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Comment by peter303 | Hacker News Reader

Traditional memory continues to become cheaper too. Flash is dimes a gigabyte, disk is cents a gig and videotape tenths of a cent per gigabyte. So supercomputers will always be maxing out each level of memory. And you will still need worry about memory hierarchies.

For ordinary computing, maybe a terabyte of flash will finally be enough.

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Flash is really closing in on disk, though. If costs continue to halve biannually, and capacities keep rising like they do, they might intersect around 12 - 16TB in five to ten years.

Sometime before that, I'm guessing in about 3 years +/- 6 months, the capacity+performance advantages of flash will reach a point where spinning disk doesn't make sense, volumes of flash being ordered start to accelerate, spinning disk volumes plateau, and investments in developing the technology adjust accordingly (more investment in improving flash, less in spinning disk)

I would be willing to wager that new models of laptops in 2020 with spinning disk will be uncommon, and, by 2023, except for niche verticals. basically non-existent. Same for Desktop 2 years later in each category.

2025 will mark the end of consumers buying spinning disk.

I think it will happen much sooner than that. Flash doesn't have to match the price/GB of hard drives, it just has to match at the minimum viable system level. A lot of people could survive with 120GB, and that number goes up drastically when you hit 240GB. When the price of those SSDs reaches the hard drive floor of about $50, hard drives will become a niche product appealing only to those who actually need multiple terabytes.

> I would be willing to wager that new models of laptops in 2020 with spinning disk will be uncommon

How about more like 2015. You're already forgetting MacbookAir/Chromebook/Ultrabook crowd are slowly taking over (which have no spinning disks).

Not really, Flash hit a wall recently and price stopped falling rapidly. Only Samsungs V-NAND has a chance of competing with HDDs on capacity, and its still very costly.

Problem with Flash is the more you pack in same volume the more of it comes out bad, while the rest is fragile ticking bomb.

Replacing slow, but reliable HDD with 100 writes limited flash is not the answer.

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