Toshiba identifies five environments where hard drives are indispensable

Hard disk storage remains the standard in many application areas that, How to analyze Toshiba Electronics Europe, will continue in the future, as in the video surveillance market.

Since the introduction of flash memory, The end of hard drives (HDD) It has been predicted again and again, But this classic storage device persists and remains the standard in many application areas..

According to the market analyst Trendfocus, In 2021 were sent 259 million HDDs, and its total capacity reached 1.338 Zetabytes, which represents an increase of almost a third compared to the previous year. Taking into account this positive development, Toshiba Electronics Europe describes the five environments in which hard drives are and will continue to be indispensable for years to come.

Online storage in data centers and in the cloud: Digital services have reached the vast majority of businesses and a large part of society. In environments, such as industry 4.0, Connected Vehicles, Platforms streaming o Social media, Huge and growing volumes of data are stored on hard drives in data centers.

This is because hard drives are the most economical medium for large online storage facilities. In addition, the capacity of HDDs is constantly increasing thanks to technological advancements, while decreasing the cost per terabyte.

Flash memory is much more expensive and cannot be produced in sufficient quantities, so it's mainly used as a cache when the performance of the Arrays of hard drives is insufficient.

Video surveillance: A booming market due to the need for safety of people and facilities, which has also resulted in video surveillance systems being more affordable.

Video Surveillance Cameras, Mostly high-resolution, They offer a video stream that hard drives can store perfectly. In fact, High-speed data writing is one of its strengths and even parallel recording of multiple high-definition video streams (Hd) It doesn't pose any problems.

Hard drives for the video surveillance market also offer a lot of storage space at a low cost, making them ideal for the large amounts of data generated by 4K and 8K cameras (More details on its advantages at Digital Security).

Network storage in businesses and homes: Grid-attached storage systems (Nas) They serve as a central data repository and backup in many small and medium-sized businesses, but also increasingly in the residential and smart home environment due to its versatility.

NAS hard drives are ready to meet the transfer speed requirements of most businesses and home networks, where the high performance of flash memory would only be noticeable in the transfer of many small files. In this case, a cached SSD is enough, for which some NAS systems have a separate slot.

External storage for computer users and gamers: Flash memory has displaced the hard disk of almost all client systems, but precisely because PC manufacturers, laptops and consoles often install fairly small SSD storage for cost reasons, Users now have less storage capacity than when these devices had a hard drive.

At the same time, User storage needs increase as a result, For example, of the growth of more sophisticated private collections of photos or games that can take up several dozen gigabytes of storage space.

Although, usually, Data is stored externally in the cloud, Many users also prefer to have local access for cost and security reasons. That's why, External hard drives with 2 Or 4 TB are extremely popular, as they offer a simple and inexpensive way to expand your storage.

File: when it comes to long-term data storage, Hard drives are the medium of choice, along with magnetic tapes, that despite being more expensive for the same capacity, offer shorter access times when documents or other types of files need to be retrieved for, For example, An audit.

In addition, HDDs can use mechanisms to reduce the amount of data to be archived, That which, depending on the type of data, It also reduces costs significantly.

As you point out Rainer W. Kaese, Senior Director of Business Development, Storage Products Division, Toshiba Electronics Europe, "SSDs are not expected to completely replace hard drives at any point. Since the need for storage space is growing and only hard drives can offer high storage capacity at the low cost demanded by data centers, Cloud and other application environments, Both media will continue to coexist in the future.".

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