>The speed (latency mostly, but also throughput) advantages of SSD mean that HDD are eventually going to disappear on the consumer side.
The last few years have been weird - hell, ram is literally more expensive, per gigabyte, than it was in 2012. PC software requirements seems to be standing still. A five-year-old PC is still perfectly usable.
This wasn't true at all for most of my life.
I mean, yes, if storage space requirements don't start growing, of course, you are right, because hard drives, while they are big, are slow.
But... hopefully, this is a temporary setback. Someone will figure out how to make use of the surplus transistors in desktop PCs.
I mean, it can't be that hard; from what I saw in the '90s and early aughts, Microsoft seemed to release a new version of word every few years, and it required a new PC, even though I personally couldn't see how it was better.
But... apparently that isn't happening anymore.
My point here is just that if the need for disk space grows as fast as hard drive and ssd size per dollar grow, SSD might never become completely dominant, assuming that hard drives maintain their space per dollar advantage.
Of course, if things keep going where they have been going for the last few years, where system requirements for desktops don't really increase over time, then of course you are right, there would be no reason to have spinning disk.
You can already see this, sort of, in mobile, where storage expectations are dramatically lower, but spinning disk never had a real toehold there. Do you remember those tiny spinning hard drives that were packaged in CF cards? oh man, so cool! and so fragile.
The early nineties was like that for RAM, it was expensive as hell and didn't get any cheaper. For example, Windows 95 required 4MB RAM. That was ridiculously tiny just a few later in 1998 when I started working (and got 128 MB in my PC, fairly standard then).
The last few years have been weird - hell, ram is literally more expensive, per gigabyte, than it was in 2012. PC software requirements seems to be standing still. A five-year-old PC is still perfectly usable.
This wasn't true at all for most of my life.
I mean, yes, if storage space requirements don't start growing, of course, you are right, because hard drives, while they are big, are slow.
But... hopefully, this is a temporary setback. Someone will figure out how to make use of the surplus transistors in desktop PCs.
I mean, it can't be that hard; from what I saw in the '90s and early aughts, Microsoft seemed to release a new version of word every few years, and it required a new PC, even though I personally couldn't see how it was better.
But... apparently that isn't happening anymore.
My point here is just that if the need for disk space grows as fast as hard drive and ssd size per dollar grow, SSD might never become completely dominant, assuming that hard drives maintain their space per dollar advantage.
Of course, if things keep going where they have been going for the last few years, where system requirements for desktops don't really increase over time, then of course you are right, there would be no reason to have spinning disk.
You can already see this, sort of, in mobile, where storage expectations are dramatically lower, but spinning disk never had a real toehold there. Do you remember those tiny spinning hard drives that were packaged in CF cards? oh man, so cool! and so fragile.