Seagate CEO Explains Why Flash Won’t Replace Magnetic HDDs Soon

[Brink]

Seagate CEO Explains Why Flash Won’t Replace Magnetic HDDs Soon

Solid state drives don’t just “sort of” speed up your boot drive, the difference is literally night and day. Anyone who has spent any amount of time with a machine equipped with one will tell you it’s hard to go back to using a mechanical drive, but that doesn’t have Seagate worried. Forbes had an opportunity to sit down with CEO Steve Luczo this week, and he makes a pretty compelling argument as to why the mechanical hard drive industry has nothing to fear from SSD to makers, at least for now.

Read more at:
Maximum PC | Seagate CEO Explains Why Flash Won

 

[mjf]

I bet Kodak had a similar point of view regarding film. They are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy I believe.

 

[Colonel Travis]

I bet Kodak had a similar point of view regarding film. They are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy I believe.

I thought that, too, at first. But if you read the interview it's interesting because apparently there is no way to produce enough flash drives to store all the information available on earth:

Q: Sitting someplace on a drive. So, demand for drive capacity will continue to grow.

A: Our industry shipped 100 exabytes of data five years ago, 400 exabytes in 2011, and we’ll probably ship a zettabyte sometime between 2015 and 2016. A zettabyte is equal to all the data that’s been digitized from 1957 through 2010. Everything, however you want to think of it, cards, tapes, PCs, mainframes, client/server, minicomputers – one zettabyte. And we’re going to ship that in one year. So whatever the architecture is, pads, phones, notebooks, ultrabooks, real notebooks, PCs, servers, clouds, one year, a zettabyte – that’s all going to be on rotating mass storage.

Q: And demand will keep ratcheting up from there.

A: By 2020, that number is somewhere between 7 and 35 zettabytes, depending on who you’re talking to – Seagate, which says 7, or EMC, which says 35. There is no amount of flash that can even address one tenth of one percent of that. People get locked in to this view at a device level. Yes, you could have some number of units that are serviced by flash. Let’s hope so. In fact, my bigger concern is that the flash guys can’t figure out how to keep delivering the performance and costs that they’ve been able to as they get to sub-21 nanometers, than it is that somehow they’re going to replace HDDs. Not without literally $500 billion of investment in fabs they’re not. And even then they’d only be scraping the surface.

 

[mjf]

Maybe I think of SSDs more generally as non spinning storage devices. I remember the days of 20MB HDDs. The idea of a 3 TB domestically available HDD was considered beyond the physics of magnetic storage. Ok rotating storage has a future for mass storage for quite a while. But I think we are talking very large database storage.

I'd like to consider SSD in future as standing for fast Static Storage Device be it NAND gate type technology or optical. I can't see the market for this disappearing.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
at least it wasn't a "Gartner's" prediction.

If Gartner said the same thing I'd sell ANY stock I had in Seagate etc etc. Those people are HOPELESS in prediction -- about 50% correct -- same as you'd get with a random guess. !!!

Of course what else do you expext SEAGATE to say--"We are in a dying Industry People -- Please do not invest any more money" --Of course not.

As more and more people try SSD's and like them demand will grow and the technology will develop (even Seagate will join the party at some time) to make them large capacity and affordable. It might take a while but IT WILL COME un some form or other.

Incidentally there are also ENVIROMENTAL reasons for using SSD's too -- less power requirements, less "Rare Earth" and toxic Heavy metal requirements so a cleaner manufacturing process etc.

(Look at Kodak failing to spot the digital photography trend, and probably SONY isn't too long left for this world either --at least in its present form).

Predicting Future technology or even the use of it is always a dangerous game -- remember once Texting was only provided since the Mobile operators had spare capacity and didn't know what to do with it -- nobody even dreamed of the amount of use it would get.

Music studios restricting output to CD thought they had the Music Industry in their hands for ever in spite of an onslaught by MD's (Minidiscs) to make music more portable.

Then as we all know the Ipod appeared and changed the whole nature of how people listen, buy and store music (and probably make it too).

Same with Movies -- Better Bandwidth, more people with large LCD screens -- so people want this at HOME rather than expensive trips to a movie theater where you don't have any control of how you play / watch the movie. People like Netflix etc have got this more or less correct assuming the Babdwidth can sustain it.

Satellite TV and "On Demand" TV has shaken the standard providers to the core -- who cares if channel X and channel Y are showing things yoy want to watch at the same time -- just RECORD both and watch them at your leisure (and fast forward the commercials too).

Cheers
jimbo

 

[M1GU31]

i'm still waiting for ssd prices to go down so i can use it as a boot drive and install a couple programs on it and install my games on my current hdd. Hopefully in the future they are a lot cheaper and then there wont be a need for hdd and i can install all my stuff on a big enough ssd.Anyways as for now i'm playing the sit and watch the prices and wait game.

