Re: Probably enterprise gear pricing
But the cost of SSD continues to go down and the density up. At some point spinning rust will die.
Beware of extrapolating. Maybe you are right, but you are assuming it will be possible either to get several terabytes onto just a few chips, like at present they can get a quarter-terabyte onto just a few chips. Since they're already close to the physical limit of how small a flash memory cell can be made, and also close to the limit of how closely such cells can be packed on a chip, you have to go to a new technology. 3D Flash may be the answer, but does it scale? from a few tens of layers (as currently shipping) up to many hundreds of layers (which would be what's needed to reach 6Tb from 250Gb at constant price -- and that's making the optimistic assumption, that more 3D layers increases production cost at a much slower rate than linear.
Meanwhile, I suspect that 5Tb disk drives will continue to fall in price until they reach the same price point that every other size of disk drive previously shipped have reached. That's about £30 for desktop-grade and about £70 for server-grade. The higher prices on larger drives are manufacturers recouping their R&D costs while the market will support a premium price.
Meanwhile, when HAMR goes into production, "spinning rust" will scale to tens of Tb per drive. Spinning rust is nowhere near its physical density limit in the radial direction, it's just that you can't radially address it for writing with a purely magnetic head.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
