[Darth Reardon]

At what point will the hard drive finally succumb to the SSD? Hard to measure. For now, I like he hard drive, despite a measly 320 gig I have now. Solid state will eventually rule, but when?

I don't believe SSD is ever going to kill HDD, but there are scenarios today where it is more cost effective to use SSD.

Not matter how big you make that SATA HDD, it's only going to be able to do about 150 reads/writes per second. Ever. We're topped out. So if you need 150,000 read/writes per second, you need 1,000 of those drives, regardless of how much actual data you have to store. Factor in the cost of all those drives, the power and cooling to maintain them, and SSD is probably MUCH cheaper because you don't need to buy anywhere near 8,000 TB of them. [Yes, I know, you wouldn't use SATA here, but the concept is the same].

Also, the inherent latency in HDD gives an SSD based system time to do dedupe/compression. If SSD costs 8x HDD, but an application like VDI can dedupe at 10x, it's actually cheaper per GB to go with SSD.

[Dr. Sivana]

SSD based system time to do dedupe/compression.

An SSD constantly doing dedupe/compression will degrade and fail more quickly due to the constant writes.