Seagate has demoed HAMR a tech which might allow them to get to 60TB and may start showing up in 6TB consumer drives within a few years. Other research is being

Seagate has demoed HAMR a tech which might allow them to get to 60TB and may start showing up in 6TB consumer drives within a few years. Other research is being done on adding sodium chloride to platters and IBM is researching magnetic storage at the atomic level. So long as magnetic storage can stay ahead of semiconductor fabrication then it will have it's place. As far as someone making a decision to build a factory for commodity hardware manufacturing, that same issue occurs with NAND which is quickly seeing profit margins plummet. E.g. a 50nm NAND plant 4 years ago is no longer competitive today. This is probably why Intel jettisoned their NAND manufacturing.