Maximum PC

why would he need to discuss ssd in an article about hard disks. they have the speed market but price me out a 1-3 terabyte drive and see if it can compete with a traditional hard drive yet.

Ridiculous. Hard drives are dead.

After the flood seemed to be an excuse for the whole industry to collapse.

After consolidations, there are now only three HDD companies standing: Toshiba, WD and Seagate.

Seagate went from a 5 yr warranty on its consumer products to 1 yr.

WD dropped from 3 yr to 2 yr.

HDD reliability--a critical function--has also noticeably (to consumers) declined to match the faith the manufacturers now demonstrate in their product.

I laugh when I read about the latest tech that exponentially increases HDD capacity. Amazing stuff, but beyond servers who cares. When you sell crap consumers notice.

They have noticed the prices on SSD's come down with respect to Gb/$. HDD makers seem to have not.

SSD sizes have gone up.

Consumers have noticed the benefits in speed, compactness, weight, lower power, silent, non-heat producing, if it fails (which is of low chance) it usually fails read only and it has proven itself reliable.

The cloud. OK, a buzz term. But people on smartphones, tablets, laptops, ect. are starting to realize they don't need all that storage space when they can either save it on their own server at home or online to download or view as they please. 128Gb, 160Gb seems fine. HDD makers seem not to notice.

Kings of the jungle don't seem to notice when their reign ends until it is too late to halt the extinction event. Pity. Now about some of those crappy Red server drives you are trying to peddle WD....

SSDs are a dead-end technology. The more you shrink them, the less P/E cycles and reliability they have. TLC based memory has a life span of about a few thousand P/E cycles, contrast to 32nm MLC which has tens of thousands and SLC which has over a million.