Will HDDs still get cheaper?

[k-x3]

Prices of HDDs have dramatically fallen in the past 5 years or so and have have been doing so consistently(aside from the thailand flood)

However, is it possible that they have come to a point where there is very little to do to bring the price even lower? The demand for storage space is not exactly increasing.. The price of 1TB of storage is so cheap now and it does take quite awhile for a normal user to use up that space. Even when they do, HDD storage is so cheap that they need not think twice before buying a whole new drive. Does this mean that HDD manufacturs have little reason to decrease prices? Also, many are now focusing on R&D of SSDs.

Does this mean we will see a stagnating of the HDD prices?

[Drethstoff]

The normal user might not have a reason to use huge hard drives but companies like apple or any other company that operates vast server arrays are always looking for drives that can hold more data per unit; thus they have to buy less units.

Most companies like WD and Seagate make their money from enterprise sales.

As the world increasely moves toward cloud storage. It means that WD or Seagate are going to continue to manufacturer higher capacity drives. The R&D for these drives will cause the companies to set the price point at which they make a return on their investment. Unless of course you come to work in the morning and half of your factory is underwater.

tl;dr no stagnation

[Eric1024]

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Yes.

But really though. As time goes on, drives will get larger (more platters and or more capacity per platter) and $/GB will go down.

[fredtechcheck]

For the time being the prices will continue to decrease for $/GB, meaning it may stay around say $80 but you may get 3TB... Also now people are now trusting more companies with their files so cloud computing will eventually take over, but that will not be soon. Even then I am sure we will still need some type of storage for the OS and important stuff. Basically the prices will continue to decrease for the GB but I doubt it will every be $10 for a drive. I hope this helps answers your question.

[wpirobotbuilder]

For the near future, the prices will probably go down. Further down the line, they may become more expensive as the rare earth metals used to manufacture them become increasingly scarce and more expensive. By then we might have extremely cheap solid state drives, or a new method of data storage may be out that's better than traditional HDDs.

[cheti]

They will go down, but probably up to a point where the price drops will stop and start to lower more slowly as the time passes.

[Kang19]

Prices still haven't dropped down to how much they used to cost pre-flood, and they have been stagnated at their current point for months now. So there is a lot of room to drop the price of HDDs down more, but I don't think we'll see it happen.