Hard drive makers under the gun from flash memory? Nope

In the hard drive industry, the price of the product seems to go down in an inversely proportionate way with the amount of storage capacity offered as time goes by. That is, every half-year or so, the amount of storage offered at a certain price goes up, or the price per product goes down. Call it Moore's Law, but in this case, it has accelerated even more than PC processors if you can believe that.

I mean, come on -- half a terabyte (500 gigabytes) for under $160 right now? Only two years ago, that amount of storage would have cost three times that or even more. With the cost of hard drive storage continuing to plummet with no end in sight, will that kind of data recording technology be around for a while? When looking at the equally-plummeting cost of flash-based storage, some have predicted the demise of the hard drive. Hogwash, I say -- data centers and even high-end PCs and home entertainment DVRs (like TiVo boxes) will be using hard drives for quite some time, even as lower-capacity needs like laptop hard drives and digital music players adopt more flash memory than traditional hard drives.

Reason? Cost per amount of storage. Even with flash memory having no moving parts and being quite a bit faster than hard drives, neither of those drives the transition from one storage technology to another like price does. In fact, aren't hard drives pretty darn reliable right now? For the technology inside them (which could rival the best engineering on earth in some cases), hard drives are amazingly resilient. Sure there are failures due to moving parts inside. But, as long as huge capacities are demanded by the market and the lowest price is required, hard drives aren't going anywhere fast.