We have been hearing for a long time how solid disks or SSDs will end up replacing the HDDs or hard disks of a lifetime, the simple answer will be when these are an insurmountable bottleneck for applications, but today we continue to use them. But until when will they coexist with HDDs?
The hard drive has been with us since the first IBM PC and has become the most veteran peripheral within our PCs alongside the keyboard and the x86 register and instruction set, but we have long heard of a replacement in the form of memory. NAND Flash against which the hard disk has been holding like a champion, but it does not seem to have any bellows for the following years.
Storage, HDD, SSD and diminishing performance
Those who are a little veteran of the place will remember how MP3 players were sold in two different types according to their storage capacity, some used mechanical hard drives with a storage capacity of several tens of Gigabytes and others instead made use of NAND memory. Flash and few gigabytes.
The first models allowed to have large amounts of music inside, but as they had more capacity they were less used since the chances of another song playing was minuscule, so people began to choose MP3 with NAND flash memory , with less capacity but portable enough to take anywhere.
Regarding storage in general, the same thing happens, there is a point where offering more storage does not result in an advantage for the end user since they will not take advantage of it, which means that as soon as the SSD disks have the density good enough they will gradually replace its use in computers.
HDD falls short of the interfaces of the future
One of the problems with the hard disk is that at the moment it has become a bottleneck, even for interfaces of several tens of Gigabits per second such as the third generation USB and SATA-III 6 Gb / s. The reason? The nature of hard drives does not allow access to data at the maximum speed that these communication interfaces allow.
If we add to this the existence of the PCI Express 4.0 and USB4 interfaces, which will be standardized after a short time, then we find that the conventional hard disk becomes a burden in order to achieve those transfer speeds.
Lighter and cooler computers
One of the problems of the conventional hard disk, especially in laptops is that they raise the height much higher compared to the use of an SSD, this translates into a lighter casing and in some cases even with greater cooling.
Many computers fit an M.2 NVMe drive into a really small footprint compared to fitting a full hard drive, allowing for lighter, more attractive industrial designs, as well as longer lasting by not relying on the mechanical parts of a hard drive .
The SSD serves as an extension to the VRAM, the HDD does not
One of the things that DirectX 12 Ultimate allows is to connect your graphics to the SSD, be it an RX 6000 from AMD or the RTX 2000 and RTX 3000 from NVIDIA. Not to make it used as a VRAM directly, but to serve as a reserve well, in such a way that data is exchanged on the fly.
This allows the graphics card to have much more VRAM than it has and it can discard the data that is no longer necessary and load other very fast. Which is only possible with an NVMe disk and a PCI Express 4.0 interface. In other words, it is impossible on a conventional hard drive.
What will influence this capacity are the new generation video game consoles that will make use of their serial SSD disks in their games, which will be ported to and from PC in 99% of cases, which will force the adoption of the SSD for the most demanding gamers.
Add to this the existence of the DirectStorage API in DirectX 12 Ultimate and you have all the elements for the games to start demanding SSD disks in the short or medium term.
It will also happen on external drives
In the case of SSDs, we are already seeing how several external drives on the market are of the SSD type instead of being HDDs, in which for the moment external SSDs do not make a very high difference compared to HDDs as they could. in speed the internal SSD based on PCIe.
But the USB 4.0 interface is already with bottlenecks when using a conventional hard disk, not allowing to achieve the maximum performance of this interface, this will become a dilemma for those who want to
PLC, Intel’s proposal
A few days ago, Intel spoke of PLC cells, which can store up to 5 bits per cell, which are currently in the laboratory but await their launch in 2022.
The new type of cell will increase the storage capacity of the SSD in exchange for sacrificing life and duration, we do not know how Intel’s proposal will turn out in the end and if it will have the perfect balance between duration and storage capacity. What we do know is that it will be an ideal cell type for external SSDs used for massive data back-ups.
So PLC cells can become another nail in the HDD’s coffin.
