CW+ Premium Content/Computer Weekly

At the Pure Storage Accelerate event in Las Vegas this week, a couple of ideas got piled up higher than a heap of end-of-lifed hard disk drives (HDDs) in a junk yard. One of them was the company’s contention that the days of spinning disk are limited. In fact, the company proposes it will be dead as a storage medium by 2028, with no new HDDs sold after that. Another is that Pure Storage will be the agent of this change by means of its ability to market very high-capacity flash drives that bring down the price per gigabyte (GB) to a level that will make HDDs uneconomic. Here, we flesh out what Pure argues and look at the potentially seismic effects should some of the claims it makes come to pass. Pure can make very big flash drives So, what will all this spinning disk storage be replaced by? Well, as it happens, by hugely capacious solid-state drives (SSDs), namely those made by Pure Storage, which puts together flash modules, cache-like capacity and drive controller software in the DirectFlash Modules (DFM) that populate its ...