 

[Colonel Travis]

Of course what else do you expext SEAGATE to say--"We are in a dying Industry People -- Please do not invest any more money" --Of course not.

As more and more people try SSD's and like them demand will grow and the technology will develop (even Seagate will join the party at some time) to make them large capacity and affordable. It might take a while but IT WILL COME un some form or other.

Agree, but the key phrase is "take a while." There's simply no way flash drives will come close to matching the capacity of mechanical drives for decades - it's the same brick wall Moore's Law is running into. Beyond a certain point, we just don't how to shrink and cram more stuff in tighter spaces. I'm sure the marketplace will figure this out, or come up with a totally new technology, but right now that is really far off.

 

[jimbo45]

Of course what else do you expext SEAGATE to say--"We are in a dying Industry People -- Please do not invest any more money" --Of course not.

As more and more people try SSD's and like them demand will grow and the technology will develop (even Seagate will join the party at some time) to make them large capacity and affordable. It might take a while but IT WILL COME un some form or other.

Agree, but the key phrase is "take a while." There's simply no way flash drives will come close to matching the capacity of mechanical drives for decades - it's the same brick wall Moore's Law is running into. Beyond a certain point, we just don't how to shrink and cram more stuff in tighter spaces. I'm sure the marketplace will figure this out, or come up with a totally new technology, but right now that is really far off.

Hi there

even today we *Could* triple the capacity of all drives be they SSD's or spinners without a single change of technology -- with fast hardware why not build compression (lossless) into the storage -- the user will just see the data in "plain text" while the hardware will compress / decompress the data.

The compression mechanism can be built into the firmware.
Things like WORD / EXCEL etc will compress up to 90% and most music / multimedia can be LOSSLESSLY compressed decently too.

We need faster hardware for this to work but the firmware of the spinners / SSD's could have fast RAM speed type caches for doing the compression / decompression.

Mechanisms and systems in the future will certainly appear (and I don't believe it will be too long).

SSD's in their present form might take a geological age (if ever) to catch up capacity wise with spinners -- but there is a lot of newer technology out there in Labs just awaiting the need to move it beyond Research stage into real development.

Mabe bubble storage with new technology might come back into consideration - certinly there's a lot of development going on into the next generation of Mass storage.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[smarteyeball]

There's plenty of time before Mechanical drive makers have to hit the panic button.

 

[jimbo45]

There's plenty of time before Mechanical drive makers have to hit the panic button.

Hi there
you can still buy FLOPPY Discs and a USB floppy disk adapter if you want .

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Maguscreed]

I think mechanicals will always have a home as massive storage devices.
The price difference for the foreseeable future makes that all too clear.
Want a 2 tb ssd, well you can get it. You'll just have to take out a second mortgage on your house to afford it.
I actually saw a 20tb ssd pci-e once I won't bother telling you the price.



...and a enteriprise level ssd of any significant size is well...
I think I'll replace my truck with something newer first.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227771

(also note from the reviews, it apparently doesn't work worth a damn)

 

[MagusMagnus]

Laughable. Mechanical drives are being slapped together now and aren't lasting as long as they should anymore. I've just had two mechanical drives die on us within the past six months and out of our total of 5. And guess what? Our 80GB drive (an OEM no less) that is 8 years old is the one reporting the best health and reliability attributes in S.M.A.R.T. And I for one find that to be atrocious. Drives that had less than 4 years of use aren't supposed to flame out and that used to be a rare enough thing back in the day, now it's more common than ever before. And we're supposedly buying drives today that have all of this much better and advanced technology?! Laughable.

As soon as the price drops to a more reasonable and affordable level, I think I will be phasing out our mechanical drives. The cost to keep replacing them, especially right now, equates to about what an SSD runs in the first place. So it just makes more sense financially to go straight for the SSD with a significantly less chance of failure straight off.

However, I for one believe the cost of both mechanical and SSD's is too much. Even SD cards and etc. are too expensive. Also, if they can cram 64GB into a tiny little SD card, they can cram a few TB into a SSD. There just wouldn't be a demand for it, as they would cost more than a brand new vehicle (gotta love that greed-or excuse me, that 'supply and demand')!

 

[Maguscreed]

There are different types of ram , not just meaning different frequencies and timings, but there are drastically varied ways ram is physically put together.
That's the big difference you are looking at when comparing a ssd to a camera or phone card.
They are two completely different animals.

 

[MagusMagnus]

While there are undoubtedly differences in how each device is utilized, it is still flash memory on both devices. I fail to see how they could differ so much (physically) in that they can't shove as much storage into a significantly larger device when they've basically already accomplished it with a tiny card not even 1/10th the size of a credit card (a feat, as I recall, was also regarded as impossible - and the Nano iPods? Same thing, they said it was impossible but here they are).

