Goodbye hard drives

2028 will be the last year in which hard disk drives (HDDs) are sold, according to Pure Storage’s vice president of research and development in the customer engineering unit, Shawn Rosemarin.

Rosemarin told tech publication Blocks and Files that he believes hard drives will reach their end-of-life in the next five years, primarily due to their power consumption.

“The ultimate trigger here is power. It’s just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity,” said Rosemarin.

“Hard drive technology is 67 years old. We need to herald this technology that went from five megabytes the size of this room to where we are today.”

“Even the latest HAMR technology, putting a laser on the top of the head in order to heat up the platters, is pretty remarkable … But we’re at the end of that era.”

Recent tests conducted by Tom’s Hardware showed that SSDs were significantly more power efficient than HDDs.

The publication found that SATA SSDs only consumed up to 5W of power, while M.2 SSDs operated at around 7–8W under heavy load.

The result of this can be seen in the improved battery life of laptops, which could gain an extra 30–45 minutes by replacing their HDDs with SSDs.

Although it can vary between models, hard drives typically consume 15–30W at peak load.

Pure Storage’s CEO Charles Giancarlo previously said that around 3% of the world’s electricity consumption took place in data centres.

Rosemarin said a third of that number could be attributed to storage’s electricity usage. The overwhelming majority of storage in data centres consists of hard drives.

He explained that rising electricity costs would make HDDs unaffordable in data centres.

“Today, it’s economically unfeasible for many customers to run their entire estate in hard drives,” Rosemarin said.

“But it’ll actually become impossible. You’ll be limited from a density and power consumption perspective of how much data you can support.”

Aside from lower electricity consumption, SSDs also offer much faster performance, which may become critical as online services move to more data-hungry applications, like cloud gaming.

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