Hard drives continue to be used as the primary storage unit in many computers today, because of how little it costs to store data and programs on them. However, we will soon reach very low costs in the large server market. Will this apply to the systems we have in our home, or will it be totally different?
When will we see a penny per gig on hard drives?
According to the evolution of the cost per gigabyte in recent years, in 2009 the cost was 11 cents per gigabyte, in 2017 the amount had dropped to 3 cents in 2019. Currently? The cost has dropped to 1.4 cents, so if this trend continues in 2025 we will see how the cost will have dropped to 1 cent.
In any case, said statement is a bit exaggerated due to the fact that the cost of the hard drive also includes the mechanical elements and the interface with the PC. So we are not going to see 10 TB hard drives for 10 euros in stores. However, if we look at the cheapest device currently on Amazon, we will see that on average we can get a 1TB hard drive for 40 euros. It is clear that in two years they will not drop so much in price, and at most the price of storage will drop by half on PC.
And where does the 1 cent per gig come from? Well of the server and data center market that work with large hard drives and with a large storage capacity, and as we increase the storage capacity in any HDD of the same type, we will see how each new gigabyte is cheaper. What’s more, they are continually buying new drives and replacing broken ones as long as their systems are always up and running.
Unfortunately, on PC hard drives will rise in price
The fact that the consumption of tower PCs has decreased over time and in the case of laptops units with standard hard drives are no longer sold has caused the demand for these to plummet. On the other hand, the new generation consoles base their storage on NVMe SSDs and have abandoned hard drives. This means less demand and therefore a rise in prices of hard drives, since manufacturers have to keep factories running and costs do not go down.
All this means that fewer hard drives are manufactured than before for the consumer market and, consequently, they have had to look for other markets, where the volumes of money paid per unit are higher, in order to compensate for the lower amount of sold units. In any case, for ordinary users, having large-capacity disks is no longer useful when the storage exceeds the size needed for its use.
In conclusion, above-average storage in terms of hard drive capacity will become a premium item, as consumers will go for smaller sizes because they are good enough.
