Hard drives continue to be used as the primary storage unit in many computers today, due to the low cost of storing 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 house, 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 fallen 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 fallen to 1 cent.
In any case, this statement is a bit exaggerated because the cost of the hard drive also includes the mechanical elements and the interface with the PC. We will therefore not see 10 TB hard drives at 10 dollars 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 dollars. It is clear that in two years they will not drop as much in price, and at most the price of storage will drop by half on PC.
And where does the 1 centime per concert come from?
Unfortunately, on PC hard drives, the price will increase
The fact that the consumption of tower PCs has decreased over time and that, in the case of laptops with standard hard drives, they are no longer sold, the demand for them has fallen. On the other hand, next-gen consoles base their storage on NVMe SSDs and have moved away from hard drives. This means less demand and therefore higher prices hard drives because manufacturers have to keep factories running and costs don’t go down.
All of this means that fewer hard drives are being manufactured than before for the consumer market and as a result they have had to look to other markets, where the volumes of money paid per unit are higher, in order to compensate for the number lower number of units sold. . In any case, for ordinary users, having large capacity disks is no longer useful when the storage exceeds the size necessary for its use.
In conclusion, above average storage in terms of hard drive capacity will become a premium item as consumers will opt for smaller sizes as they are good enough.
