Asianometry dives into the tech, history, and the last bits of innovation potential spinning magnetic platters have left as they hold on to their last niches under the onslaught of SSDs
Slow Spinny Disk (SSD)
Don’t let scammers hear that. They’ll sell 16TB “SSDs” for cheap and defraud thousands of people.
Here’s my pet theory on the death of hard drives: it’ll decline fast when SSDs hit twice the price per TiB, and we’re only a few years away.
My thinking is that there’s a lot of corporate deployments of four drive RAID 10. With SSDs, you can make that two drive RAID 1 with equivalent redundancy, but much, much faster.
Spinning platters are around $10 per TiB. SSDs around $60. (This does depend on the specific models of each.) SSDs would need to be cut in half about 1.5 times to reach that point.
