On December 6, the Chinese Institute of Metrology officially released the "Technical Specifications for Storage Capacity and Performance Certification", which means that the upgrading of China's data storage industry is entering an accelerated period.
In 2020, data was written into the first document as a new factor of production for the first time, and then a series of development plans and policy measures were successively introduced to promote the construction of data elements and data element markets, and then to the establishment of the National Data Bureau, data elementalization and data security have become the internal engine of the construction of digital China.
Digital transformation is accelerating, and at the bottom of digitalization is a huge amount of data that is constantly generated, collected, and calculated, and future business innovation will be driven by data, and the value mining of these data must rely on advanced storage power. From the perspective of national policies, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Cyberspace Administration of China and other six departments jointly issued the "Action Plan for the High-quality Development of Computing Infrastructure", and formulated the main development goals by 2025, which focuses on encouraging the deployment and application of advanced storage technologies and realizing the upgrading of storage flash.
The Technical Specifications for Storage Capacity and Performance Certification issued by the National Institute of Metrology (CAIM) standardize a series of technical requirements and test methods for storage capacity and performance certification, and solve the problem that the measurement of raw capacity (physical capacity) is complex and cannot be seen is WYSIWYG. The new specification defines effective capacity, which is the amount of storage capacity that a storage device can actually hold user data. It is clarified that the available capacity can be reduced through a series of data reduction methods to improve the ability to store data and reduce the TCO of users. At the same time, the measurement method hides all kinds of technical details to facilitate capacity measurement. This new set of technical specifications will help professional storage manufacturers further accelerate the development of the SSD industry based on the advantages of available capacity technology, and promote the entire storage industry to a new starting point for high-quality development.
The HDD market is "cold".
In A Theory of Evolution, Charles Darwin wrote, "Natural selection is the driving force of evolution. "For data storage, the continuous evolution of storage media is essentially a natural choice for market development.
It is undeniable that HDD (mechanical hard disk) has played an indelible role in the development of the computer industry.
In 1956, IBM built the world's first HDD, the size of two refrigerators, consisting of 50 disk stacks with a total capacity of only 375MB. In the long history since then, the storage innovation represented by HDD has been continuously reducing the volume and increasing the capacity.
IDC predicts that nearly 90% of the world's data will be generated within a few years, and the global data volume in 2025 will be 161ZB is increased tenfold. At the same time, the popularity of AI large models has generated a larger amount of data, which poses more challenges to the storage and processing of data.
For example, efficient data processing requires faster data reads and writesThe mainstreaming of mobile devices also requires higher stability and durability of storage. From a technical point of view, HDD has an obvious upper limit, which is difficult to meet the needs of data storage in the new data era.
As a result, there has long been a "SDD (flash drive) replacing HDD" argument in the industry, because SSDs have much higher read and write speeds than HDDs, which allows systems and applications using SSDs to load and run faster. This is an important advantage for users who need to process large amounts of data or run high-load applications. At the same time, SSDs have no mechanically moving parts, so they are more durable than HDDs and less susceptible to shock or physical damage. This makes SSDs more suitable for certain environments, such as mobile devices or industrial applications.
Market data also seems to support this trend: according to Gartner, global SSD shipments have surpassed HDDs since 2022As the stock of hard drives continues to be out of warranty, it is expected that the proportion of SSDs in the global stock of hard disks will reach 32% in 2026. HDDs are rarely seen in the notebook market these daysIn the desktop and enterprise markets, HDDs have also lost almost all of their hot data storage patterns and have had to shift to the warm and cold data storage market.
SSDs say no to "progressive" innovation in storage
All the innovations that change the process of scientific and technological civilization are subversive, but unfortunately after 70 years of evolution, HDD innovation has entered a "gradual" innovation rhythm, from 2015 onwards, it will take almost an average of 9-10 years HDD to have a breakthrough technology generation, which obviously does not match the digital process of geometric speed iteration.
Because the core technology of HDD can only make a fuss on a small "disk", writing excessively dense data on a limited physical space has affected the reliability of the hard disk. You must know that when a data center that carries a critical business, if a hard disk fails, the loss can be huge.
Of course, the core technology of HDD is only in the hands of a few companies, and the relatively closed innovation environment is not conducive to rapid iteration of technology in an open atmosphere.
Compared with the innovation space of HDDs, which are getting closer to the limit, SSDs still have a very wide space for technological innovation, such as increasing the number of stacked layers and increasing the density of particle patches, etc., to continuously improve their performance and capacity. At the same time, in terms of technology ecology, the SSD industry has more players and a more open technology ecosystem, which is more conducive to rapid iteration and innovation.
The new specifications released by the National Institute of Metrology mention some advanced storage technologies, which provide a direction for SSD acceleration to replace HDD:
1) Based on SSD, leading storage manufacturers have conducted in-depth research on system-level data reduction technologies, such as encoding and decoding, similar deduplication, and compression, and can also do 12 or even 15x data reduction capability.
2) Abandon the outdated replica technology and apply system-level large-scale EC algorithms to ensure reliability and bring more storage space.
3) Second, manufacturers use the complete technology stack of controllers, disks, frames, and disks to achieve accurate management of IO, reduce data write amplification, greatly reduce storage fragmentation, and improve storage capacity.
It can be seen that there is huge room for storage manufacturers to improve the utilization of storage resources based on SSD, and the technical trend of replacing HDD with SSD is accelerating.
In fact, as long as users have higher requirements for performance, stability, and responsiveness when faced with the challenge of data explosion, the rapid rise of SSDs is an irreversible reality. Back when the first commercial SSDs hit the market, they were welcomed by the market, even though they were the most expensive compared to HDDs, proving that the balance of competition is naturally tilted in favor of the side that can drive the technology.
China's SSD industry is maturing
Due to the lack of HDD core technology, it means that there is also a risk of "supply interruption" in HDD products, and it is easy to pose a certain degree of threat to national data security.
In recent years, the policy has given strong support to the development of domestic SSD. In 2022, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the "Made in China 2025", which clearly proposes to strengthen the R&D and industrialization of key technologies such as new memories. In addition, the Ministry of Science and Technology has also issued a series of policies to support the development of domestic SSD.
According to IDC data, four of the top five manufacturers in China's SSD market share in 2023 are domestic companies, and the domestic SSD market share has exceeded 60% and is still expanding.
Domestic SSD technology continues to innovate Domestic SSD has also made breakthroughs in technology. For example, in 2023, YMTC launched its self-developed third-generation XTACKING technology, which has greatly improved the storage density and performance of SSDs. In addition, domestic SSD manufacturers are constantly strengthening their self-developed controller chips to improve the performance and reliability of SSDs.
At the same time, from the perspective of market demand, with the rapid development of technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence, the demand for storage equipment in data centers is also growing. Due to the advantages of SSDs in terms of speed, durability and energy efficiency, it has become an inevitable choice to switch from HDDs to SSDs.
If we compare the development history of automobiles, SSD is like an "electric car", with ultra-high efficiency and more than ten times the leading performance, and HDD is like a fuel vehicle that uses mechanical drive, with low efficiency and poor performance. No matter how superb the industrial design foundation of fuel vehicles is, this replacement is essentially a dimensionality reduction blow, so the advanced productivity represented by electronic technology such as SSD will inevitably replace the backward mechanical transmission, which is also a natural selection like "species evolution".