Every year someone declares the hard drive dead. Every year drive makers ship more bytes than before. New recording techniques have pushed capacity past 30 TB, and the cold-storage tiers behind video, backups and model training data run almost entirely on them.
Where flash wins and where it does not
Anything latency-sensitive moved to solid state long ago. The remaining market is bulk capacity, where price per terabyte still favours disks by a wide margin. Analysts expect the gap to persist through the decade.
Key takeaways
- Drive capacity has passed 30 TB
- Cold tiers remain overwhelmingly disk-based
- Cost per bit gap persists
This story is part of our ongoing coverage of hardware. We will update it as more details emerge.
