Let’s find out what they will be, according to Toshiba, the five most important trends which will affect the market storage.
Toshiba on the future of storage
Several years ago, some analysts and industry experts predicted that by 2020 the hard drives would be replaced from solid state drives (SSDs). Today it is evident like this did not happen.
Indeed, it must be said that the amount of data generated e archived has grown exponentially, exceeding all expectations. This means that hard drives still play a key role in the storage industry.
According to Toshiba Electronics Europe, in 2022 there will be exactly 5 trends in particular that will affect the market. Let’s find out together.
The first trend concerns the implementation of online storage. Society today depends on an ecosystem based on ever-expanding cloud. This system includes applications, streaming movies / music, e-commerce platforms, social media activities, and more.
All information is therefore stored in huge data centers, which rely on HDD as the primary storage medium.
Often, these HDDs are not managed by hardware controllers, but by a software-defined storage (SDS). For large offline archives, tape storage is still very popular – and significant growth rates are currently being observed.
Over the past two years, vendors have optimized capacity of their own HDD to ensure greater capacity and higher speed. Some HDDs, combined with SSD caching, can provide high performance e higher capacity at the same cost as archiving today.
The second concerns the long life of external USB HDDs. By 2022 the SSDs will replace traditional hard drives in almost all other client applications such as notebooks, all-in-one PCs, compact PCs and game consoles.
For example, if older generations of business computers were usually equipped with 1TB HDDs, today they will install SSD da 500GB, despite the request being between 2 and 4TB. Hence, client devices need increase available storage and external HDDs from 2TB to 4TB are becoming more and more popular.
It then continues towards gaming. In the past, game consoles integrated 1TB HDD. Despite the adoption of SSDs, the capacity has not increased. Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 deliver 1TB (about 825GB) even if the memory requirements of the games are grown enormously.
The most popular video games often take up 50GB or more. To free up disk space on the console, the External HDDs connected via USB are very popular. They offer higher capacity and lower price than external SSDs. HDD manufacturers like Toshiba stand following this trend, expanding the line-up of external HDDs that can be connected via USB with models designed specifically for gaming.
The latest trends according to the brand
Another trend not to be forgotten is that of surveillance. Surveillance systems are no longer used just to monitor homes or business premises. Modern surveillance systems are capable of recover valuable data for more complex tasks.
Evaluating this data can offer traders one mode overview and gods purchasing behavior of its customers. However, the storage solutions that support these systems must guarantee the maximum reliability everytime.
Since this data will come in waves, the systems will have to deal with significant peaks. Vendors such as Toshiba have understood the need for provide tailor-made surveillance solutions e reliable.
Finally, Toshiba talks about the Network Attached Storage. NAS certainly represent an ongoing trend to be taken into consideration. NAS systems are one universal solution and can be used in smart home applications.
However, it is important implement the right configuration. For most home users, 2-bay systems are sufficient, as they can provide several TB of storage space and offer protection in the event of a drive failure.
The user will need to equip most NAS systems with hard drives. In principle, the devices work with almost all SATA drives, but users should select a NAS-optimized solution, such as theN300 on Toshiba.
Le parole di Rainer W. Kaese
Rainer W. Kaese, il Senior Manager Business Development Storage Products, Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH, ha dichiarato:
HDD and SSD will continue to coexist. The growing need for more low-cost online storage capacity can only be addressed by HDDs, so their future is guaranteed for many years to come. In 2020, the entire storage component industry achieved around 1200EB (i.e. 1,200,000TB) and only 200EB was based on SSD technology. This equates to a ratio of 5: 1. Thanks to engineering advances, the cost per capacity associated with SSDs and HDDs continues to drop. The 5: 1 ratio is expected to shrink to around 4: 1 in terms of total capacity split between HDD and SSD, but as the demand for storage continues to grow exponentially, there will be greater demand for both technologies.