Hard Disks Face 'Solid' Competition

Hard Disks Face 'Solid' Competition
Hard drives have long dominated the storage sector. But they are facing a threat from solidstate drives, especially Flash-based memory. We take a closer look at what the future has in stor(ag)e.
There is nothing carved in stone when it comes to storage. Here we don't mean stored data, but the medium on which the data is stored. There is speculation that solidstate drives (SSDs) may soon replace hard disk drives (HDDs).

Flash-based memories, which were once limited to RAM, USB storage devices and MP3 players, have now evolved into a strong competitor for HDDs. The most significant development in this field was made by Samsung in May 2006, with the announcement of the world's first notebook PC, featuring a 32 GB NAND Flash-based Solidstate disk (SSD), instead of traditional HDD Microsoft MCTS Training.

The announcement fuelled speculation that the future of HDDs was under threat, and Intel added to it with the launch of its own solidstate drive.

Analyse this
But will SSDs replace HDDs completely? There are several points that need to be understood before we can answer this. Let us analyse what makes SSDs better than HDDs. SSDs score over HDDs on various fronts: form factor, speed, boot delay, power consumption, ruggedness and many more.

The form factor may not be decisive because hard disks are also shrinking in size, but to a limit. Power consumption is a serious issue when one is talking about notebooks and mobile devices, and here SSDs consume only 5 per cent of what HDDs devour. According to a Samsung press release, SSDs read 300 per cent faster (53 MBps) and write 150 per cent quicker (28 MBps) than normal hard drives. Also, HDDs cannot resolve the issue of boot delay (time that a PC takes to start the operating system). The Microsoft Windows XP operating system will boot up 25-50 per cent faster on an SSD compared to other drives, claims Samsung. HDD manufacturers have attempted to compensate for this by coming out with the concept of hybrid drives,embedding Flash-based memories with HDDs. SSDs hold the edge in ruggedness as well. No matter how well packed, {quotes} HDDs are vulnerable to temperature, magnetic fields, humidity and physical impact, whereas SSDs are almost immune to them.{/quotes}

Nobody is perfect
But SSDs have their drawbacks too. These include pricing, reliability and storage capacity. SSDs are expensive compared to HDDs, while HDDs offer storage at the rate of $1 per GB, SSDs cost approximately $90 per GB. But prices are coming down dramatically,something that HDDs also experienced with the development in technology. SanDisk's 1.8-inch (4.6 cm) drive used to cost $600, but now the 2.5-inch (6.35 cm) drive is available for $350.

"Many of the PC manufacturers are looking towards the SSD as a future storage device. With falling NAND Flash pricing and faster access time compared to HDDs, this will be the future trend. {quotes align=right}But this technology will only mature in the next couple of years, to eventually replace the HDD{/quotes}," says Rajesh Panicker, country manager, India, Kingston Technology Company Microsoft MCITP Certification.

Is bigger better?
SSDs also fall short when it comes to storage capacity. Seagate, the leading manufacturer of hard drives, rules out the possibility of SSDs replacing HDDs stating, "This is not a viable solution for two reasons. First, the write-wear phenomenon with Flash puts your critical data in jeopardy. And second, 32 GB is just not enough capacity for mainstream consumers. Vista takes up to 15 GB and Mac OS X 10.5 takes 6 GB. That leaves about 15-25 GB to store your data and run your applications. Seagate's customers want much more storage than this. The average capacity of notebook drives shipped last quarter reached 90 GB."

But Linux may blow a massive hole in this argument. There are many distros (versions of Linux-based operating systems that are as good as Windows) available today that can be stripped down and packed in a Flash drive. A machine can be directly booted from the Flash drive,you are up and running without even requiring a HDD.

However, for high-density storage requirements, HDDs have no competition, unless there are some major breakthroughs in SDD technologies that ensure not only higher data storage, but also data security. Recently, there were reports that a Taiwanese company, A-DATA, developed a 128 GB 2.5-inch (6.35 cm) SDD with SATA II interface. But even this capacity appears tiny compared to the 1 TB capacity offered by hard drives.

Another issue that weakens SSDs' prospects of replacing HDDs is limited write cycles , the number of times you can write and re-write a file. At present, Flash-based drives have limited write cycles, compared to HDDs, on which you can re-write endlessly. But this does not mean HDDs are eternal. They also have a limited life span. The magnetic property of the drive fades with time, and you cannot keep your data on the same device for ever. Whatever the storage medium, you will have to migrate your data to newer devices.

But with the evolution of newer and better technologies such as Phase Change Memory (PCM), also known as PRAM (which is considered to be a successor to Flash), SSDs seem to have overcome the limited write cycle issue.

"Technology takes time to mature and volume ramps bring down prices; so if we take these two points into consideration, then we are looking at a 2-3 year period for these products to get into the mainstream," says Panicker.

Online applications ,who needs HDD space?
The world is now migrating from desktop-based applications to Web-based applications or online services (we covered part of this aspect in "Google Apps Biting Into Microsoft's Pie?" in the April 2007 issue of this magazine). With the advent of such services, you do not need to buy and install office suites or image editing applications on your PCs.

Google, Zoho and many other companies are offering online document processing services (free as well as paid for options) as an alternative to desktop-based office suites. There are video content sharing services such as You Tube and Yahoo Video, where you can save video files on the servers of these companies instead of on the PC. For images, there are services like Flickr, which allow users to post and share images on the Web. Adobe is also planning to introduce a Web-based version of its popular creative suites like Photoshop to enable people to edit images online. This new trend will negate the need for storing or installing applications as well as data on local machines, thus creating a demand for machines that do not have a large storage capacity.

"The future of storage devices will be more driven by the demands of the application. While we are seeing the need for faster access times, at the same time, applications are getting more niche. This trend looks like tilting more towards Nand Flash-based storage products," feels Panicker.

When it comes to entertainment, a new trend that has emerged is the pay-per-view/listen service, in which users do not have to buy the content, but pay for the times they want to listen or view it. This also eliminates the need to store data.

With the growing popularity of media players like the iPod, people are increasingly opting to listen to music on handheld devices. While high capacity media players still feature HDDs, some (including Apple's iPod Nano and Shuffle) are Flash-based. Ideally, SSDs are a better option for media players because of non-moving parts and low power consumption. However, they lose out to HDDs on the storage capacity front. But as SDD capacities expand (witness A-Data's 128 GB effort, which offers a higher capacity than the iPod or Zune), there will be a shift of digital content from hard drives to the SSDs embedded in these devices.

A controversial technology, digital rights management (DRM), may also lead to a decline in the demand for high storage capacity at individual levels, as this technology restricts people from copying or storing data on their machines. Why would anyone want high capacity storage devices like HDDs when there is not much to store?

Home users, unlike major organisations, are not particular about the security of their data. And they generally take back-ups of critical data on CDs or DVDs, instead of trusting hard drives or data recovery services. That's another factor in favour of SSDs.

The future is slim, sleek and...shrinking!
Devices are shrinking in size every day. Smart handheld devices are emerging as alternatives to laptops. And ubiquitous computing and 'wearable' computers are on the horizon.

Texas Instruments recently demonstrated a projector the size of a human fingertip, for mobile devices. You can place your mobile in front of a screen and enjoy life-sized images of a Hollywood blockbuster.

The future definitely seems to belong to sleek and slim devices, and these are likely to use SSDs for their storage needs. Hard drives will continue to exist, but you may not find them on the devices you use. They'll be running silently in server rooms!