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Will Hard Drives Be Replaced by Future Technology?

Yes. As the storage market is changing, it’s very likely that hard drives will be replaced by future technology. According to research from the online company Backblaze, the use of hard disks could come to an end soon. Solid-state drives (SSDs) are already replacing hard disks as a primary storage source for computers. Hard drives are still relevant for commercial storage though, this is largely due to the high cost of SSDs.

The fact that solid-state drives are more reliable than hard drives for long-term use has made the idea of switching to SSDs more attractive, despite the much higher cost to storage capacity ratio. This is something very important to consider when building your own computer or your own server.

Slower Speed

The speed of a hard drive is dependent on the revolutions it makes per minute (RPM). This can vary with the different variants of hard disks. A traditional hard disk will, however, perform slower in comparison to flash memory due to its mechanical nature and the fact that data in HDD is fragmented. What this means is that computers with hard drives will boot slower and take more time transferring files.

Power Consumption

HDDs rely on the rotation of platter disks as well as the movement of a read/write head to write data. Substantial power is consumed for all these mechanical parts to function optimally, which is why many manufacturers lean towards SSDs when building computers with a limited battery capacity.

Noise

The constant rotation of platter disks and movement of read/write heads causes hard drives to produce a distracting noise and cause vibrations. The noise becomes more prominent when hard drives carry out heavy operations such as the storage of large files. SSDs on the other hand, produce virtually no noise at all.

Mechanical Failure

Hard disk drives have a high chance of experiencing mechanical failures since they contain moving parts, many of which are located close to each other. A sudden drop or shudder could result in friction between these parts and result in damages which could, in turn, lead to overall device corruption. This is why hard drives should be handled with the utmost care.

Technologies and Trends That Could Make Hard Drives Obsolete

While hard drives still enjoy a good measure of popularity as a medium for data storage, they may soon be phased out as other technologies and trends continue to rise. Some of these exciting new technologies that you should look out for are listed and briefly explained below.

DNA Storage

DNA storage uses DNA density to store large amounts of data in very tiny formats. A single gram of DNA can store up to 215 petabytes or 215,000,000 gigabytes of data. This density far outweighs that of other storage technology. It will, however, take a while before this technology can become viable due to its writing speeds being only 400 bytes per second. DNA is also very expensive, as just one megabyte can cost thousands of dollars.

Crystal Etching

Crystal etching is a technology that uses laser pulses to write data in nano-scale dots form. The data is written on the 3-dimensional structure of a quartz disc with the capacity to store up to 360 terabytes of data. Data in this format can stay stable for billions of years, hypothetically speaking, and, though this technology is promising, it’s still in its early stages and may continue to be too costly for everyday data storage applications.

Increasing Popularity of SSD Storage

Solid State Drives (SSDs), also referred to as semiconductor storage devices or solid-state disks, are devices that use an integrated circuit assembly to store data and use flash memory as secondary storage. SSDs do not have a physical spinning disk and lack the movable read/write heads found in floppy disks and hard disk drives (HDDs).