Five Reasons Why HDD Is Dead and SSD Is Taking Over

Until recently, Flash-optimized Fibre channel storage has been extremely expensive to implement and many organizations were priced out of the procurement cycle.  According to Gartner, however, the solid-state drive (SSD) market is expected to grow from some $390 million in 2012 to more than $4 billion in 2016. Emulex, a provider of hardware and software solutions for network connectivity, monitoring and management, offers five reasons why.

Click through for five reasons why HDD is being replaced by SSD technology, as identified by Emulex, a provider of hardware and software solutions for network connectivity, monitoring and management.

Today’s Big Data analytics, financial trading systems, digital content delivery and security applications, require “on demand” access to stored data in order to crunch large data sets faster. The moving parts in a hard disk drive (HDD) make accessing data slower, and this latency is no longer tolerable. In addition, queries from ever-growing databases and boot storms from virtual desktop environments require the fastest access possible to disk.

An older technology, HDDs have long been much more affordable.  But as SSDs gain popularity, many startup and storage stalwarts are beginning to manufacture less expensive SSDs to commoditize the technology.

With the increased bandwidth and reduced latency provided by solutions that deliver faster I/O operations per second (IOPS), Flash-optimized Fibre channel storage and high performance applications can deliver faster response times.

SSD read/write speeds, durability and longevity are too good to ignore. Unlike HDDs, which have mechanical parts that can break down or wear out, SSDs can last for many years without the need for continual rip and replace.

Given that SSDs have no moving parts, there is a dramatic reduction in power and cooling consumption and heat generated. For example, according to Marc Staimer from Dragon Slayer Consulting, SSDs’ power and cooling consumption ranges from approximately 50 to 80 percent less than HDD systems. This can have a dramatic impact on data center OPEX.