SSDs have been overtaking HDDs in the last few years, but HDDs still dominate in the enterprise, with just over 85% of the primary data footprint, according to Ed Burns, an analyst at IDC who specializes in hard drives.
This year, increasingly dense SSDs have been on the rise, with the highest available for purchase scaling from 61 TB to over 120 TB in 2024. Along with higher performance, there is a demand for higher compute, which requires more power and can be potentially gained through a consolidation of storage arrays with denser SSDs.
While some vendors are pressing for innovation such as increased density, others are figuring out how HDDs and flash can work together to meet these demands. In June, Western Digital unveiled a storage framework for AI, the AI Data Cycle, that includes HDDs for cost-effective bulk storage. Software-defined parallel processing vendor Vdura also uses HDDs in the same way in the latest release of its data platform in November.
By combining HDDs and SSDs to meet performance and compute demands, vendors can present a more cost-effective product to customers than a pure SSD offering alone. The gap in price between SSDs and HDDs shrunk in 2023, but didn't narrow further in 2024, according to Ken Claffey, CEO of Vdura. And the reality is that when it comes to storage requirements, customers don't make decisions based on performance needs alone -- they also consider their budget.
"If flash is expensive, I need to be able to get the performance my customer needs and the capacity with a minimum amount of flash and more HDDs," Claffey said in reference to Vdura's composable nature that enables more HDDs to be added.
Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, noted that customers must consider use cases before making an investment.
"Unless you're running a primary, mission-critical workload, you don't need the performance of SSDs," he said.
Data management infrastructure such as data lakes as well as data types including object storage are core to AI workloads and are adequately supported by HDDs, according to Staimer.