HDDs have ended up giving ground in many sectors by the push of the SSDsa reality that would not have been possible without the enormous price drop that this type of units have experienced in recent years, and which has also been key to democratizing access and extending them even to consumers with fewer resources.
Today it is possible to find 128 GB SSD units from only 13.99 euros, and if we need higher capacities, the situation is still good, since we can get interesting options for less than 100 euros. There is no doubt that the cost per gigabyte ratio has improved a lotbut it is also true that It is still not at the level of what HDDs offera reality that will not change in the short or long term.
The cost per gigabyte of hard drives in 2009 was $0.11, a figure that with the passage of time has been reduced considerably during. In 2017 the cost per gigabyte, according to Backblaze data, was $0.03, and today it has fallen to $0.014, that is, it has been reduced by more than 50% compared to the cost it had just five years.
This trend is not going to change, and it is expected that by 2025 the cost per gigabyte of HDDs will be reduced to only 0.01 dollars, that is, less than a euro cent. That price will make this type of storage units remain very competitive in the professional sector (data centers and companies), and also in the general consumer market as secondary storage solutions, mainly.
We don’t know what will happen once HDDs hit that new bottom, but it will most likely continue down at a slower pace. I personally believe that these types of units they are still a good investment to accompany an SSD. This works as the main unit and the hard drive serves as a “mixture” to cover high storage needs at a very low cost. Think that, for less than the cost of a 1 TB SSD, it is possible to buy a 4 TB hard drive, and that for a little more we can get a 6 TB drive.
If we wanted to buy a 4 TB SSD we would have to spend at least 370 euroswhile a HDD with the same capacity would cost us about 78 euros. I know that there is an important difference in performance between the two, in fact SSDs have become the recommended standard even in Windows, but this does not matter when the use that we are going to give it is that of a secondary storage unit.
