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

[jimbo45]

Hi there
even the biggest scrobbits of all will still have a load of music / audio book / dvd copies / videos / photos etc -- to say nothing of copies of scans of documents like Income Tax returns (What's Income tax ??) . !.

All this stuff can easily consume several TB.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Solarstarshines]

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.

Seriously guys Mechanical drives speak for Themselves
Generaly speaking as well the normal Consumer or average Joe if you will ,would not invest in a SSD for practical purposes and the capacity wouldn't be worth the speed Getting more for less seems to be what would Prevail

2TB Hd 250.00 bucks 250GB SSD 300.00+ guess who will win everytime

Not everyone is about speed ,But heck I do love my Benching score when using a SSD

I would say for now the CEO is right and SSD lifespan isn't what it could be it wares over time just a little faster then a regular HD

Which again people in today's world don't want to keep spending money to replace I know I don't I have had a WD mybook since 2005 and still going strong im sure a SSD of that year would be performing as fast as the Mybook by now so you would see why the man isn't worried they simply Can't create a super mass storage SSD at a affordable price