Samsung: SSDs will overtake HDDs in 2017

The dominance of hard disk drives may soon be over, according to Samsung. The company outlined recently how it sees solid state drives impacting the market over the next couple years. Samsung is not a disinterested party, of course. The company is invested heavily in flash memory products and makes some of the best-performing ones on the market. However, the numbers seem to support Samsung's conclusion in most areas, the exception being large data storage, a segment in which HDDs continue to have a price advantage. When it comes to performance, however, HDDs cannot keep up with SSDs.

A combination of better performance and price declines for SSDs is leading many manufacturers and consumers to make the switch. TLC NAND is helping bring SSD prices down and NVMe connectors are offering faster performance. Samsung forecasts shipments of 64 million NVMe SSDs in 2017, 12 million more units than the company expects for SATA SSDs. SATA currently has no plans for a faster revision of its technology.

The price declines for SSDs per gigabyte are also important even though it does not bring the drives close to the price of HDDs. For many consumer devices, however, that does not matter. Many people are happy to use a 256GB SSD with all its performance improvements over a 1TB HDD, which is comparable in price. Samsung expects 256GB SSDs to fall below the cost of 1TB HDDs in 2017 and 512GB SSDs could do the same in 2020.

HDDs may still play an important role in data archiving. While SSDs are now critical parts of server farms because of their superior performance, HDDs remain much cheaper per gigabyte. This makes them ideal for long-term storage when data does not have to be accessed frequently. Researchers are looking for better forms of long-term data storage that does not degrade as quickly as HDDs, but until that happens, disk drives remain the best option.