SSD costs will eventually come down.
Just not in the near future.
Metal plates are cheap, chips are expensive.
Once you get up to a terabyte SSD at a competitive price, mechanical hard drives become a niche product. ...but mechanical drives will almost always be there for bulk storage.
For me, the amount of digital content I produce every year outstrips the capacity of solid state drives and upstream bandwidth is a limiting factor for cloud storage.
I’ve had mixed performance but mostly good out of Seagate stuff. Western Digitals have done very well overall throughout the years. Maxtor is a brand I avoid.
“Solid state will eventually rule, but when?”
From what I understand, SSD drives corrupt easily. Until that ‘glitch’ is fixed then we are stuck with electro-mechanical drives.
today, the move for home users is for these big storage drives to be in NAS boxes running mirrored for automatic back up (tho on-site)
combine that with a gigabit LAN and 256 SSD for local storage and you’ve got a nice, extendable setup
When they finally figure out how to keep the innards from croaking after too many read/write cycles.. ;-)
I don't believe SSD is ever going to kill HDD, but there are scenarios today where it is more cost effective to use SSD.
Not matter how big you make that SATA HDD, it's only going to be able to do about 150 reads/writes per second. Ever. We're topped out. So if you need 150,000 read/writes per second, you need 1,000 of those drives, regardless of how much actual data you have to store. Factor in the cost of all those drives, the power and cooling to maintain them, and SSD is probably MUCH cheaper because you don't need to buy anywhere near 8,000 TB of them. [Yes, I know, you wouldn't use SATA here, but the concept is the same].
Also, the inherent latency in HDD gives an SSD based system time to do dedupe/compression. If SSD costs 8x HDD, but an application like VDI can dedupe at 10x, it's actually cheaper per GB to go with SSD.