Electromagnetic hard drives have been in the market since late 1950s and they have shown tremendous staying power over all these decades. The hard drive capacity, reliability and speed of data access have all improved dramatically over the last two decades whereas prices have fallen dramatically so that hard drives constitute a very small portion within overall costs of computer manufacturing and sales.
Hard drives used to come in many different sizes or form factors, but this has become streamlined into just two sizes these days: a 3.5 inch and a smaller 2.5 inch version. Both form factors now boast 1 Tera Byte or higher memory and costs have been driven down to less than 10 cents per gigabyte, so that a 1TB hard drive can cost less than 100 US dollars these days.
Most consumers’ needs will be easily satisfied by these 1TB+ hard drives and only intense gamers, pornography and movie addicts, as well as scientific community will continue to demand higher capacity higher drives in future.
However, magnetic hard drives are witnessing a powerful and fast approaching rival in solid state flash drives (SSD). SSDs are rapidly gaining market acceptance since they are much lighter and smaller than hard drives, they can access data more rapidly, and they have no moving parts thereby reducing noise pollution. A combination of less weight, recycling costs, reduced material and energy consumption also makes SSDs more earth friendly.
However, SSDs lack economies of scale and require more cost intensive manufacturing techniques so that their cost per Giga Byte is almost 10 times as much as hard drives. However, in next 10 years innovations and breakthroughs in SSD technology will make them more cost effective and this might make hard drives increasingly obsolete except in niche markets.
With the expansion of tablet, smartphone and laptop markets, SSDs will muscle out hard drives and make them practically obsolete by 2020.