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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

>>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.

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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..

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.

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.

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