When developing large-scale data infrastructure, it is essential to recognize that not all storage media offer the same advantages. For applications requiring continuous data writing and processing—such as AI pipelines, video surveillance archives, or cloud-scale backups—hard drives provide superior efficiency in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO), power consumption, and durability.

Hyperscale data centers operate a wide range of data management workloads, and it is clear that no single storage medium meets all key criteria. An optimal architecture utilizes a combination of hard drives and SSDs to achieve the best results. Consider a workload simulation at the 100+PB scale: hard drives like Seagate’s Exos 32TB clearly outperform SSDs in both cost-effectiveness and energy efficiency for write-intensive tasks delivering the same performance and throughput. 


SSDs excel when it comes to read-heavy, smaller deployments, but in write-focused scenarios, their costs and power consumption soar. This happens because SSDs require extensive over-provisioning to address endurance limitations throughout their lifecycle. When factoring in the additional provisioning needed to meet drive write endurance specifications, the benefits may become even clearer: for high-volume, write-intensive environments, hard drives scale effectively, offering an economical and sustainable solution. While a storage cluster exceeding 100PB would primarily use hard drives, a proportion of SSDs (generally 5–10%) is included to support optimal system performance.