But if you know something about it that I don't with these differences, feel free to pass it along. Learning is my hobby.

Personally, I'd like to see them create a massive SD-card type device that works exactly the same way, but which would be purely a data storage drive for documents, pictures, music, video etc. etc. leaving the present, evidently higher-functioning SSD's for the operating system and programs. That way, we really would not need 1TB and above in a single SSD to house the brunt of data, which is personal files rather than programs and games. And really, apart from with mobile systems that can only accommodate 1 drive, I've never seen the point or advantage of storing personal files on the same drive as the operating system and programs. Seems to me they are much more secure and less likely to be damaged, lost or corrupted on a separate drive in the first place.

If any of that makes sense anyway, sometimes I have a hard time communicating ideas to others... abstract minded.

 

[Maguscreed]

For basically the same reason you can't get a Yugo around a track at the same speed as a Bugatti veyron even though they are both cars made with engines that run on gas...

...there is the obvious price difference there as well.

 

[Phone Man]

Interesting article. Page 5 states the economics of the problem. There is not enough manufacturing capacity in the Flash fabs to come even close to the volume of HDD, and the investment costs do not make it feasible to try and replace the HDD. The SSD is a special market and works great for OS and some programs but HDD will dominate the storage area for years to come.

Jim

 

[fseal]

There are several things wrong here.

1) SSDs do not HAVE to "replace" HDDs for them to be insanely useful so this whole argument or justification for his comments seems misplaced on the face of it..
2) Just because there is not enough silicon capacity TODAY does not mean there won't be within 5 years.
3) MOST people never use anywhere NEAR the full capacity of that 1TB drive that comes with their computer. Not even close. I bet 90% of all computers and laptops used today don't need more than 250 gig of storage, and the price on those sized SSDs will soon be at a point where the performance/cost increase and the marketing value will be plenty good to switch over.

So while segate may continue enjoy selling hard drives to huge data centers, corporate servers and the enthusiast home user, they could /easily/ lose a HUGE chunk of their drive market in the next few years because no one really needs a 4TB drive in their laptop, home or office computer...

 

[Lee]

SSD's will first take over HDDs in the home computer market. I have been running a SSD since November 2009 and am totally glad that I spent the $250.00 dollars for the unit (80 gigs). The home market will in the future start to drive the purchase of SSDs. This is in a way what happen in the 80's and 90's.

For those who remember back in the 70's and 80' we saw the influx of floppy disk. These disks ranged in size from 3.5" to 12". Those used for home use were 3.5" to 5.25". In a since it was again the home user who started pushing the HDD. I remember in 1988 buying a 20 meg HDD. The drive had a 5.25" platter, and was about the size of a bread box (may be a little smaller).

When SSD demand out reaches supply then manufactures will step up and meet those demands, albeit until that happens then yes HDDs will still be out in the for front.

 

[lehnerus2000]

3) MOST people never use anywhere NEAR the full capacity of that 1TB drive that comes with their computer. Not even close.

A lot of people do need far more than 1 TB.

You need a lot of space, if you actually make backup HDD images, instead of relying on "the whims of the Gods" to protect your data.

My friend shoots lots of photos and video and he has multiple TB of external HDDs for storage.

If you are a compulsive hoarder (like me) you need stacks of storage space.
I've got 8 TB of storage (4.5 TB internal + 3.5 TB external).
There is about 2 TB 1 TB of empty space left, spread over 7 HDDs.

I need another large HDD, so that I can reorganise my backups, pictures, videos, VMs, etc.
I can probably get a TB back, if I can track down all the (excess) duplicate files.
I know that I have about 100 GB of duplicate VMs.

 

[fseal]

3) MOST people never use anywhere NEAR the full capacity of that 1TB drive that comes with their computer. Not even close.

A lot of people do need far more than 1 TB.

You need a lot of space, if you actually make backup HDD images, instead of relying on "the whims of the Gods" to protect your data.

My friend shoots lots of photos and video and he has multiple TB of external HDDs for storage.

If you are a compulsive hoarder (like me) you need stacks of storage space.
I've got 8 TB of storage (4.5 TB internal + 3.5 TB external).
There is about 2 TB of empty space left, spread over 7 HDDs.

I need another large HDD, so that I can reorganise my backups, pictures, videos, VMs, etc.
I can probably get a TB back, if I can track down all the (excess) duplicate files.
I know that I have about 100 GB of duplicate VMs.

Yes, you and I do, we are "enthusiasts" as any regular poster here is. We are not the 90% that do NOT need anywhere near that amount of storage.