Analysis: 1TB for $200 is great, but SSD is still the future

The Server Room, Ars Technica's new community for IT professionals, is sponsored by Dell's Future of Storage. This article on magnetic storage is part of our ongoing series of topics and discussions related to IT and storage technology.

My first computer was a 1990 i386 with 2MB of memory and an 80MB hard drive, scrounged from the offices of a local shipping company. Complete with serial mouse, IBM Model M keyboard, and 15" color VGA monitor, it was my parents' hope for making me into a competent writer, but it better succeeded in making me a PC gamer. This ancient machine, 17 years old, is incredibly outdated in the physical basis of every technological detail, except one: its hard disk.

What's wrong (and right) with the hard disk
The hard disk is still fundamentally the same device: magnetic reader heads fly over rotating platters. The disadvantages of this system, with its moving parts and associated rotational latency, are making themselves felt, and a number of considerations make it likely that solid state disks (SSDs) will rise to increasing prominence in the enterprise storage market as well as the laptop market. Some of those trends are explored below.

Samsung's recent announcement of a 1TB disk at the $200 price point provides a dramatic illustration of just how rapidly the cost per unit of storage continues to fall. When 1TB hard disks were first introduced, in April of 2007, they launched at a cost of $400 at retail, and have fallen steadily in price since then, reaching $200 this month, halving in price in only a year to $.20 per gigabyte. This rapid decrease in price is part of a trend which spans the whole of the technology's history; the price of disks has fallen by a factor of 35,000 in the last 17 years.
At the launch of the 1TB hard disk, and through the tier's life so far, other disks have been available with lower costs per gigabyte and per transfer speed. In April 2007, 500GB disks had just hit $100, the $.20 per gigabyte level 1TB drives are just now reaching, and now 750GB drives can be had for $.16 per gigabyte. However, the cost of additional drives, in controller channels, server space, and electrical power, makes the highest-capacity hard disks optimal in all but extreme cases, and their price the relevant metric.
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