At one time, 3D NAND technology greatly contributed to the growth of recording density and the increase in SSD capacity. DigiTimes reports that conventional hard drives, which have recently been increasingly replaced by solid-state alternatives, may be getting a second wind thanks to the development of generative AI and the introduction of thermal magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. Seagate Technology's development, according to some estimates, can provide an annual increase in HDD recording density of 20%.
According to Japan's Techno System Research (TSR), global HDD shipments peaked in 2010 at 650 million units. Since then, supplies have been steadily decreasing, falling to 120 million units in 2023 – more than 500 million “lost” HDDs replaced SSDs. True, the total capacity of hard drives continues to grow, despite the decrease in unit shipments.
At the same time, HDD is still more profitable than SSD in terms of price/capacity ratio, especially for nearline-class drives. According to Nikkei, in 2023, HDD prices per gigabyte were $0.013, and high-capacity SSDs were $0.123/GB, i.e. 9.5 times more than HDD. IDC estimates that storing generative AI data will require an average annual increase in storage capacity of about 20%. If a company is limited in funds, it will prefer HDD precisely because of the more favorable price-capacity ratio. There is another factor – today it costs $1–1.5 billion to build each data center, and energy costs amount to $10–100 million annually.
However, PMR technology is relevant only for hard drives of relatively small capacity, and the more advanced ePMR from Western Digital (WD) and FC-MAMR from Toshiba show an annual increase in density of about 8%, DigiTimes writes. In 2021, Toshiba proposed MAS-MAMR technology, which allows increasing the maximum HDD capacity to 30 TB and further reducing power consumption per TB, which would allow upgrading existing data centers.
Seagate is ready to begin production of HAMR HDDs with a capacity of more than 30 TB; in 2025, it intends to release a 40 TB HDD, and in 2027-2028. The capacity of its drives will exceed 50 TB. As a result, hard drives will truly see a second wind by the end of the decade. However, Pure Storage predicts that by this time hard drives, on the contrary, will be completely replaced by SSDs due to the energy efficiency of the latter. And the demand for AI will only spur replacement. It seems that only LTO libraries will not experience problems.
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