Spinning Disks and Their Cloudy Future

Modern hard disks are a miracle of engineering, worthy of celebration. However, solid-state disks already own mobile and performance use cases and will leave spinning disks only the role of storing large amounts of mostly cold data. Fortunately for disk vendors, this is an area with tremendous growth, primarily due to video. Such use implies multiple copies in different locations and professional maintenance, and thus drives those bytes to the Cloud. Yet, current disks were designed for enterprise servers, not for their coming dominant use as Cloud-based storage. This talk reviews this shift and provides a wish list for "Cloud disks"—the next, largest, and perhaps final market for spinning drives.