Despite what some voices in technology media say, if you’re waiting for parity in the SSD vs HDD price war, it could be quite a while—even though we have watched SSD pricing decline steadily for the past year. Currently, the most inexpensive SSDs hover around $0.30 per GB—a pretty good deal, but when HDD prices are something like $0.04 per GB and also on the decline, waiting for price parity does a disservice to both technologies.
This is because the technology behind SSDs and HDDs make them suited for different tasks. Measuring both types of disks using the price per GB metric is essentially a useless way to compare them.
Hard drives spin magnetized disks and they can be noisy, slow, and hot. But they also offer vast amounts of storage capacity. If you need to store a massive amount of data, you could use several large SSDs or one HDD. For instance, Seagate offers a non-enterprise 6 TB 3.5-inch hard drive (STBD6000100) for desktop systems. As for datacenters, they still largely rely on hard drives with a few exceptions, most notably Facebook, which has had reliability issues with all-flash arrays...Read more