Hard drives are currently considerably less expensive than SSDs in terms of price per GB, and especially at higher capacities (around 4 times cheaper). The two main advantages of mechanical hard drives today are that they offer much higher capacities, in addition to having a much lower cost per GB. However, in five years, this trend could change according to analysts.
Buy an SSD in 2026, cheaper than a hard drive?
A few days ago, an analyst released a compiled table that analyzed the price trend for the capacity of SSDs and enterprise hard drives. Currently, the price per GB of SSDs is still much more expensive than that of hard drives, but the trend is clearly downward, that is to say that in a short time the price of SSDs has fallen a lot and here 2026, in order not to do so, it will equalize.
According to the analyst, this is due to the cost of manufacturing each product: between 2013 and 2020 the price of manufacturing hard disks fell by 13%, but the cost of manufacturing a flash drive fell by 33% on the same period, and therefore the trend is downward. In other words, if it costs less to manufacture, they can sell for less, or they can also increase capacity while maintaining the price (which also reduces the price per GB).
Over the next 10 years, the analyst says, the unit price of SSD and HDD capacity will continue to decline but both will reduce the margin: SSDs are expected to reduce their cost of production by 26% while hard drives will decrease it. will reduce only 5.4%. The upshot of all of this is that around 2026 the unit cost of SSD and HDD will be stable and should be around $ 15 per terabyte, which means that subsequently buying an SSD will cost the same. than buying a hard drive, and from there it will be even cheaper.
In other words, from 2026 if you want to buy for example a 4TB storage unit, be it an SSD or a hard drive, it will cost you the same price.
Hard drive manufacturers disagree
According to John Morris, CTO of Seagate (which is currently the world’s largest hard drive manufacturer), those who say SSDs will kill mechanical hard drives have not seen the situation in the data center arena at all. . He said that right now, half of the world’s data is stored in data centers, and 90% of the storage media in them is still mechanical hard drives, with just 10% SSD.
This is a reality, but at the end of the day what companies with data centers are looking for is efficiency, and whether within 5 years they will be able to buy the same capacity as with mechanical hard drives but in SSD, with much higher performance, no one doubts that they will choose to use SSDs instead of mechanical hard drives, especially since their failure rate is much lower.
We’ll see what happens at the end, but if this analyst’s prediction really comes true and within five years we can buy SSDs that are cheaper than normal hard drives and with the same capacity, we finally could have. reach the tipping point where the hard drive industry ceases to make sense. Renew or die, you know the saying.
