HDDs have ended in many industries pressure on the SSDa reality that would not have been possible without the enormous price drop that these types of units have experienced in recent years, which has also been key to democratizing access and extending it to consumers with fewer resources.

Today it is possible to find 128GB SSD units starting at 13.99 euros, and if we need higher capacities, the situation is still good, we can find interesting options even for less than 100 euros. No doubt about it the price per gigabyte ratio has improved a lotbut it is also true that It’s still not at the level of what HDDs offera reality that will not change in the short or long term.

The price per gigabyte of hard drives in 2009 was $0.11, a figure that has decreased significantly over time. In 2017, the cost per gigabyte was $0.03 according to Backblaze data, and today it has dropped to $0.014, meaning it has been reduced by more than 50% compared to the cost it had just five years ago.

This trend will not change and it is expected that by 2025 the price per gigabyte of hard drives will decrease to only 0.01 dollars, i.e. less than a euro cent. This price will ensure that this type of storage units remains very competitive in the professional sector (data centers and companies), as well as in the general consumer market, mainly as secondary storage solutions.

We don’t know what will happen when HDDs hit this new bottom, but it will most likely continue at a slower pace. I personally believe that these types of units they are still a good investment to accompany an SSD. The latter acts as the main drive and the hard drive serves as a “mix” to cover high storage needs at a very low cost. Consider that for less than the cost of a 1TB SSD, you can buy a 4TB hard drive, and that we can get a 6TB unit for a bit more.

If we wanted to buy a 4TB SSD, we would have to spend at least 370 euroswhile an HDD with the same capacity would cost us approx 78 euros. I know there is an important difference in performance between the two, in fact SSDs have become the recommended standard even in Windows, but it doesn’t matter when we use them as secondary storage.