The stabilizing average price per Gigabyte of hard disk drives will be a challenge for cloud storage providers, because users will generate more data in the future. according to cloud storage provider Backblaze based on research on the 75,000 HDDs it purchased the last couple of years.
Between 2009 and 2011 the cost per GB dropped with 45%, from $0.11 to $0.05 per GB. From 2015 till 2017 the average costs dropped 26% from $0.038 to $0.028 per GB, a drop of a mere $0.01 per GB. "This means that the declining price of storage will become less relevant in driving the cost of providing storage," Andy Klein of BackBlaze writes on the company's website.
He also refers to a prediction of research company IDC that states that from 2020, 44 trillion GB of data will be generated annually.
"That’s quite a challenge for the storage industry especially as the cost per gigabyte curve for hard drives is flattening out," Klein writes.
Possibly new improvements in HDD technology, such as Helium and Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), and future technologies such as quantum storage, are a solution.
