Talk Like a Duck

Could the SSD revolution already be over? Last week, Western Digital (actually the Hitachi folks they recently bought) announced the imminent release of helium filled hard drives. This story doesn't mention size, price, or availability. The only numbers: rather than five platters, these drives will have seven. That's a 40% increase, and for less power.

Dum da dum dum. Short stroking a hoard of these might be just as cost effective as equivalent SSD. Don't know yet. But could be. Does it matter? In a sense no, in that the point of SSD, so far as I've been concerned, is that SSD was an obvious finger pointing to high normal form databases as the solution to both byte bloat and application performance. For single disk machines, RAID/10 isn't an option, of course, but the point has been database servers, where a RAID set versus SSD is a feasible trade off.