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The end of the hard disk

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xtabber:
revisiting this topic...
ok, so 4TB regular hard drives can be had for about $200-300.
1TB SSD is over $400
-superboyac (July 21, 2015, 04:26 PM)
--- End quote ---

The highest capacity 2.5" hdd available today is 2TB.  2TB laptop drives go for $100 and up, while 1TB laptop drives go for about $50 and up, $70 and up for high performance (7200 RPM) drives. 

Micron has just introduced a "budget" line of SSDs in the 2.5" form factor that is slower than top of the line SSDs, but still more than 10 times faster than the fastest laptop hard drive, at $149 MSRP for 512GB and $299 MSRP for 960GB.  That's 6 times the price for 10 times the performance.  The gap is closing.

I'd agree that I don't see SSDs replacing desktop HDDs any time soon for long term and off line storage, but I think they will mostly survive as external devices, either as portable drives or as NAS.

Added 11/6/15 - I've started to see 2TB laptop drives priced below $90, at the same time, the price of a Samsung 2TB SSD has dropped from $1,000 to $750.  Also, Micron has announced they will no longer make SSDs with less than $240GB capacity because they expect the market to move to 1TB and higher.

xtabber:
Seagate is showing off a 60TB SSD in a 3.5 inch HDD form factor.  Toshiba has also announced new NAND that it says will allow it to produce 100TB SSD drives.

Don't expect to be able to buy Seagate's SSD until next year, and it might cost you over $40,000 then. But if you are in the cloud storage business, you probably spend far more on physical plant, maintenance and energy than you spend on drives, so this may already be a good deal

None of us here is going to buy this kind of SSD storage anytime soon, but what these developments mean is that storage companies are not going to be spending any money on HDD development or manufacturing facilities.  SSDs are less labor intensive to build and Seagate has already announced 8100 layoffs this year. 

The combination of lower production costs and competition between NAND manufacturers should cause prices to come down sooner rather than later.  Perhaps more important, those are capacities that you are never going to see in spinning metal, at any price.

And that, in turn, means that sometime in the foreseeable future, maybe even within the next decade, HDDs will go the way of the VCR.

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