Analysis - Western Digital says the smart money is still on hard drives

[Saracen]

....

Maybe SSD's will finally replace the spinning-plates-of-rust when someone can sell us on the idea of not keep so much rubbish on our PC drives ... (he says, ducking and running quickly off stage)

To a point, that is oh so true.

The point it's true until is that modern high-capacity disks do of course enable some things that weren't practical without them, like large collections of high-res photos, let alone digital video, or keeping your entire CD collection on a media PC. But conversely, the bigger the drive the more crap it will hold, and the more crap it holds, the more daunting the task of getting stuck in and sorting it out. It's easier to just buy a bigger drive.

[badass]

I think SSD's will take off price wise once they stop having to emulate HDD's and deal with translation, wear levelling, reducing write amplification etc. I believe that an OS will do a better job of this. That will make the cost of SSD's pretty much the cost of the flash plus the cost of some other non volatile memory that can take far more write cycles to store what is neccesary to find the data on the SSD. This will also hugely positively effect access times although they aren't currently much of a problem.
However I think even at 10x the price per GB or 1/10th the capacity of HDD's, they represent excellent value for money. £40+VAT for a 100GB SSD anyone? That's £40 to transform the responsiveness of your computer.

[usxhe190]

At this stage, yes HDD still rule. But the fact that people are going hybrid already shows the potential for SSD more than HDD to be honest.

I still think HDD will lose in the long run (i.e. in the future, consumer computers won't have HDD).

They are quicker, more robust, more power efficient and more efficient in data organisation.