With each passing day, SSDs are growing in capacity and speed while their cost/GB continues to go down. Not surprisingly, HDD shipments have been falling steadily over the last few years as SSDs encroach their territory in storage. Despite the gloomy outlook, Seagate CFO thinks that HDDs will be here to stay, at least over the next 2 decades. Speaking at the Nasdaq 33rd Investor Program Conference David Morton said that:

“I believe HDDs will be along around for at least 15 years to 20 years”

While we would expect an HDD maker to express confidence in their product, HDDs will likely remain relevant for the near future. Despite the huge drops in price, SSDs still remain much pricier than their spinning disk cousins. Another major factor is that HDDs still continue to offer larger capacities in a single drive. With the introduction of HAMR and other technologies, HDDs will likely keep their lead at least till the end of the decade if not longer.

Even if SSDs do surpass HDDs in terms of capacity, hard drives may remain cheaper and thus more widely used for bulk storage. For those with large media collection and services that require immense amounts of storage, hard drives will likely remain cheaper for quite a while. With such an advantage, it seems highly likely that hard drives will be with us for quite a while yet.