The Three Myths About Hard Disk Drives That Refuse to Die

Storage is challenging, particularly when you’re dealing with complicated systems and old technology that reStorage is challenging, particularly when you’re dealing with complicated systems and old technology that require forklift upgrades. You want to deliver the best for your organization and customers as their trusted advisor, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult with the legacy reality of your current HDD-based system. 

Consider this: Analysts expect exponential data growth over the next 5-10 years, with much of this growth being file and object data. 

In light of this, it’s still hard to fathom that there are people and companies who insist on continuing to use HDD-based systems. 

The disk pundits will claim they can simply expand to support the demands of new data types such as AI/ML, health images, data protection repositories, video, and other file and object workloads, and sure, that’s an option, but let’s analyze the reality of this and look at the three biggest myths that are keeping hard disks alive, barely. 

Myth 1: Disk is less expensive than flash

The tired old excuse is that all-flash is too expensive for data repositories, and the only economical choice is disk. That was true until now. Like many modern solutions in the electronics landscape, the technology becomes affordable as time passes, and all-flash is now the most economical choice for any workload or data. 

Fact: Pure’s all-flash storage lowers operational spend, reduces the need for additional administrative resources, and helps shrink your data center footprint, ultimately resulting in up to 40% lower TCO over six years vs. comparable disk-based systems.

Taking management, power, cooling, and replacement into consideration, the value of disk storage no longer adds up—or rather, it does add up, but only for costs. Switching from disk to all-flash can mean up to 60% lower operational costs over six years. Pure Storage all-flash acquisition costs are now on par with HDD with under $0.20/GB raw and $.016/GiB for Evergreen//One™ storage-as-a-service (STaaS) offerings.

Myth 2: Disk Capacity Scales With Your Data Growth

Data growth and accessibility are a one-two punch. Your teams and customers are creating new data, but aging data is still incredibly valuable and needs to remain accessible for historical business decisions, compliance, and many other reasons. It’s assumed HDD capacity will scale at the same rate as data growth. 

This is not the case. 

Conventional disk drive capacity is growing at a snail’s pace compared to Pure Storage DirectFlash. How can hard disks keep up when they only grow a few TB/year on average? On the other hand, Pure Storage DirectFlash provides seven times the density of HDDs. Tap into the industry’s largest drives now at 75TB, with plans for 300TB by 2026! 

Figure 2: Capacity comparison of Pure Storage DirectFlash Modules to largest nearline HDD. 

Myth 3: Disk Storage is Easy to Manage

Legacy storage providers claim disk storage platforms are easy to manage and provide high uptime. However, failure rates increase as your disk storage platforms age. There’s nothing “easy” about unreliability. 

Pure’s all-flash storage family does what traditional storage systems were

simply not designed to do—ensure critical data is instantly available to your business and eliminate the frustration and expense of unplanned downtime or worse, outright disk failure. 

Pure all-flash guarantees six nines uptime and up to 20 times better reliability than spinning disk, reducing your e-waste by up to 85%. Easily scale to multi-petabyte level with intuitive management and without adding complexity and incremental resources.

The “Elephants in the Room”: Downtime and Sustainability

Now that we’ve broken down the three biggest die-hard myths of HDDs, we’d be remiss not to also mention the two other really big issues with disk: downtime and sustainability. 

Downtime

Traditional hard drive platforms are time-locked, and updates only fix software bugs, seldom adding new value. A full hardware upgrade is the only way to get anything new, which means downtime for your business. 

Pure Storage Evergreen® non-disruptive upgrades let you say goodbye to this business interruption forever. Evergreen takes the forklift out of the equation, giving you an ever-improving, self-updating ecosystem with zero downtime for updates. In fact, over 10,000 FlashArray™ systems five years and older are still in active service today, benefiting from continual updates.

Sustainability

Sustainability considerations and energy use are top concerns for C-level executives and their organizations. Especially now that AI investments are increasing power usage and data storage, there’s incredible scrutiny on reducing existing power needs. 

When it comes to sustainability, traditional disk-based storage solutions result in higher power usage, greater space requirements, and increased energy consumption through cooling. Per a recent report, data centers account for 2% of world energy consumption, and legacy storage such as disk can be up to 30% of the total data center power footprint. 

Pure Storage® DirectFlash® uses up to 85% less power and up to 95% less space. This translates to immediate environmental benefits.

In summary: HDDs are dying out fast. What’s going to replace them? All-flash. 

Learn more about the various advantages of all-flash over HDDs. 

<INSERT IMAGE OF MYTH INFOGRAPHIC AND LINK>

So you’ve convinced me. How do I get started?

Anytime a storage vendor touts something earth-shatteringly new, eventually, it falls to your hands to make it work. But this time, it’s different. You now have an easy button to get you started on day one. With the all-new Pure//E™ Family, you now have a complete set of products that can be instantly deployed to support all your block, file, and object repository data—and replace those old spinning disks. 

Simply choose the capacity you need (starting at 1PB) and tap into the vast data services ecosystem of Pure Storage at the same acquisition cost of disk and a massive 40% reduction in TCO. With a cost under $.20 per GB raw ($.016 per GiB for STaaS), there’s no longer a need to accept second best due to budget limitations.
Get started with Pure//E.