Study claims HDDs will still be cheapest storage device by 2020

FUD Zilla cites a storage study that concludes that hard drives will remain the cheapest storage technology for at least another decade. The analysts predict 14TB 2.5" HDDs will cost about $40 in 2020, while flash memory based devices are expected to cost about ten times more as they're expected to heat technical limits that will prevent them from replacing HDDs anytime soon.

A new study claims that by 2020, hard disk drives will likely be less expensive on a cost per terabyte basis than any of the competing technologies. The study gives the thumbs down to boffins who are developing nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies, saying it is unlikely to replace HDDs within the next decade.

According to the popular engineering magazine IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, which we get for the spot the ball competition, Professor Mark Kryder and PhD student Chang Soo Kim of Carnegie Mellon University have investigated 13 up-and-coming NVM technologies to see whether one of them might outperform HDDs on a cost-per-TB basis in 2020.