The wave of AI is coming fiercely, not only keeping high-performance chips continuously in the spotlight but also providing the memory market with new development opportunities. Recently, Citibank stated that SSDs would replace HDDs in the AI field because SSDs are faster and more suitable for AI training applications. It is noted that the data centers of America’s top technology companies are shifting from HDDs to enterprise-grade SSDs.
From consumer electronics to enterprise markets and now to the era of AI, the competition between SSDs and HDDs is being staged again.
01
Can SSD completely replace HDD?
The industry points out that SSDs surpass HDDs by nearly 10 times in terms of access speed, while HDDs have the advantage of lower costs.
In recent years, as NAND Flash prices have fallen during the downturn, the cost difference between SSDs and HDDs has started to narrow, allowing SSDs to begin replacing HDDs in certain areas. For example, in consumer-level PCs with storage under 2TB, HDDs are gradually being phased out. In the enterprise server market, industry data shows that SSD usage is seven times that of HDDs.
This seems to indicate that SSDs are significantly ahead of HDDs, but it’s still not enough to say that SSDs will completely replace HDDs. After all, compared to consumer products, data centers have higher performance requirements for SSD products. Moreover, from a cost perspective, enterprises face significant pressure to completely switch from HDDs to SSDs.
The current AI boom is providing development opportunities for both HDDs and SSDs, with a surge in demand for large-capacity products leading to price increases.
Industry insiders revealed that HDD manufacturers reduced supply last year due to poor market conditions, and with the arrival of the AI wave, there was a supply shortage in the second half of the year, causing prices to rise. From the third quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year, the overall price increase for HDDs reached 10%-20%. Recent reports indicate that Western Digital has notified customers that it will continue to raise HDD prices. Industry experts expect HDD market prices to continue to rise in the second quarter of this year, with an increase of 5% to 10%.
The SSD market is also facing a supply shortage, especially for enterprise-grade SSDs. TrendForce estimates that NAND Flash contract prices will rise strongly by about 1318% in the second quarter, with Enterprise SSD contract prices increasing by 2025%, the highest among all products.
02
Academician Ni Guangnan: Hope for domestic SSDs to replace imported HDDs
The current market will see both SSDs and HDDs developing together, but in the long term, some storage manufacturers hope that SSDs can continue to advance and even replace HDDs.
In 2023, Shawn Rosemarin, the Vice President of Research and Development at Pure Storage, stated that HDDs will cease to be sold within five years. HDDs consume too much electricity, with global data centers using 3% of the world’s electricity, one-third of which comes from storage systems, predominantly mechanical hard drives. The cost difference brought by such large-scale deployment is significant. If storage media are switched to SSDs, power consumption will be reduced by 80% to 90%.
HDD manufacturers have countered this statement. Rainer Kaese, Senior Manager of Business Development for Toshiba’s HDD business, believes that hard drives will continue to exist for a while and will remain cheaper than SSDs in the long run. Data center engineers will develop more efficient hard drives to meet stricter power requirements in the future.
The debate between the two sides also reveals the respective advantages and shortcomings of SSDs and HDDs. As manufacturers continue to enhance performance, reduce costs, and decrease power consumption, the competition between SSDs and HDDs is expected to continue.
For China, as the HDD market is dominated by foreign enterprises, the importance of developing domestic SSDs for the storage market is self-evident. Hence, Academician Ni Guangnan has repeatedly expressed the hope for domestic SSDs to replace imported HDDs.
Ni believes that the proportion of SSDs used in China’s computing centers is relatively low, and the share of flash storage in China’s storage market is still small, with huge potential for future development. As China’s domestic storage system and flash production capabilities gradually improve, the time for SSDs to replace HDDs has arrived.
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