Hard Drives Remain Indispensable in Data Centers

In recent years, there have been predictions of the hard drive’s demise. Yet, this storage medium remains indispensable in the data centers of enterprises and cloud providers. And, for the foreseeable future, this is unlikely to change.
While hard drives may have disappeared from most consumer devices -and with that, from the view of end users – they remain highly prevalent in data centers. More than that, they bear the brunt of data storage demands, as no other storage medium can provide the direct access and necessary capacity for AI, video streaming, and other data-intensive applications as economically as hard drives. After all, SSDs are still about five to eight times more expensive per unit of capacity. Even if their price were to match HDDs, it would take many decades and insurmountable investments to scale production capacity to a level where SSDs could possibly replace hard drives. This is due to the complex and costly production of flash memory in cleanrooms.

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