Last year, 2016, Seagate presented their new SSD storage with a huge 60TB capacity. It is not on the market yet, as of August 2017, and analysts expect a price tag around 40,000$, not exactly for my purse. That means a 0.66$ cost per GB. Compare this with a cost of 0.03$ per GB you are paying for a hard drive storage or a 0.3$ cost per GB per a mass market SSD and you see it will be a product for a few very demanding use cases.
So, why would this sort of capacity be needed? Well, according to Seagate in 2020 there will be some 1,300 EB (1.3 million Petabyte) of installed storage in Clouds all over the world, 1,800 EB installed storage in data centres, 10 EB captured by drones in 2020 (resulting from 560 million photos and videos captured by drones that will generate a 127 Billion $ market worldwide) and 393 EB of storage shipped to the mass market. In addition they expect 600 ZB (million of Petabyte) generated by IoT (not necessarily needing a permanent storage…). See the clip.
As I was marvelling at the rapid evolution of SSD storage I read the news of IBM and Sony developing an advanced mag tape with a storage density of 25GB per square inch. when you do the math, it means that a tape cartridge can store 330TB of data at a cost that is a fraction of the cost of the SSD. Obviously there is a trade off: you gain capacity but you lose speed!
SSD will remain king in applications where there is a need to access data randomly, like when you need run data analytics applications on huge amount of data, whilst tape cartridges would do perfectly when you just need to preserve data for archival reasons.