What’s interesting is we’re seeing the ending of the 2 year Moore’s Law doubling rate at the same time (as we reach near the limits of the physics of photolitho

What’s interesting is we’re seeing the ending of the 2 year Moore’s Law doubling rate at the same time (as we reach near the limits of the physics of photolithography as we reach toward EUV light sources... if we go much shorter wavelength, we get inherent shot noise from the high energy of the photons... and this in addition to device-level quantum effects), so we might never quite reach the point where SSDs totally take over. Also, even tape seems to be defending its niche from hard drives. Also, higher RPM hard drives are still a thing and are holding their own to some degree. The higher RPM can help with rebuild times and to reduce the impact of the lower random IOPS. Also, conventional hard drives do not have the write limitations that (especially cheaper) SSDs have, although that has improved over time. So I think we’ll just see a continuation of the three-tiered system of storage for many years to come, but with hard drives increasingly disappearing into the cloud and away from consumer devices. SSDs for most things, hard drives for bulk server/cloud storage, and tape still for cold, long-term-stable storage. I think we’ve already seen a plateau in storage cost reduction as SSDs are not cheaper per TB than HDs. I think we’ll put more effort into being efficient with storage management in the future as we can no longer simply rely on doubling storage capacity every couple years.