Currently, hard disk drives offer a more cost-efficient alternative to solid state drives, making them a more suitable option for developing and expanding cloud infrastructures, as capacity matters more than speed.

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Apple, for example, has also frustrated hard-disk drive makers by featuring solid state drives across its line of notebook computers and eliminating spinning disks in the MacBook Air, its thinnest, lightest model.

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Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, and innovative external storage solutions and services used to store, preserve and manage the world's most valued data.

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Solid-state storage and memory technologies in general use less power than hard disk drives when they are active, and thus there can be power savings if some solid-state storage and memory can be used in a mixed storage technology environment in a way that reduces the spinning time of hard disk drives and thus decreases the power needs of a storage system.

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