For the past 10 years or so, SSDs (Solid State Drives) have been an available alternative to the older HDD (Hard Disk Drive). SSDs offer much faster data reading and writing speeds with typically smaller capacities than HDDs. While SSDs have developed over time though, the costs for these drives have been steadily lowering. With the development of even faster storage devices such as NVMe, SSDs have been slowly moving into a much more standard position in computer hardware, pushing out HDDs almost to the point of obsolescence.
These days, it’s fairly easy to find a 1TB SSD for under $150 and while you can still get a greater storage capacity HDD for the same cost, most computers no longer need more than 1TB of storage due to the increasing availability of cloud data storage. As such, most computers purchased these days will have an option to have an SSD or an NVMe drive and only the budget models will have a HDD.
HDDs are still somewhat commonly used in large disk arrays for data storage in servers. When put in these arrays, it’s possible to achieve enough capacity at a lower cost when using HDDs, but even this is becoming less common. Most newly installed RAID arrays these days are likely to be setup with SSDs instead of HDDs because of the benefits and ever decreasing price difference.
It’s very likely that within the next 3 – 4 years HDDs will become something of a rarity or seen as a negative aspect of a computer or server that should be upgraded.
