Why Hard Drives Remain Essential for AI Data Centers Despite the Rise of SSDs

Seagate’s Take on SSDs vs. Hard Drives in AI Development

The belief that SSDs can boost computing acceleration and improve AI efficiency is widespread. However, Seagate points out that hard drives still hold key advantages in price, supply, and workload management. As a result, they will continue to be essential in AI technology development.

Seagate Taiwan General Manager Huang Youqing explains that while SSDs have clear benefits in devices like laptops, the same doesn’t automatically apply to data center architectures. Data centers demand massive data storage, and AI training depends heavily on huge datasets. This makes balancing cost of ownership, reliability, and performance critical for storage solutions.

Why Hard Drives Remain Crucial

Hard drives will remain vital in AI development, especially before 2027. Enterprise-level SSDs are expected to cost at least six times more than enterprise-level hard drives during this period. For many data centers and enterprises, hard drives will be the primary choice for large-scale data storage.

Currently, AI-generated data accounts for less than 1% of all data, but this figure is expected to rise to 10% by 2025. With more data created through AI, storage demands will grow substantially. This growth makes it challenging to rely solely on SSDs, as hard drives offer a more feasible solution for storing vast amounts of information.

Cost Efficiency and Storage Capacity

From a cost perspective, data from Yole Intelligence shows the production cost per zettabyte of NAND flash memory was about US$670 billion between 2015 and 2023. In contrast, hard drive production costs per zettabyte were roughly US$10 billion. This massive difference means hard drives economically cover nearly 90% of data center storage needs.

Seagate predicts that by 2024, the output of hard drive exabyte-level storage capacity will be nearly three times that of SSDs. This indicates a clear market trend where hard drives and SSDs coexist rather than replace one another.

As hard drive storage density continues to improve, they will maintain their role as the main medium for storing extensive data volumes in data centers.

Conclusion

For IT professionals managing AI infrastructure, understanding the balance between SSDs and hard drives is crucial. SSDs excel in speed and performance for certain applications, but hard drives offer unmatched cost efficiency and capacity for large-scale storage demands.

Both storage types will continue to coexist, each serving distinct purposes in AI development and data center operations.

For more insights on AI development and data management, explore Complete AI Training.