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Hard Drives Have A Future: Page 2 of 2

Of course, hard disks have their own technology hurdles but developing technology like bit pattern media and heat assisted magnetic recording should get us through this decade and well into the next so we'll see 60-80TB drives around 2020.

The future's not so bright for performance-oriented drives.  I've already reached the stage where I don't understand why anyone buys 10K drives. 15K drives are the same price and  SSDs are already much cheaper than fast disks on a $/IOP basis.

It appears to me that the future is flash, or some exotic non-volatile memory technology using electron spin or glass phase changes, and trash (capacity oriented drives).  We just have to continue developing automated tiering, huge cache and other technologies to use solid state memory for cheap IOPS and spinning disks for sequential use patterns and capacity.