SSDs haven’t won yet

Revisiting the slow but capacious hard disk drive.

Jarrod Walton

We don’t talk about hard disk drives (HDDs) much these days. When you’re after maximum performance, solid state drives (SSDs) are so much faster. But HDDs still have a place, particularly if you have large archives of movies, videos, photos, and other files that don’t need a lot of speed. The cheapest HDDs now start at around $0.015 per GB. The cheapest SSDs start at about $0.03 per GB, with more desirable M.2 PCIe 4.0 models that don’t use QLC NAND starting at $0.06 per GB – about four times the cost of an HDD. HDD technology isn’t sitting still. Sure, the first 8TB HDDs appeared in 2014, and like so many things, the rate of doubling has slowed down. Now, 8TB drives are ubiquitous, and 20TB models are readily…

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APC (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2023

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