They will probably keep making spinners in plants that already exist like audio cassettes.  It will become a niche market.

Like optical media perhaps

HD don't skip across the pond as well.  Those 3 1/2"ers make a big splash. 

Yesterday, Samsung introduced 2 new 2T SSDs with MSRPs of $800 and $1,000.

That's about 10 times the current price of a 2TB laptop drive, but these SSD's are in a 7mm form factor, meaning that they will fit in slim laptops, unlike 2TB HDDs, which are all 9.5mm or greater.  Furthermore, they have 5 and 10 year warranties and are rated at 150TB and 300TB writes respectively, which works out to about 80GB of writes every 24 hours for the rated life of the drive.  No laptop drive has more than a 3 year warranty and most have only 1 year.

250GB SSDs are currently selling for under $80 and 500GB SSDs under $175 at retail, and are both faster and more resilient than rotating memory, so it's clear that you won't see HDDs in portable computers much longer.

An 8TB single drive is a beautiful thing.

Until it dies.

Hard disks can become too big to fail...

Hard disks can become too big to fail...

Do they get a bailout at that point?

I think if you look at storage trends, the increase in size of mechanical HDs has been slower (relatively speaking) than the increase in size of flash-based solid-state storage. That's where much of the research is being focused now too (for good reason), and so naturally innovation is faster there. Mechanical drives have also been knocking on the doors of *physical* limitations for a while now, and although there always seems to be an innovation around the corner that extends things a good bit, it almost certainly gets harder and harder. Meanwhile, if capacity really needs to be increased for SSD, one could always just have a bigger physical package. Current drives are all 2.5" form factor, but you could easily quadruple capacity by making a full-sized form factor (not sure if cooling would become an issue, but probably a fixable one if so). That says nothing of pricing, of course, but that has been falling consistently for years, so it's really only a matter of time before the graph lines of hard drive's slowing capacity increase crosses the line of SSD's decreasing costs and increasing capacity... I think it will be another year or two, but not a ton more time...

- Oshyna

They could form The Last LLC and all their products could be branded The Last.

Whatever product they made, it would be The Last product.

Just over a month ago,  when I started this thread, my thinking was that a decade from now, hard disks would still be around, but only for low cost offline storage.

The announcement last week by Intel and Micron of what they call 3D Xpoint memory technology has changed that.  This is non-volatile memory capable of densities up to 10 times greater than NAND, byte-addressable (unlike NAND, which is addressed in blocks) and as fast as DRAM.

Intel+Micron claim that this is not a lab concept, but a product which they expect to bring to market within a year.  If so, I'd expect NAND prices to fall even faster and SSDs to become the standard for low cost offline storage. I'd also expect that a decade from now, nobody will even be making HDDs.

According to Information Week, the end of 2015 will see SSDs with greater capacity than any hard disks currently available and SSDs are expected to be cost competitive with hard disks by the end of 2016.

Sure. Also, no one will use a device with a real keyboard anymore, yadda yadda.

@Deozaan:
And when a hack (buffer overflow) occurs in a machine with this type of memory...does that mean that the hack remains present until (that part of) the memory is actually overwritten?

I really don't know anything about this technology. I imagine it will be like traditional storage (HDD/SSD), but super fast like RAM. That is, no need to store things in memory temporarily. And things that are meant to be temporary will no longer have pointers pointing to them once they're no longer needed, much like deleting a file from your HDD doesn't actually erase it until you write to that sector. As far as the harddrive/memory cares it's just a random bit.

But again, I need to stress that I don't really know how RAM works, nor do I know how this new Xpoint memory stuff works.

Samsung has just introduced a 15.36 TB SSD in a standard 2.5 inch form factor.  That's over 50% greater capacity than the largest hard disk drive available today.