Western Digital, a titan in the storage industry long renowned for its hard disk drives and solid-state drives, has officially separated its NAND flash memory business, effectively ending the company’s direct involvement in SSD production and sales. Western Digital’s exit from the market leaves behind a legacy of innovation and quality that has significantly impacted the PC gaming community.
I am surprised they decided to fully exit SSDs. One would think that in the next ~10 years $/TB prices for NAND will reach HDD prices.
In general, there are a lot of drawbacks to HDDs, they are relatively large, you having moving parts and of course sequential/random speed is attrocious even compared to the most bottom of the barrel QLC SSDs.
HDDs are great when you need a ton of cheap storage, but don’t really need it to be super fast. Especially if you use an SSD as a cache. Hdd technology is continuing to advance too, so it might be longer than a decade before prices are comparable.
I have an HDD base NAS for my movie collection, so I recognize that currently HDDs do have a use case. I was thinking more about the future.
Every CCTV system with playback uses HDDs. Can’t use SSDs in that particular usecase because of the constant high volume writes.