• @mindbleach
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    110 months ago

    Yeah no shit. HDDs have been at the price floor for twenty or thirty years. Mechanical complexity dictates minimum cost. What keeps them relevant is expanding capacity. Finer control - even for the same components! - can significantly increase reliable data density. Plus, you can add more platters and only duplicate a few other moving parts.

    On a good day, hard drives can offer fifteen-ish terabytes for $200.

    By the time SSDs can match that, HDDs will probably be 40+ TB for the same price.

    Even if those curves meet - what’s really going to squelch the hard drive market is that laptops and smartphones won’t touch them. Why in the name of god would you put a spinning disk in a moving object, after 2020? If your device needs as much storage as money can buy - not even a fat gaming laptop will fit 3.5" drives, and all that space comes from disk area. SSDs are going to push out HDDs in much the same way LCDs pushed out other flat-screen tech. It’s a virtuous circle of sales encouraging research that improves products and results in more sales. there’s probably gonna be a point where 1TB SD cards cost five bucks… and actually hold 1TB.