When will SSD drives catch up in storage capacity and price to traditional spinning platters? A SSD consumes very little power so this type of setup will not be as necessary.
Also what about the life cycle of drives that get powered on and off repeatedly? On one hand you have backblaze running consumer off the shelf drives 24/7. On the other you have FB/Google/Amazon powering on and off these drives.
Never. Someone did calculate that if you can get flash that lasts 15 years it would be cheaper than disk, though (because the disk has to be replaced). I can't find the links on those.
Also what about the life cycle of drives that get powered on and off repeatedly?
We wrote a paper on that topic where we treated start-stop cycles as a resource to be rationed with a token bucket filter: http://storage-conference.org/2011/Papers/Research/10.Felter...
Pretty likely. One of the post's authors, Kestutis Patiejunas, was an architect working on Glacier a few years ago. (src: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kestutisp )
The last few years have been weird - hell, ram is literally more expensive, per gigabyte, than it was in 2012. PC software requirements seems to be standing still. A five-year-old PC is still perfectly usable.
This wasn't true at all for most of my life.
I mean, yes, if storage space requirements don't start growing, of course, you are right, because hard drives, while they are big, are slow.
But... hopefully, this is a temporary setback. Someone will figure out how to make use of the surplus transistors in desktop PCs.
I mean, it can't be that hard; from what I saw in the '90s and early aughts, Microsoft seemed to release a new version of word every few years, and it required a new PC, even though I personally couldn't see how it was better.
But... apparently that isn't happening anymore.
My point here is just that if the need for disk space grows as fast as hard drive and ssd size per dollar grow, SSD might never become completely dominant, assuming that hard drives maintain their space per dollar advantage.
Of course, if things keep going where they have been going for the last few years, where system requirements for desktops don't really increase over time, then of course you are right, there would be no reason to have spinning disk.
You can already see this, sort of, in mobile, where storage expectations are dramatically lower, but spinning disk never had a real toehold there. Do you remember those tiny spinning hard drives that were packaged in CF cards? oh man, so cool! and so fragile.
Unless SSD will become better than HDD by all parameters, HDD's are very suitable as part of disk setup for anyone who need more than 200 GB data. And there are millions of people who don't use all that cloud things and prefer to download, store and watch/listen their content locally.
If my home media library gets wiped out by hardware failure, replacing it would be an annoyance but not a disaster. Anything that would be a disaster is covered by at least two cloud services.
I have family members who have had and continue to have user induced data loss due to single copy, but even single copy + cloud because they insist on passwords being b.s. so they don't write them down, don't remember them (due to arcane rules requiring them to pick a password they can't remember without writing down), and then the device has some problem that requires a reset, and then they can't get into their online account because they failed to properly set (and apparently weren't required) the recovery account or phrases.