When will Hard Disk Drives transition completely to Solid State Drives?

I find modern technology very fascinating. I built my custom-made build a few years ago, and my hard drive was a 1TB HDD.
It ran quite loudly with my lack of rubber for the casing, which is beside the point and crosses into a different realm of topic.

Regardless, my HDD performed and it was reasonably fast at the time. I had heard from friends that SSDs were the way to go, and of course being the cheap-skate that I am, I went for a cheap Kingston thinking it would be terrible. Well, I was wrong. I will never go back to HDDs as a primary drive - they're so incredibly slow compared to an SSD. The startup time is so much better, and you can get straight to work after you login and start applications, while on HDDs, you had to wait for a good 30 seconds or more to get the computer up to speed. That being said, my old primary drive, the HDD, is now a storage drive with a capacity of 1TB which was a lot cheaper to buy than the 225GB SSD I have.

The question is this: When do you think HDDs will move completely out of desktop towers, be cleared off the shelves like floppy disks, and be written in history

Not any time soon as the price point is still far off, especially when it comes to enterprise drives.

Also capacity still has a bit to go

Short answer: when it's financially prudent for everyone :P

Although the prices have come down a lot they're still much more than HDDs, which are still perfectly functional in most cases. Gonna be a little while before HDD becomes totally defunct

Not anytime soon I'd imagine. Plus the option of having both SSD and HDD is a plus imo

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Originally Posted by Catchy

Not anytime soon I'd imagine. Plus the option of having both SSD and HDD is a plus imo

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Perhaps another factor would be to produce the SSDs in a much more reliable manner and ensure that they won't fail before be become dependent on them.
Not that they aren't reliable already - they just have a bit of a reputation for failure.

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Originally Posted by !Landon

Perhaps another factor would be to produce the SSDs in a much more reliable manner and ensure that they won't fail before be become dependent on them.
Not that they aren't reliable already - they just have a bit of a reputation for failure.

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It's generally accepted SSDs are more reliable than HDDs....

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Originally Posted by AgnesIO

It's generally accepted SSDs are more reliable than HDDs....

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Under what studies and conclusion?
SSDs are a lot more likely to loose data than HDDs.

I'd still rather have a 2tb hard drive that does 100 read and write. Me as a performance type of guy, yes I can see where your coming from, but not all people need this. Unless they are a Hard Core Sweaty Gamer :D

I've slowly been transitioning out of HDD (except for my external drives) but I still think they'll have a purpose for time to come.

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Originally Posted by RelliexHD

I'd still rather have a 2tb hard drive that does 100 read and write. Me as a performance type of guy, yes I can see where your coming from, but not all people need this. Unless they are a Hard Core Sweaty Gamer :D

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Nah, I definitely wouldn't want to solely use my SSD. I have my HDD as a storage drive and also a backup area in case anything goes south with the SSD. :)

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Originally Posted by !Landon

Under what studies and conclusion?
SSDs are a lot more likely to loose data than HDDs.

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Incredibly hard to judge, as manufacturers are very quiet about this. However, return rates are (at least used to be) higher for HDDs, but that could be for a number of reasons.

SSDs are also better in portable devices due to the lack of moving parts to break every time you go over a bump.

The issue is highly contentious, but either way, HDDs definitely aren't a lot less likely to lose data than SSDs...

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Originally Posted by AgnesIO

The issue is highly contentious, but either way, HDDs definitely aren't a lot less likely to lose data than SSDs...

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Agreed with this - It's very minuscule and unlikely. It just makes me curious in terms of those small levels which one actually performs better with data retention.

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Originally Posted by !Landon

Agreed with this - It's very minuscule and unlikely. It just makes me curious in terms of those small levels which one actually performs better with data retention.

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Yup, I think the truth is that neither is exactly optimal (hello cloud!), which would explain why even after a good few years, there still isn't a clear answer.

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Originally Posted by AgnesIO

Yup, I think the truth is that neither is exactly optimal (hello cloud!), which would explain why even after a good few years, there still isn't a clear answer.

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Correct me if I'm wrong - Aren't most of the large cloud data servers, take for instance Google datacenters, running on HDDs?

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Originally Posted by !Landon

Correct me if I'm wrong - Aren't most of the large cloud data servers, take for instance Google datacenters, running on HDDs?

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Oh I'm not debating that - but whatever they use, every is backed up on multiple storage devices. That's the difference there!

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Originally Posted by !Landon

Correct me if I'm wrong - Aren't most of the large cloud data servers, take for instance Google datacenters, running on HDDs?

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It depends on the purpose mostly, at an enterprise level disk failure is fairly meaningless, but I've seen a hell of a lot more HDDs fail than SSDs.

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Originally Posted by scottish

It depends on the purpose mostly, at an enterprise level disk failure is fairly meaningless, but I've seen a hell of a lot more HDDs fail than SSDs.

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True, I think in this case though we are debating as if it were in good conditions and stable.

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Originally Posted by !Landon

True, I think in this case though we are debating as if it were in good conditions and stable.

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Stable devices in good condition don't just 'lose' data, though?

I finally made the move this week, got rid of my 10 year old 500GB HDD for a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB.
Now I've got my OS on my 500GB SSD and my 120GB SSD (which was my OS setup) is now my spare space/backup drive and binned my HDD.

The answer to your OP is when SSD's become cheaper than a HDD, which in some cases it already is, but for more capacity it's still more expensive. Newer SSD's are a lot more stable than the ones a few years ago, so it's one less thing to worry about.