First: SSDs obviously are still many times expensive per GB. A quick look at a popular site (newegg.com) shows that all four of their available 1TB SSDs each cost more than $3,000 US, while they offer a 1TB laptop HDD for $170. There are more than a dozen desktop 1TB HDDs available for less than $100. Are you saying that people will run out and pay 20-30 times more?

The price premium for SSDs goes down when you look at lower capacities–but it’s still a factor of about 10 for 160GB drives, for example. Of course this will get better over time, but there is no doubt that there will certainly be a huge difference for a least a couple of years, possibly for much longer than that.

For a LARGE number of applications where larger capacity is needed, SSDs will remain cost-prohibitive during that time. For those where HDD speed is “good enough” and the physical size isn’t an issue (both desktop computers and devices such as DVRs, where cost competition is a big factor), HDDs will be a perfectly acceptable choice.

True, there is a big “sweet spot” where SSDs are a great choice, and many people are happy to pay the higher price for speed they actually will see benefits from…and in those cases we are already seeing SSDs make big inroads. Of course the physical size/weight/power-consumption advantages for SSDs are already a big deal for many laptop and server applications.

The speed comparison in this article is incredibly general and oversimplified. SSDs have read speeds which are many, many times faster than HDDs, but with write speeds the performance/benefits vary widely. For a long time some SSDs were actually slower than fast HDDs for real-world write-performance, but newer SSDs (e.g. OCZ/Vertex) are much faster for writes as well and that should get even better in the near future.

The generalizations about “who knows” in regards to failure rate are laughable. What do you think engineers do for a living? Those who develop these products DO know: At the very least they have their statistical/measured MTBF data for various drives. Those vary widely, and yes, generally SSDs will usually have much longer mean time between failure. But you shouldn’t disregard the fact that SSDs have significant challenges when compared to hard drives: Attention must be paid when selecting an SSD to make sure it will work well for their application, and continue to work well for a few years at least. The author does not even begin to consider things such as wear leveling, TRIM, spare blocks, etc. Many early-adaptors of SSDs have found out the hard way that they fail too! Backups are still important.

Capacity-wise the best HDD will achieve this year is probably 3TB per drive. 5TH HDDs aren’t far off. Since 1TB SSDs are available already, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had 8TB ones well before 2015. That looks like yet another not-well-informed guess by the author. Of course the big question is how much SSDs of 8TB (and various smaller but still generous capacities) will cost at that time.

Finally, WD and Seagate do see the writing on the wall, and are trying to compete with their own SSDs. They have a ton of engineering expertise but you are correct that others have a big head start in the SSD arena. WD and Seagate certainly have their work cut out for them to adapt to a new world moving away from HDDs.

The market for digital storage is still growing rapidly, due to the ongoing explosive growth of broadband, online video, PVR’s, and all other sorts of digital media. HDDs will ofer the lowest $/GB for at least some time to come. Eventually flash memory might become cheaper, but not in the time frame projected in the article.

BTW Samsung and Toshiba are also two of the world’s biggest flash memory producers, so they will be ok either way