It’s almost de rigueur these days to declare the spinning disk dead. In an age of plentiful cheap flash, the performance limitations and mechanical complexity of a traditional hard drive can make it seemingly hard to justify. But as Enrico Signoretti points out, it’s not that the disk will die. Rather after seeing Western Digital lay out their roadmap at Storage Field Day, the disk will increasingly not be for small enterprises anymore. Instead, much like what happened with tape, disk will serve a valuable need in storing the ever increasing amounts of data for hyperscalers. As a random access medium, dense disk storage is ideal for cold, but not frozen, data, where things like retrieval time still matter. Because of this, far from the death of the disk ,Enrico sees a long life ahead.
