Spinning Rust [Still] Ain’t Dead Yet (Redux) | Chaos Lever

Chaos Lever Podcast

Spinning rust is still not dead. Despite what some all-flash evangelists want you to believe, hard drives have a lot of life left—and yes, we’re still talking about tape too. While Chris and I enjoy a week off, we’re revisiting one of our favorite topics: storage tech and the slow demise that never quite comes. Spoiler: if you thought 2028 would be the funeral for HDDs, you may want to reschedule.

In this trip down the byte-laden lane, we dig into Samsung’s monster 256TB SSD, the physics-defying logic of QLC vs. SLC flash, and why PureStorage is ready to bury HDDs... despite being wildly optimistic. And yes, there’s tape—because nothing dies on the internet or in data centers. Ever.

Grab a Slurpee, sit back, and marvel at the storage wars that never end. Because if there’s one thing you can count on in tech, it’s that someone is always wrong—especially when they say “never.”

📌 LINKS:

• The Spinning Disk Hard Drive Is Dead
• Long Live The Spinning Disk Hard Drive
• This month saw Samsung announcing some frankly absurd upcoming SSD products
• IBM announced a TS1170 tape that handles 50TB native at an IO rate of 400mb/s
• The LTO Ultrium Roadmap has a 576TB native tape listed in just 5 more generations

• (00:00) - Cold open and the horrors of CatDog
• (03:50) - Samsung’s absurd SSDs
• (07:00) - The death of hard drives (allegedly)
• (10:30) - Disaggregated storage and PB-SSDs
• (13:45) - SSD architecture: SLC to QLC
• (22:00) - Tradeoffs in flash types and reliability
• (27:30) - Hybrid SSDs and caches
• (29:00) - Why HDDs still matter
• (32:40) - Long live magnetic tape
• (35:50) - The case for tape in the cloud
• (38:00) - Future storage: DNA, 5D crystals, and other sci-fi

Click here to view the episode transcript.