High-Density HDDs Vs. QLC SSDs: Demystifying Power Efficiency Debate
StorageNewsletter.com, Thursday, August 17,2023
In the first of our posts comparing high-density HDDs and QLC flash SSDs for petabyte-scale unstructured data, we looked at the dimensions of performance and cost. In this blog, I'll dive in deeper to compare high-density power consumption.
TLDR: Today, power consumption is not a main criterion on which to base an SSD vs. HDD decision. Read on to learn why.
Reminder: Scality products work with both SSD and HDD, so we don't have a horse in this race. Ultimately, in all comparisons, the data and access patterns of the user/customer's application workload will determine the best storage platform and media.
As a hardware-agnostic storage software provider, Scality leverages both types of disk drives - HDDs for a range of customer use cases for unstructured data and high-density flash SSDs (and specifically QLC flash) for read-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads. The use of SSDs can be warranted for these workloads, despite current significant cost disadvantages of high-density QLC flash SSDs vs. (LFF) HDDs. And the cost differential can be minimized if the workload is amenable to data reduction through compression and/or de-dupe methods.