September II

Exciting news from the hard-disk vendors this week: it seems that we are about to start the rollout of the 4 TB disk drive options.
The one example on the left originates from Seagate, but Hitachi actually was a day early to announce their first 1 TB platter.

The HDD industry overall did again very well in Q2: Over 167 Mio drives sold in just three months (2Q 2011), so SSD technology does not really seem to have a real impact on the HDD market so far, my impression is that SSDs are mainly used in new market segements today (like the Apple iPad) and most PCs and laptops on the shelves of electronis retailers are obviously still based on HDD storage.

This is even more true for the enterprise storage market, see the Q2 tally from IDC here.
My opinion: as soon as more then 50% of PCs and Laptops sold will be SSD based, we will probably be at a price point where using SSDs in large-scale enterprise storage systems becomes economically feasible.

Eventually -in a couple years- HDDs will be replaced be the "next big thing" in storage anyway, this may be "Racetrack" technology developped by IBM.