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whotheff t1_jcyap4u wrote

  1. Flash storage is a thing - Boot drive, gaming drive, SD card or anything
  2. Optical drives will probably survive if they pack some insane amount of storage space in a small form factor. Whatever they do, they will be too slow and only good for deep archiving.
  3. Mechanical HDDs will linger a few more years and then completely die, unless some niche appears, where they are better. Alternatively, some insane new technology might speed them up (but not very likely).
  4. Tape drives will outlive all of us :D They are still alive and developing.

There is a huge difference between home use and pro use. Home use will go completely in the cloud, while pro will remain on local storage. There will be a totally distributed network of computers, holding random bits of data, but it's too hard to predict what shape or use it will take. I suspect it will take a tiered approach, where fastest and most accesed data will be on flash, while least accessed data will be on tape or some future version of Blu-Ray.

Also, keep in mind that the definition of a true "backup" says that storing same data on at least two different physical locations, stored on two technologically different medias is considered as backed up.

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riceandcashews t1_jd0iadt wrote

Hdd is still used as slow cheap storage. If ssds actually get as cheap as hdds then yeah they'll go extinct

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whotheff t1_jd281cf wrote

Currently, cheapest 4 TB HDD is 51 USD (HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 HUS724040ALS640 (0B26885) 4TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SAS 6Gb/s).

This roughly means 1 TB of HDD costs ~13USD.

While a 4TB SSD is 200 USD ( Crucial P3 4TB PCIe 3.0 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD, up to 3500MB/s - CT4000P3SSD8 ).

This means 1 TB of SSD costs 50 USD.

Yes, these are the cheapest options and probably not with the best performance, but still comparison is interesting.I predict In 2-3 years that price difference will be cut in half. Meaning, an SSD will be only 2 times more expensive than a HDD.

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