However, there may be some good news on the horizon for the storage industry, even as the price of nearly every other aspect of modern life continues to rise.

The HDD price drop predicted by cloud storage expert Backblaze may be welcome news for the occasional user.

HDDs are notoriously slower than SSDs, and their bigger sizes make them impractical for the compact designs preferred by many consumers. But if a lot of space is crucial, the best is yet to come.

Disk Drive versus Solid State Drive Expenses

Backblaze predicts that by2025, the cost of hard disc drives (HDDs) will drop to an all-time low of $0.01 per gigabyte, putting the price of a 1TB drive at around $10.

More than a quarter of a million hard drives up to 16TB have been acquired since 2009 (when the firm was paying roughly $0.11 per GB), and orders for 18TB, 20TB, and even 22TB drives are planned if cost matches Backblaze’s expectations.

As an added selling point, it emphasises the usage of PMR/CMR drives rather than the even more cost-effective SMR drives. The disadvantage of an SMR drive is its potential for slowness.

Backblaze’s numbers suggest that the price per GB will drop by 56% between 2017 and November 2022, even accounting for the impact of the pandemic. Looking at the bigger picture, we can see that costs have dropped dramatically in the past, and while the graph looks to be levelling out as we approach the middle of the 2020s, there still appears to be opportunity for additional reductions.