not be a big deal whatever the specs are however, I will say that the reason I think SSDs are going to be standard, the number one reason is the reliability because people don't back up.

Obviously, it doesn't really matter what you're using if you back up properly but most people don't even do that, they just expect the computer to work perfectly all the time and obviously, it doesn't and they get mad when that doesn't happen.

_[3]

I can easily see computer manufacturers moving to SSDs exclusively if the price is right just so people don't experience Hard Drive failures and complain about the computers. No one would be happy when their Hard Drive dies and they lose a ton of different data, they never backed up because they didn't realize it. I think SSDs are a powerful protector against that and that's a really good incentive to use SSDs exclusively. For the people who do need big storage, they're gonna use Hard Drives anyway.

In Conclusion

We're moving towards the terabyte size SSDs, we're probably gonna see more computers that only have those and with a larger capacity. I guess that's all I wanted to say and hopefully, this rambling was interesting enough. If you guys have any thoughts of your own, be sure let me know in the comments and if you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to hit that upvote button.

---

---

References: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

Image sources: 1 - 2 - 3

---

---

_{GIF made by @foundation}

---

---

Thanks to @camzy for this amazing toon.