Reply to post: Re: No, they will completely disappear

SSD price premium over disk faaaalling

Naselus

Re: No, they will completely disappear

"Why wouldn't hard drives completely disappear, once the price premium disappears?"

First, the premium will never entirely disappear, simply because the fixed capital requirements for SSD production are orders of magnitude higher than HDD and storage requirements grow faster than SSD production can. Even at current price multiples, it takes 4-5 times as long for an SSD fab to pay for itself compared to an HDD plant, and it's probably not possible for the premium to sink below 2x ever, unless someone finds a NAND tree.

Second, there's some circumstances where raw capacity is always preferable to speed, so as long as the HDD is at a lower $/TB, it'll be the better choice. Consider, say, FB photo storage, which is rarely accessed but needs vast capacity and increases enormously and continuously. You just want to stick in the largest capacity item possible at the lowest price possible. That's going to be HDD.

There probably is a technology coming in the near future which will obsolete HDD, but it's not going to be SSD; we need something that achieves higher speeds at HDD-equivalent prices. Either that, or some breed of NVRAM will come along and simply eliminate the concept of separate storage.

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