Hm, disk drive maker, what's that smell lingering around you?

In the fantasy relm of Corporate __________

This Article make sense, but One would think that the like of Seagate, HGST & WD would be making their Bread & Butter in the White-Box OEM / OTC Market to Retail. So in the real World a what are we up to know? 960Gib? SSD would set ya back by about the same amount as Two, Four Terabyte HDDs?

Long term storage may not be everyone's Tea here, and sure SDDs can have their place too, but Prices need to come down to their HDD equivalents. OR LOWER! before (the like above), would begin to take further notice in this Tech. But then perhaps I just have different storage needs then those of who'd likely down vote this.

I find it hard to believe that SAS drive makers have not done two things, the first is make more affordable SSD drives and 2 they haven't made 15K drives larger than 600GB still. Bulk SATA storage is all very well and good until your in the performances vs capacity hole of being an SME we have at the moment

Spinning rust will die

One of the biggest challenges facing spinning rust is actually the transfer rates. The enormous and ever increasing amounts of data stored is outpacing the ability to get the data off the drives. This is due to the physical limitations of the rotation rate. 10K+ RPM disks are not particularly great due to heat and energy considerations and are likely to face a decline to be superseded by SSD's. Consider the amount of time it takes to backup/restore/resync a multi-TB drive. While people forecasted the death of tape, transfer rates and capacities have kept pace and I suspect they will continue to. The other factor that will have an impact is actually communications speeds. Cloud services not only allow global access to data, they also provide the ability to deduplicate data, while user end SSD's will effectively function as a layer of caching. The backend storage will need to perform better than what traditional rotating disks can provide, hence SSD.

immature tech

it's taken flash quite a long while to mature. I'm not surprised Seagate and others haven't jumped in - they haven't needed to. Most of the flash guys pitching raw hardware are not rolling in cash, and the rest of the flash folks make all their money off of software.

Enterprise storage arrays also could not properly leverage flash (I'd argue that most of them still can't even now) the controllers are not powerful enough to push the millions of IOPS that flash is capable of doing.

There also seems to be a lacking of flash standards and more importantly performance metrics. You can take a 15K RPM disk from vendor A and compare it to vendor Y it will be similar. Flash there seems to be a thousand different configurations and everyone is making grand claims and nobody is backing them up.

Cost has been high as well, the only cheap flash is shit flash. Well there is some middle ground but again really needs software layers above to smooth it out - something the HD vendors have never really done, and I wouldn't expect them to get into that business because they'd be competing with their customers. El Reg had a good article about Xiotech's technology a few years back and how many big OEMs threatened Seagate they would stop buying disks if Seagate went to market with it directly.

Sounds like this Sun guy more than anything is tired of waiting around for dirt cheap high reliability flash and was hoping the big guys would jump in and scale things out to lower the cost.

Not surprising

The book "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen, which describes how incumbents get disrupted even though they know it's coming, was based on case studies from the hard drive industry.