2013 will be a hard work year of traditional hard drives, while enterprise market will be one of the main event,traditional hard drive manufacturers watershed also here.

SSD and HDD, born to different.

Solid-state drive (SSD) and traditional hard drive (HDD) are respectively representatives of media and magnetic recording technology products. Due to the principle does not involve mechanical operation, and mainly rely on electronic NAND flash Erase, so the advantages of SSD focused on faster speed, anti-vibration,and relatively simple manufacturing process. Comparatively speaking, HDD manufacturing process is much more complex,and much more slower speed. Moreover, HDD working not only afraid of vibration, also produces its own vibration. Not only harmful, but sinful, which led to multi-block HDD can not follow the usual way to put together with a high-density,or easy to produce resonance, which may cause damage to HDDs.Industry,such as Nexsan,high-density disk array vendors,are using the HDD inserted in positive and negative way, allowed to cancel each other working vibration,so as to put as many as possible HDD into the disk array box,and to improve overall storage capacity. Despite this,enterprise storage Gangsters,like EMC, NetApp,still scoff about this practice, in their view, HDD vibration is flawed, not "cured."

However, HDD now are able to stay alive, it must also have its advantages. First, HDD prices are very cheap. In my experience, the current market units price of SSD that is able to do 4 yuan / GB is considered low, while the price per GB HDD only Threepenny yuan. If we buy 10 000 GB of storage capacity, then, SSD we have to spend 40,000 Yuan, and buy HDD only 3 thousand.

In addition, HDD capacity is also far beyond for SSD. Toshiba has previously released 1.5TB SSD, at present, this is considered the SSD capacity limit. And to note that this is just released, there is no real trend on channel market. In the end of this year, the market can already see a 4TB HDD capacity.

However, it must be noted that the HDD is now used for the basic perpendicular magnetic recording model has reached the disk surface density limit. Data from the hard drive manufacturer, said disk surface density of annual growth has been less than 10%.

Through the above induction, we can clearly see, SSD and the HDD are different. It also determines the two applications. SSD is more suitable for higher speed requirements, the work environment more demanding areas, such as the production system, the military field; while the HDD can be used for general scenes, and the need for data archiving areas, such as regulatory compliance, archives .

Storage Future,see Capacity.

There is a saying called "valor", SSD and the HDD positioning, it shows that only products that conform to the development of the times it will not be eliminated by the times.

Numerous facts have proved that the future will be an era shrouded by the data. From analysis of research firm IDC said that in 2011 the global amount of data generated 1.8ZB (or 1.8 trillion GB), equivalent to every American every minutes to write 3 Twitter messages, wrote a total of 2.6976 million years. And over the next decade, global server for storing data volume will increase tenfold. According to IDC,global amount of data in 2020 will increase by 50 times than that in 2011,Such surveys and forecasting is not sensational, nor is it one-sided testimony, we ourselves can feel such change in total amount of data.

For example, how much data each of us will have daily? Take a picture, write a microblogging,Clockwork SMS, or even go to the hospital for one CT film, these are data that based on information technology as the carrier of IT information data. These data are new generation, and will not replace the old.Imagine, who will delete photoe in the past,after taking new photos?

In human society,all information data that generated by working and living, are stored on the hard drives.Whether these hard drives keeped at the consumer's home, or on the computer room or data center. The amount of data continues to expand, making us an insatiable demand of data storage medium-hard drives.

HDD manufacturers optimistic about the enterprise market

All along, the traditional hard disk manufacturers are more concerned about the consumer market. After all, the consumer market is much larger than shipments professional storage market. However, starting in 2013, the eyes of the traditional hard drive manufacturers will want to change.

On the one hand, since the SSD will be the same as the main battlefield of the consumer market, so HDD manufacturers will inevitably need to face conflict with SSD; on the other hand,despite SSD performance advantages get favor from part of enterprise-level users,but by the rewritable life, cost and other constraints,SSD have not many applications. In other words, the enterprise market is not the main positions for SSD vendors.

Professional / enterprise storage market is expanding. From another research analyst firm Gartner's survey data show that 47% of business users saw data grow as top three IT challenges. Gartner research director April Adams believes that due to various factors, corporate data capacity yearly average growth rate is about 40% to 60%,including large amounts of unstructured data, such as e-mails and files, these data also need to be stored. In addition, subject to legal and regulatory restrictions, operational data and information all need conduct long-term preservation.

2013, the following expertise areas will be a greater demand for enterprise storage:

Video Surveillance

Some time ago,Security Exhibition held in Beijing attracted a large number of attention.It can be predicted that in 2013,video surveillance industry pulled by "Green City" still will be a hot topic. As video surveillance storage requirements on Hard Drive is a bottomless pit,while HD video is also gradually being introduced into the industry, therefore, HDD in this area will reap great benefits.

Internet sites

Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and so these Internet giants are in the focus on building their own large data centers to meet the needs of users. In fact,me,writen this article,and you,saw it,are all these Internet giants' users. So,what will we do by using these giants products?

Video, pictures, music, at least in my experience in the Internet, the content has gone beyond mere words, to become an important part of web browsing. Multimedia Times,social networking Times, mobile Internet Times, these "times" are relying on the more rich media / unstructured information, rather than just simply text.

These unstructured data take much more space than characters, requires a lot of space for storage. This provides HDD unlimited market space.

Today, there are HDD manufacturers have started a whole and new way of customer service to cut into enterprise storage market, in order to get rid of the past simply OEM form for array manufacturers,to earn more profits from the products.

Cloud computing / cloud storage services

Cloud computing is currently in full swing in boosting the development of enterprise storage. The core of cloud computing, is to concentrate Decentralized resources into data center. In the future,computers that we use will composite only by monitor, adapter,mouse and keyboard, all other resources extracted from the data center through the network. Data storage is no exception. As a result, some consumer-grade storage needs will be converted into the enterprise storage market share.

In addition,online cloud storage services similar to Apple's iCloud began to prevail. At least on my side, there are already a lot of people started to use cloud storage services to do data backup. This will be a big market.

These aboved three parts market for HDD vendors is a rare oasis!

2013 will be a year of HDD manufacturers,they force that one hand competition of technology,capacity improvement,but more importantly, they will be on the market model to seek new breakthroughs. This breakthrough is likely to give the SSD vendors a "counterattack."