That's only an issue for enterprise class storage of course. The speed (latency mostly, but also throughput) advantages of SSD mean that HDD are eventually going to disappear on the consumer side. The real question is when "eventually" is - I keep predicting in "two-three years" - but then two-three years comes along, and HDDs are going strong as ever. I'm guessing that when you can get a 2 TB SSD for < $100, they'll finally become the dominant consumer storage platform.

>The speed (latency mostly, but also throughput) advantages of SSD mean that HDD are eventually going to disappear on the consumer side.

The last few years have been weird - hell, ram is literally more expensive, per gigabyte, than it was in 2012. PC software requirements seems to be standing still. A five-year-old PC is still perfectly usable.

This wasn't true at all for most of my life.

I mean, yes, if storage space requirements don't start growing, of course, you are right, because hard drives, while they are big, are slow.

But... hopefully, this is a temporary setback. Someone will figure out how to make use of the surplus transistors in desktop PCs.

I mean, it can't be that hard; from what I saw in the '90s and early aughts, Microsoft seemed to release a new version of word every few years, and it required a new PC, even though I personally couldn't see how it was better.

But... apparently that isn't happening anymore.

My point here is just that if the need for disk space grows as fast as hard drive and ssd size per dollar grow, SSD might never become completely dominant, assuming that hard drives maintain their space per dollar advantage.

Of course, if things keep going where they have been going for the last few years, where system requirements for desktops don't really increase over time, then of course you are right, there would be no reason to have spinning disk.

You can already see this, sort of, in mobile, where storage expectations are dramatically lower, but spinning disk never had a real toehold there. Do you remember those tiny spinning hard drives that were packaged in CF cards? oh man, so cool! and so fragile.

The early nineties was like that for RAM, it was expensive as hell and didn't get any cheaper. For example, Windows 95 required 4MB RAM. That was ridiculously tiny just a few later in 1998 when I started working (and got 128 MB in my PC, fairly standard then).

Many kinds of big data files used by customers do not require high speed or latency. Watching video is fine as long as disk read speed greater than video stream bitrate. Music does not require that either. When you download huge archive, you don't need high write speed, HDD write speed will be more than enough, it's probably higher than network speed anyway.

Unless SSD will become better than HDD by all parameters, HDD's are very suitable as part of disk setup for anyone who need more than 200 GB data. And there are millions of people who don't use all that cloud things and prefer to download, store and watch/listen their content locally.

How are consumers storing local content reliably - home NAS with RAID? If millions of consumers are buying NAS devices, which vendors are reaping that revenue?

Single copy is most common. I haven't seen reliable data on the split between a copy in the cloud vs a copy on an external drive, but those would be 2nd and 3rd most common, with cloud growing to cut out both external drive and single copy.

I have family members who have had and continue to have user induced data loss due to single copy, but even single copy + cloud because they insist on passwords being b.s. so they don't write them down, don't remember them (due to arcane rules requiring them to pick a password they can't remember without writing down), and then the device has some problem that requires a reset, and then they can't get into their online account because they failed to properly set (and apparently weren't required) the recovery account or phrases.

Bulk content (when cloud storage might not be appropriate) is rarely important enough for reliability to be a concern, and home NAS is totally insufficient for reliability when it comes to truly important content as it does nothing for theft, fire, etc.

If my home media library gets wiped out by hardware failure, replacing it would be an annoyance but not a disaster. Anything that would be a disaster is covered by at least two cloud services.

Probably risks of data loss are underestimated by most people, so they don't use neither NAS neither RAID (I would be surprised if many people without solid technical background understand what RAID is). Disks are reliable enough so majority is not affected and if data is really important, it often could be restored for those who experienced data loss.

Most consumers are probably just using a single copy on an external hard drive...