Reply to post: Re: No, they will completely disappear

Re: No, they will completely disappear

I guess you don't understand economies of scale, if you could think that fixed capital requirements mean the product with a larger up front capital investment can never be cheaper. If you have fixed capital requirements of $1 million and variable costs of $50 versus fixed capital requirements of $1 billion and variable costs of $10, then if you have enough volume the $1 billion fixed capital requirement products will be FAR cheaper.

The only variable costs for making flash chips are the per wafer processing costs, which are less than a thousand dollars per wafer - regardless of the number of bits the chips you carve from that wafer hold! While the fixed capital investment for a new process that doubles the number of bits per wafer is huge, it is nowhere near double the capital investment for the previous generation process, thus the cost per bit is constantly being driven down - and at a much faster rate than the cost per bit of hard drives is being driven down!

How else do you think that SSDs have gone from 100x premium to 20x premium to 5x premium over the years? If some new breakthrough that let hard drives double in storage every couple years (like was happening in the early 2000s thanks to the GMR technology IBM developed) then they'd be able to keep pace with flash, but that's very unlikely to happen since R&D into hard drives is a fraction of what it used to be. Otherwise unless we stop being able to put more bits on a NAND chip, SSDs will catch up with and then be cheaper than hard drives.