SSD could ultimately replace hard disk drives

In an interview with Network World, Hitachi Data Systems' CTO, Hu Yoshida noted that solid state disks (SSD) may ultimately replace the traditional Winchester (aka mechanical) disk drive. Of course, this much is pretty obvious to anyone who's ever tried a recent generation of solid state disks; the performance boost afforded by an SSD leaves alternative upgrades options such as upping the RAM or even swapping the processor pretty much in the dust.

Still, hearing it from an enterprise storage solutions maker is quite another matter entirely. Of course, Yoshida also rightly pointed out that the lifespan of 100,000 writes that SLC flash memory currently yields in current enterprise storage products "may not be adequate" to make flash a complete replacement for hard disks at this stage.

Other non-volatile storage technologies that are currently in development might yet bring about breakthroughs related to dramatically improving the number of write cycles though.

When all is said and done, the demise of hard disk drives will probably be a long process. With a 10-to-12-years development road map already drawn out, computer makers are also striving to improve performance. This ranges from the use of various technologies such as striping and utilizing a global cache to improve the efficiency of spinning disk drives.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Network World

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