A Pure Storage R&D chief believes hard drives won’t be sold after 2028. His forecast does not correspond to the existing trends.

Shawn Rosemarin, Pure Storage’s vice president of research and development for customer engineering, doesn’t think classic hard drives will be sold after 2028, he told Blocks&Files. According to Rosemarin, the end of the HDD era is near. The trigger would be the power consumption in the data center. Storage is responsible for about a third of the consumption of a data center and this is mainly due to the classic hard disk. Replacing it with an SSD reduces energy consumption drastically.

It’s no surprise that Rosemarin cites SSDs as the solution. After all, Pure Storage is a flash memory specialist and would be happy if the prediction was correct. However, there is currently no sign in the market that data center builders are looking for alternatives to hard drives for mass storage.

Cheaper per gigabyte

In many cases, the SSD has effectively replaced the hard drive. When storage needs to perform, there’s no comparison between the performance of a solid state drive and a hard drive. For mass storage and archiving, however, the SSD remains a significantly more expensive option. Rosemary points to falling prices, but prices per gigabyte of hard drives continue to fall. Current trends suggest that the cost price per gigabyte for an SSD will remain higher for a long time to come, even if higher electricity prices play a role.

Pure Storage might be right, of course, but that would mean that hyperscalers are starting to prepare for the end of HDD. After all, they are supposed to replace their immense storage infrastructure, so that hard drives will no longer be needed from 2028. No major party has communicated any plans to do so today. Unless a hyperscaler jumps on the bandwagon, Rosemarin’s claim appears to be more of a wish than a true prediction.