Determining Full Cost And Sustainability Impact Of Flash Vs. Spinning Disk
StorageNewsletter.com, Friday, September 22,2023
HDDs will effectively be dead by 2028 using much denser flash device technology, not COTS SSDs.
Lately there's been a lot of discussion in the industry purporting to compare the cost and 'eco-friendliness' of HDDs and SSDs using metrics that frankly are not relevant for enterprises looking to deploy storage systems at scale. In this blog I'd like to point out how these discussions are doing a disservice to enterprises looking to deploy the most cost-effective and sustainable storage infrastructure and suggest the relevant metrics.
I'm all for using performance and storage density, energy and floorspace consumption, and TCO metrics to compare enterprise storage solutions, but you can't get a relevant analysis for an enterprise by comparing a single HDD to a single SSD. As an IT manager building an enterprise - class storage system, you aren't buying a single storage device - you're buying a system that will have anywhere from tens to hundreds (or even thousands) of storage devices.