This is a bit of a cherry pick.

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Sure the drives are dropping slower but at the end of the day, I have a mental ‘limit’ on hard drive prices.

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I paid $250 AUD for 3TB once.

Then I paid $250 AUD for 5TB

Then 8 and finally, 16.

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It’s taken some time but it continues to evolve. It’s going to take a very long time before an SSD which lasts in excess of 5 to 10 years, matches HDD speeds (you heard me) and costs less than $250 AUD for 16TB.

HDDs are getting cheaper at the high end.

SSDs are still new enough that they are still figuring out how to get economic viability where HDDs were a decade ago.

1TB for $100 is new in NVMEs for example.

It’s cute how OP is comparing enterprise-grade HDDs with 5y warranty, with the trashiest consumer-grade SSDs with 2y warranty, some of which are QLC garbage that cannot be reliably used for long-term storage.

Graph a 2TB and 4TB HDD

What’ll be extremely nice is when the price per TB is less on an SSD than a hard drive.

Might be a while, but I would gladly take SATA speeds if that’s what it meant to get to that price.

I just assumed since spinning rust can outlast flash it will always cost more. I can’t think of anyone using flash for long term storage or backups.

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.

Pretty common. Drive manufacturers aren’t able to reduce costs much because most of the cost cutting measures were figured out already. With SSDs there is still plenty of opportunity

in my country 1 tb nvme ssd are cheaper than 2.5 inch sata HDD of same size, and it sucks because my server is 10 year old and has only sata ports