The Future of HDD

Hard Disk Drives (HDD) technology has been around for almost 50 years. Even now we are still relying on HDD for data storage. However, there is another technology that is slowly emerging and could take over HDD in the future - Solid State Flash Memory.

Flash memory has been known for its small size and portability. Most of the portable devices like mobile phones, PDAs, Digital cameras, iPod nanos use flash memory as their mainstream storage. The even popular one is the stand alone USB flash drive. The capacity and reliability might not match current HDD but its compactness and compatibility makes it so convenient for data transfer and small storage. With USB becoming a universal hub nowadays, people can just easily plug in their USB flash drive for quick and easy data transferring.

There are only few players who are still surviving in the HDD business, mainly Seagate and WD who owns almost 70% of world's HDD market, where as there are more than 10 flash memory players around the world. The competitiveness will push manufacturers to come up with a cheaper and higher capacity flash drives in the future.

So will HDD become obsolete in the next 5 to 10 years? HDD manufacturers have tried to come up with smaller capacity drives like the 1inch and 1.3inch drives (mainly 1 to 8 gig capacity) but failed to compete with flash memory. The main technical issue that HDD face is the incapability to withstand too much vibration and impact. Vibration will cause performance to go down whilst impact will cause it to malfunction. Flash memory does not have this kind of issues.

However, looking at current cost per gigabyte ratio, HDD still has the advantage over flash. They have been putting a lot of effort and research to maximize the capacity on its HDD media. By implementing the new perpendicular media recording technology (or PMR), the capacity can be doubled or tripled and can reach as much as 1 terabyte (that’s 1000gigabyte!) for a 3.5 HDD. If you think a 8gig flash memory or a 50gig blue ray disc is a lot, then 1000gig is king! So who would need 1 terabytes? Yes, the high end users like business servers and movie production.

Well, mainly target on high end user is not enough. The biggest market is still on consumer PC and laptop. Seagate has been developing a so called Hybrid drive which is a combination of HDD and flash memory. The concept is interesting, consider this is the first time Seagate has ever consider using flash memory. Can it eliminate the portability issue (impact and vibration) that HDD is facing? Or will it improve the reliability, transferring speed and cost issue that flash memory is lacking behind?

On the other hand, we are seeing Microsoft developing their Vista OS to better suit solid state memory storage. Sony and Toshiba has started to sell their Laptops with 100gig flash memory to replace HDD (but it will cost a lot!). These are few examples that manufacturers are starting to prefer solid state design as their mainstream storage.

So who will win the storage market? As photo and video uploading to the web has been increasingly popular, web host like Youtube and Yahoo will require more and more storage capacity to keep their servers running. New programs and games has been consuming more storage space. Thus, we can see that HDD will definitely has its market in the next 10years. Flash memory will one day beat the cost per gigabyte ratio of HDD, but will not catch up with the high capacity of HDD. HDD, however, will lose on portable market for sure.