The Near-Term Future of PC Storage.

I had grand ideas that my current PC build would be all solid state. Sure the cost would’ve been high, on the order of $1500 to get about 2TB in RAID10, but the performance potential was hard to deny. In the end however I opted for good old fashioned spinning rust mostly because current RAID controllers don’t do TRIM on SSDs, meaning I would likely be in for a lovely performance downgrade in the not too distant future. Despite that I was keenly aware of just how feasible it was to go full SSD for all my PC storage and how the days of the traditional hard drive are likely to be numbered.

Ever since their first commercial introduction all those years ago SSDs have been rapidly plummeting in price with the most recent drop coming off the back of a few key technological innovations. Whilst they’re still an order of magnitude away from traditional HDDs in terms of cost per gigabyte ($0.50/GB for SSD, $0.05/GB for HDD) the gap in performance between the two is more than enough to justify the current price differential. For laptops and other portable devices that don’t require large amounts of onboard storage SSDs have already become the sole storage platform in many cases however they still lose out for large scale data storage. That differential could come to a quick close however, although I don’t think SSDs’ rise to fame will be instantaneous past that point.

One thing that has always plagued SSDs is the question around their durability and longevity as the flash cells upon which they rely have a defined life in terms of read and write cycles. Whilst SSDs have, for the most part, proven reliable even when deployed at scale the fact is that they’ve really only had about 5 or so years of production level use to back them up. Compare that to hard drives which have track records stretching back decades and you can see why many enterprises are still tentative about replacing their fleet en-masse; We just don’t know how the various components that make up a SSD will stand the test of time.

However concerns like that are likely to take a back seat if things like a 30TB drive by 2018 come to fruition. Increasing capacity on traditional hard drives has always proven to be a difficult affair as there’s only so many platters you can fit in the standard space. Whilst we’re starting to see a trickle of 10TB drives into the enterprise market they’re likely not going to be available at a cost effective point for consumers anytime soon and that gives a lot of leeway to SSDs to play catchup to their traditional brethren. That means cost parity could come much sooner than many anticipated, and that’s the point where the decision about your storage medium is already made for the consumer.

We likely won’t see spinning rust disappear for the better part of a decade but the next couple years are going to see something of a paradigm shift in terms of which platform is considered before another. SSDs already reign supreme as the drive to have your operating system residing on, all they require now is a comparative cost per gigabyte to graduate beyond that. Once we reach that point it’s likely to be an inflection point in terms of the way we store our data and, for consumers like us, a great time to upgrade our storage.