Wozniak: Solid-State Drives Will Not Replace Hard Disk Drives
Steve Wozniak, the chief scientist of Fusion-io and a co-founder of Apple, said in an interview that although solid-state drives (SSDs) do offer a number of advantages over conventional hard disk drives (HDDs), they would not replace traditional storage based on the spinning media completely. In addition, Mr. Wozniak said that SSDs for PCI Express offered great benefits compared to SATA devices and thus would gain popularity.
“I don't see [SSD] kicking all spinning disks out. In computers we have so many tiers of storage for cost efficiency. Even when you have a hard disk drive it has its own cache built into it. Then we have caching systems in operating systems. Then we have different speeds of memory from your RAM to your L1, L2, L3 caches. […] It cost more money per bit to create NAND flash,”
said Steve Wozniak in an interview with Computerworld.
The low cost-per-gigabyte argument is usually repeated by high-ranking executives of hard drive companies, who naturally recall the main advantage of HDDs over NAND-based storage. However, as the cost of NAND gets lower, whereas the cost of platters and mechanics inside hard drives does not, SSDs and HDDs reach crossover point, where the prices of different types of devices with similar storage capacities become equal. Once the crossover point is reached, SSDs win, claims Mr. Wozniak.
