Today I installed a new HDD (WD Red, 6 TB) since I ran out of space for my Music and Movie collection. That's when I realized the hard way why HDDs in their current state have no future compared to SSDs. I spent almost 48 hours moving and resizing partitions, copying data... Most of the time I had to wait hours before I could continue with the next step since my HDDs (all SATA 3 devices, connected to a SATA 3 capable mainboard) where copying data at painfully slow 40 MB/s. Just so we have done the math: If I had to copy the entire volume of my new HDD that would mean 6'000'000 MB / 40 / 60 / 60 = 41.67 hours of waiting. I know, 1 GB is not exacty 1'000 MB and so on but for the sake of simplicity I allowed myself to calculate like this.
And here we are at my main complaint: While todays HDDs are cheap and offer an immense amount of storage space, they are actually not able to handle that enormous amount of data efficiently. Ok, maybe my mainboard - HDD combination is not the fastest but even I we double the throughput that would still mean more than 20 hours of copying. So in my opinion HDD manufacturers like WD should really stop the "arms race" of offering more and more storage as long as they actually haven't got a solution how to drastically improve data throughput of their products. What does it help to have 8 + TB HDDs if it takes half a week to make a backup of that amount of data? Plus in case of disaster the same amount of time to restore your data. But currently it does not seem like there are any ideas how to drastically improve transfer rates of HDDs, all we hear about are bigger and bigger HDDs.
So if that does not change and SSDs keep getting bigger and bigger as well as cheaper and cheaper I fear HDDs are doomed. I might be that I will never get as much storage for the same amount of money with an SSD but at least the SSD is capable of handling the amount of data it stores. So what are your thoughts about it?
And here we are at my main complaint: While todays HDDs are cheap and offer an immense amount of storage space, they are actually not able to handle that enormous amount of data efficiently. Ok, maybe my mainboard - HDD combination is not the fastest but even I we double the throughput that would still mean more than 20 hours of copying. So in my opinion HDD manufacturers like WD should really stop the "arms race" of offering more and more storage as long as they actually haven't got a solution how to drastically improve data throughput of their products. What does it help to have 8 + TB HDDs if it takes half a week to make a backup of that amount of data? Plus in case of disaster the same amount of time to restore your data. But currently it does not seem like there are any ideas how to drastically improve transfer rates of HDDs, all we hear about are bigger and bigger HDDs.
So if that does not change and SSDs keep getting bigger and bigger as well as cheaper and cheaper I fear HDDs are doomed. I might be that I will never get as much storage for the same amount of money with an SSD but at least the SSD is capable of handling the amount of data it stores. So what are your thoughts about it?
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My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 8.1 Update 1
- Computer type
- PC/Desktop
- System Manufacturer/Model
- self built
- CPU
- AMD FX-8350
- Motherboard
- Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 Rev. 3
- Memory
- 16 GB
- Graphics Card(s)
- Zotac GTX 770 Amp 2 GB
- Browser
- Firefox
- Antivirus
- GDATA Internet Security