In the long run that may be true, but the same things they talk about (minus the mechanical head changes) will still hold in SSDs. The background activity is ev

In the long run that may be true, but the same things they talk about (minus the mechanical head changes) will still hold in SSDs. The background activity is even worse for SSDs and the tail latency still very much exists. Essentially the problem is that the HDDs and SSDs are built as black boxes and are not vertically integrated with a data center storage scheme. The major win will be when the HDDs and SSDs are slightly less self-sufficient and let the higher components in the stack manage them more in depth. Being able to tell the disk "do not bother with ecc for now" and try to get the data from your RAID and if that doesnt work come back to the disk and tell it "we really really want the data, spend as much as needed on this" is very strong in both getting the tail latency down and getting the reliability to stay at the same level. For SSDs there is an added complication of garbage collection and the incredible amounts of over-provisioning needed to get consistent performance from them (at least 30% in an ME drive, the RI drives suck at consistent performance). If those can be reduced by more vertical integration that would reduce costs of the systems and make for better overall performance as well.