Understanding The Importance of Flash and HDD Storage in a Data Driven World

Imagine all the world’s stored data as an iceberg. Flash storage would be the part we see above the surface - present in everything from our phones to our kitchen gadgets. It enables autonomous vehicles, undersea drones, remote surgery, and many other remarkable applications. But this type of storage doesn’t always operate alone; it has a crucial partner below the surface: hard disk drives (HDDs).

While flash storage often captures the spotlight, HDDs are the unsung heroes, storing massive amounts of data in the cloud. This data comes from industries, connected devices, digital platforms, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLMs), autonomous machines, and more.

Flash Storage: Transforming the Edge On the Surface

It’s perhaps no surprise that flash storage garners so much attention. It’s fast, compact, durable and adaptable to nearly any environment – from outer space to deep underwater.

Advances in NAND flash technology, in particular, are driving storage capacities to impressive levels, empowering personal devices, IoT gadgets, drones and robots to be more powerful than ever while maintaining a compact size. This allows an enormous amount of data to be processed directly at the network’s edge, accelerating autonomous decision making and other automated operations in real time, right where they’re needed.

Simultaneously, high-performance technologies like NVMe™, NVMe-oF™, and UFS are speeding up data transfer between devices and from device and the cloud. This high-speed connectivity enables devices to communicate more seamlessly, share essential information, and execute complex, coordinated operations with greater efficiently. It’s this blend of speed and compact form factor that makes flash storage an ideal choice for these types of edge applications.

Understanding HDDs and their Benefits

Despite the prevalence of flash storage at the edge however, according to IDC, nearly 80% of cloud infrastructure relies on HDDs. These drives are the unsung workhorses of modern storage systems, optimised for high-capacity storage and providing hyperscalers, cloud service providers (CSPs), and enterprises with a scalable, efficient, and cost-effective solution for managing large volumes of data in data center.

Ongoing innovations in HDD technology continues to enhance capacity, power efficiency, and performance. For instance, conventional magnetic recording (CMR) HDDs now offer capacities of up to 26 terabytes (TB), while shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs achieving even greater densities,

reaching up to 32TB. Increased storage density means lower power consumption, reduced cooling requirements, and smaller footprint in data centers, enabling organisations to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and support sustainability and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals.

In essence, higher capacity HDDs allow businesses to store the same amount of data in a smaller space while using less power. Even a 15% or 20% boost in drive capacity is significant, helping cloud providers meet the ever-growing demand for storage.

In the cloud industry, customers generally transition to higher-capacity hard drives as soon as they become available, making efforts by HDD manufacturers to enhance storage density crucial. Why is high-capacity so important to customers? Simply put, larger drives contribute to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage solutions.

Consider a scenario where 144 petabytes (PB) of storage is deployed using 42U rack servers, each with the capacity to hold 100 drives. Using 20TB drives would require 7.2 racks to reach 144 PBs, whereas opting for 26TB drives would reduce the requirement to just 5.5 racks. Even when factoring in the higher cost and improved power efficiency of 26TB drives, the combined capital and operational expenditures (CapEx and OpEx) can lead to a total cost reduction by 10% to 16%.

These advancements reinforce HDDs as the optimal storage solution for data centers and cloud environments that support today’s large scale, innovative applications.

Flash and HDDs Shape the Data Landscape Together

The power of storage to drive new innovations and use cases, such as AI/ML, LLMs and Internet of Things (IoT), comes from the seamless collaboration between flash and HDDs. Simply put, customers can leverage flash to store frequently accessed or performance-critical “hot” data for quick retrieval, while less frequently accessed “warm” or “cold” data can be stored on more cost-efficient HDDs. This tiered strategy maximises both capacity and performance while keeping long term costs in check, making it ideal for today’s cutting-edge applications. While flash storage may steal the spotlight, it’s important to remember that HDDs continue to serve as the robust foundation of the storage ecosystem.