I initially hesitated in posting this for multiple reasons including the authors own uncertainty about some of the assertions and claims made by the company.
OTOH this has already created significant concern among our large business and enterprise customers especially those with significant data centers.
Additionally this runs somewhat counter to the very biggest users of spinning drives such as AWS and Facebook though they “bake in” so to speak a given failure rate as they build out enormous drive arrays.
Additionally this also indirectly bolsters the narrative that SSDs have surpassed spinning drives in overall reliability in the last few years.
It’s mostly due to length of existence and therefore predictability aided additionally by built in fault tolerance.
In other words for instance, something like the drives platter rotating on a spindle has antecedents going back far before the drives themselves, such as for instance wheels on cars.
Yes, but the envelope was/is constantly being pushed — we went from single digits measured in megabytes units which were the size of washing machines to HP, unable to find any hard drive companies willing to make their 1.3" “Kittyhawk” drives turning to the watch manufacturer Citizen in just a couple of decades.
It was/is amazing technology in terms of material science and so forth (at one point in time weren’t they using noble gases to fill them with so as to reduce corrosion, &c.), but I’m not sad that I don’t have to worry about spinning rust, heat buildup, and the attendant failure — it’s a good thing I’m not the only market, 'cause I’d pay just about anything for SSDs, and was constantly surprised that they took so long to become economically viable.
Moreover, I jumped ship early w/ a CF–IDE adapter on my Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 (which I managed to get Windows 2000 on, and convince the Compaq TC 1000 Finepoint digitizer driver to run on) — it was amazing how that transformed the machine from noisy hot box which wasn’t that pleasant to hold to dead silent little workhouse which was a pleasure to carry and use — I even managed to install the encyclopedia Encarta on it for reference when traveling.
OMG - and i thought I was a pioneer when I replaced the 2.5" HDD on my ThinkPad x61s with an SSD (it just slid into a drawer under the keyboard) and cost a FORTUNE for 128gb.