"Each shrink in NAND geometry seems to require costlier manufacturing processes and more over-provisioning to keep endurance, expressed as drive writes/day for five years, up at acceptable levels."
And shingling, TDMR, HAMR cost nothing to implement?
Between 2000 and 2010, over some 10 years, mainstream hard disks went from ~40 GB to 2 TB, a 50-fold improvement without increasing the price too much (allowing for the overblown Thai flood hype). That's an average increase of nearly 50% per year. If this pace kept up, mainstream disks now would be almost 10 TB in capacity, and yet mainstream is still at 2 TB, very slowly moving towards 3 TB, never mind 4.
The recent breakthroughs that will allow more than 4 TB are ridiculously expensive and it seems that disk cannot break through this ceiling.
Going by the same chart, I see that SSDs are predicted to grow by almost 2000%, while HDDs only by 123%.
However, assuming the data for two last years and estimate for this one are accurate, this is an interesting extrapolation.
It predicts that HDD growth is expected to increase or keep at a steady rate, while SSD growth is supposed taper off, astonishingly so -- it grew by 120% in 2013, then 85% this year, and they are expecting this trend to continue and growth to decline further, while HDDs are not going to be affected at all? I call bullshit.
Oh, and they've got SSD endurance wrong. Taking a 480 GB SATA 3 drive at maximum speed (600 MB/s=52 TB/day) and 10000 writes/block, assuming you never stop and you never read this data, you get 92 days of useful life. That's still extremely high endurance. Lower this by a factor of 10, to 5.2 TB/day, and you get almost three years of useful life. However, 5 TB/day on a 480 GB drive? Who writes (and overwrites) this amount of data daily? If there's a usage pattern that fits this requirement, I suppose the user is getting paid well more than enough to cover disk replacement.