Pure: No more hard drives will be sold after 2028

Could someone help me understand something I noticed recently when shopping around for SSDs - the pretty large difference in power usage between the more consumer-targeted models vs datacenter models. How much of it is attributed to larger memory sizes vs other factors?<p>Examples:<p>- Intel 660p 2TB: 100mW active. Older and slower, but only 100mW!<p>- Samsung 990 Pro 2TB: 5-6 watts<p>- Micron 9400 &gt;=8TB: 15-25 watts !<p>Intel: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.intel.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;www&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;docs&#x2F;memory-storage&#x2F;solid-state-drives&#x2F;consumer-ssds&#x2F;660p-series-brief.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.intel.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;www&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;docs&#x2F;memory...</a><p>Samsung: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;download.semiconductor.samsung.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;data-sheet&#x2F;Samsung_NVMe_SSD_990_PRO_Datasheet_Rev.1.0.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;download.semiconductor.samsung.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;data-sh...</a><p>Micron link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media-www.micron.com&#x2F;-&#x2F;media&#x2F;client&#x2F;global&#x2F;documents&#x2F;products&#x2F;product-flyer&#x2F;9400_nvme_ssd_product_brief.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media-www.micron.com&#x2F;-&#x2F;media&#x2F;client&#x2F;global&#x2F;documents...</a>

It is important to note that Pure Storage is a vendor of all-flash storage solutions, so there may be some exaggeration in their claims.

One thing that HDDs seem to have and SSDs seem to lack is that they fail _reliably_. Some SMART values get higher, warning, then error. Sometimes directly in error. Tick tick tick tick. But you often can still recover some data.<p>SSDs on the other hand: from one day to the next they are dead, don&#x27;t do NVME or SATA handshakes anymore, and you&#x27;re done.<p>I wonder if SSD firmware still needs to mature to the point of still allowing some connectivity and data recovery.

The headline seems a bit sensationalized, but there certainly are major forces pushing hard drives toward being a niche storage technology rather than a mainstream or default choice. Hard drive prices ($&#x2F;TB) haven&#x27;t been improving as quickly as SSD prices. SSDs have already overtaken hard drives for low capacities. For datacenters, SSDs provide more TB per rack unit. As drives get bigger, hard drive performance characteristics become more tape-like; some workloads will be unable to benefit from better $&#x2F;TB of larger drives because they cannot tolerate the performance hit of consolidating more data behind a single actuator.<p>At scale, whether to use hard drives or SSDs is not so much a question or how much capacity or performance you need, but the <i>ratio</i> of capacity to performance. Hard drives are best for cold data, SSDs have been the choice for hot data and are taking over for warm data.

I just can’t see this. HDDs hit a Pareto frontier in their niche not matched by tapes (slower access times, no real random access so expensive to fetch) and SSD (it will retain $&#x2F;gb for the foreseeable future). Maybe electricity costs are significant but if you’re a hyperscaler storing exabytes, what else are you going to use to store the vast majority of infrequently accessed content?<p>Am I missing something?

Actual summary:<p>&gt; Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&amp;D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&amp;F: “The ultimate trigger here is power. It’s just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity.” Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure’s DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part.<p>&gt; HDD vendors sing a different tune, of course. Back in 2021, HDD vendor Seagate said the SSD most certainly would not kill disk drives.<p>So the claim being made here is that SSDs will &quot;soon&quot; achieve a lower <i>lifetime cost</i> than HDDs per unit of storage, due to high electricity prices.

They might be right that spinning rust isn&#x27;t going to be used for <i>online</i> storage due to the energy cost, but that doesn&#x27;t mean it can&#x27;t still be useful for offline storage. I&#x27;m not buying this.

When HDDs fade away, what can we use for reliable storage? The endurance of SSDs has dropped from 100K cycles for SLC to 1K cycles for QLC. That makes an SSD essentially a consumable. Some say you should replace them every couple years. Meanwhile, I&#x27;ve got HDDs that are 10 years old and still going strong. Is there anything out there, or even on the horizon, that would be reliable long-term like HDD?

I don&#x27;t think so. Eventually maybe but €220 for 14TB is not in the realm of SSDs yet and it won&#x27;t be by 2028.

Most of my computers use ssd or nvme, except for my 16tb file server, which is a mixture of 12 hard drives and 6 ssds. I would upgrade it to a system of 4&#x2F;8 nvme drives, but I&#x27;m still on the fence as to whether they could survive 5 years before needing replacement again.

Whats preventing datacenters from using free solar energy? Once you produce your own clean power, electricity price becomes irrelevant.

And just like that, I now know &quot;Pure Storage&quot; is a company that exists!