The hard disk drive
(HDD) has been a crucial component of PCs of all types for the last
50 years. Indeed the first hard drive was developed by IBM in 1956
and ever since its conception prices and physical size have decreased
while the capacity of the drives has greatly increased. Two terabyte
drives have recently become widely available for around £100 with
the first 4TB drive being shipped by Hitachi last year. However, the
speed by which hard drive storage can be expanded upon has slowed and
with the dropping price of solid state drives we might, after 50
years of dominance, be about to see the death of hard drive for
everything but mass storage. Until last year a solid state drive
(SSD) was the ultimate sign of a PC enthusiast with prices often
reaching £2-3 per GB with that amount getting higher as the capacity
increased. Yet in the past week SSD prices have seen a significant
drop with a 240GB drive available for £175. That's only 71p per GB,
a price that was almost unimaginable two years ago. Indeed signs are
pointing to the fact that we might be about to witness the decline of
the traditional hard disk drive.
Why Now?
Yet people have
predicted the death of the hard drive for years now and every time
hard drive manufacturers have found a way to increase capacities and
reduce size. So why do I think that in the next year we will see the
replacement of hard drives in laptops and in desktops? We will of
course see hard drives remain for mass storage but for the average
consumer they will become a thing of the past.
Floods and lost
sales
The first reason is
because of last years floods in Thailand and the large effect in had
on hard drive sales. Last year there were serious floods in Thailand
that rendered the production facilities of major hard drive
manufacturers unusable. This meant that during the Christmas period
and even into the new year hard drive prices were at inflated levels.
Whereas before the flood a 1TB hard drive cost £60, after it prices
were around the £100-120 range. Not only did this result in the loss
of sales but more importantly a loss in sales that were translated
into SSD sales. For just over £120 you could buy a 120GB SSD. While
you would have clearly lost a lot of storage in opting for the SSD
you will have gained incredible speed. Christmas is a time when many
people would have been updating their systems and it is likely that
they opted for an SSD boot drive and waited until hard drive prices
lowered. Whereas before the flood they may have been looking to get a
HDD boot drive they instead ended up with the much faster SSD
instead. It is unlikley that people who bought an SSD would be able
to go back to using a HDD and therefore the process by which people
moved from using HDDs to SSDs was sped up.
The Emergence of the
Cloud
Another reason that
HDDs could be said to be on their last knees is due to the ever
expanding network of cloud storage. Dropbox, SkyDrive, iCloud and
Google Drive all provide cloud storage alternatives to the HDD. This
storage obviously comes at a price but brings with it the convenience
of being able to access your data almost any time you have access to
the internet. Dropbox for example has both a browser app as well as
android, iOS and desktop applications. The only problem with cloud
storage at the moment is the price per GB ratio. 100GB of storage on
Dropbox is $200 a year or $19.99 a month. Thats considerably more
that an HDD and is even more expensive than an SSD. Microsoft's
SkyDrive offers much more reasonable prices, however. One hundred GB
of storage with SkyDrive is only $50 a year. With competition between
Google, Microsoftt, Apple and Dropbox set to cause prices to drop
further it won't be long before we store most of our information in
the cloud.
Prices are Going
Down but Capacity is Going Up
As SSD performance
improves greatly as the storage capacity increases the ability to
have an SSD capable of storing lots of data came at an exorbitant
price. Yet the size of SSDs is increasing just as prices are
dropping. It won't be long before we see 1TB SSDs on sale. Even
though these are likely to be extremely expensive most people will
not be looking to purchase a drive with so much capacity. A 256GB SSD
is probably big enough for most users as traditional hard drives can
still be used to store large amounts of data if you really need them
to.
Rise of the
Ultrabook and MacBook Air
While Intel's Ultrabook
initiative may not have hit the heights Intel and partners would have
hoped, Ivy Bridge has signalled a new start for high end
ultra-portables. In a device where performance and size are key the
SSD provides the ultimate answer to the storage question. SSDs
contain no moving parts and are therefore silent, require less power
and produce less heat than traditional spinning platter HDDs. All of
these things lead them to being the perfect solution for
manufacturers looking to produce fast and sleek looking machines.
Previously both price and capacity have held SSDs back from being a
key component in ultra-portables, but as already stated this is
becoming less of an issue and as Intel continues to demand inclusion
of SSDs in products under the ultrabook name it looks like
traditional hard drives have been relegated to the budget end of the
notebook market. As prices continue to fall there will be less and
less reason for manufacturers to include HDDs in their devices and as
notebook sales far outweigh those of desktops it certainly looks like
HDDs are soon to be replaced by SSDs.
Speed, Speed, Speed
Finally
and arguably most importantly is the speed of SSDs compared to HDDs.
A 7200rpm Seagate barracuda hard drive is advertised as reading data
at around 156MB/s. This is compared to a mid range, year old OCZ
agility 3 SSD that has advertised read speeds of 525MB/s. This is
clearly a huge leap in performance and more importantly relates to
real world differences. SSDs cause applications such as microsoft
word to open almost instantaneously and cause games to load, in some
cases, three times faster than a traditional hard drive allows.
Possibly the best benefit to this increased performance is how fast
computers boot when the operating system is stored on an SSD. Windows
7 running on a 120GB crucial M4 loads in around 20s although half of
that time is the time it takes for the computer to POST. However,
unlike booting from a HDD, once windows has loaded on a SSD the
computer is completely usable. For instance as soon as you see the
home screen you will be able to load up your applications without the
wait you normally see when the operating system is stored on a HDD.
Indeed it certainly
looks like we may be about to see the death of the hard disk drive,
especially in laptops. With the growing popularity of cloud storage
consumers no longer seem to need the huge storage capacities that
hard drives provide. Instead the huge speed benfits that SSDs provide
in comparison to HDDs means that they are quickly becoming the
storage option of choice and with SSD prices only getting cheaper
manufacturers and consumers alike have a fast SSD filled future to
look forward to.
sources
No comments:
Post a Comment