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Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

I'm not that astounded at all. Hard drive sizes have barely changed in 10 years.

Sure, flash storage keeps increasing, and 4TB on an SD card is pretty amazing, but it's not a hard drive, and SD cards aren't really that reliable, nor can they be used as long-term offline storage.

Good ol' spinning rust HDs are the only thing that make any sense for archiving data right now, unless you have enough data to make LTO tapes economical (and here you have to worry about the tapes being readable with newer generations of drives, so you still have to cycle the data to newer tapes). (Re)writable optical discs were supposed to serve this purpose, but they utterly failed at it.

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>>Hard drive sizes have barely changed in 10 years.

I mean, they kinda have. From what I can find online, the largest capacity 3.5" drive you could buy in 2014 was 12TB.

Now in 2024, the largest drive seems to be this 30TB Seagate - not quite a 3x increase, but close:

https://petapixel.com/2024/01/18/seagates-new-30tb-hard-driv...

What hasn't really moved is the price - I feel like even few years ago a £100 could get me a 4TB drive, and the same is true today, the capacity vs cost ratio hasn't really followed the same curve as it did with SSDs.

That's because there's a floor to HDD prices regardless of size.

If you want maximum storage per unit of currency spent, you'll be looking at 16-20TB drives which go for 15-16€ per TB in my area.

By comparison, 4TB drives tend to go for 20€+ per TB.

But I agree that SSDs have moved much more rapidly and am looking forward to them finally surpassing HDDs on the price front too.

Meanwhile my internet speed has increased from 50Mbit/s to 8Gbit/s..

Basically, what's happened is that people aren't storing very much locally any more. Everything is on streaming services, stored on some server on the internet somewhere, and accessed on-demand. The only people who actually use lots of local storage are developers and pirates; everyone else only needs enough for their OS and installed apps plus some extra for cache and the the like. Most people just don't care about owning stuff any more, or having any real control over their data.

Mine has actually decreased in the last 10 years lol, in 2014 BT(British telecom) introduced their G-Fast packages with 150mbps speed, and that's what I've been on since then......except this year they said the G.Fast packages are all deprecated so if I want to stay with them I'll be put on the next highest package....which is a 76mbps FTTC connection.

The state of internet connectivity in the UK is dreadful, and 8Gbps is unheard of unless you have a business line, I think the highest offered to regular consumers is 2gbps and only in very few places.

> and SD cards aren't really that reliable, nor can they be used as long-term offline storage.

It would be very nice if there was storage that was more durable & reliable than current tech. As opposed to just bigger & cheaper.

Eg. that glass-based storage Microsoft is working on. If that makes it to market, even a few dozen GB per media, write-once, would be very tempting.

I don't need ever-increasing # of TBs. I need [whatever I have stored] to not disappear randomly. Hell, in this aspect even floppies in early 80s out-did current day flash storage.

Yeah I know good backup procedures protect against data loss. But that doesn't make random-failing-storage-without-warning any less pita.

>Hell, in this aspect even floppies in early 80s out-did current day flash storage.

As an interesting aside, you can roughly estimate's someone age from internet comments when they talk about the reliability of floppy disks (or lack thereof).

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