STATE OF PLAY: STORAGE
Storage is never boring. There are always a ton of products from all different segments. Hard drives, SSD, NVMe, NAS, Optane. It’s all happening!
MECHANICAL HARD DRIVES ARE HERE TO STAY
The world is producing ever larger amounts of data. The likes of IoT, analytics, deep learning, and all those cat memes means there’s a constantly increasing need to store it all. SSDs are too expensive for mass storage and probably always will be, so there is still plenty of life in the humble mechanical hard drive.
The highest capacity drives top out at 14Tb right now, though as time goes on we will see even larger drives. Western Digital demonstrated its microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology in October last year. Its purpose is to cram more data into a given space, which has otherwise been difficult due to nano-scale magnetic properties. It plans to ship these devices later this year or early next, and says the technology will allow drives with a 40TB capacity within a few years.
With mechanical hard drives likely to be with us for many years, if not decades, we should see the ageing SATA standard stick around for some time to come. A good high capacity hard drive or even a SATA SSD is looking like a good safe investment. With performance unlikely to improve, a good drive today should remain a good drive in five-plus years.
NAND FLASH PRICING IS FALLING
Most of 2017 saw the prices of SSDs remain quite high relative to the downward trends seen over previous years. Flash manufacturers are always under investigation by one watchdog body or another, but there’s no doubt that the explosion of smartphone usage means that flash memory demand has skyrocketed over the last few years. Now that the supply of NAND flash from all the leading manufacturers is picking up, we can look forward to some great value SSDs in the second half of 2018.
The highest capacity drives top out at 14Tb right now, though as time goes on we will see even larger drives.