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by spullara 3735 days ago
He is wrong about 6TB being the biggest hard drive in the market. Now that SSDs have become the standard they are taking up the curve. Samsung announced a 16TB SSD last year. I don't expect people to devote as much effort to making spinning disks bigger.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-unveils-2-5-i...

4 comments

He mentioned that:

> As the pace of magnetic disk development slackens, an alternative storage medium is coming on strong. Flash memory, a semiconductor technology, has recently surpassed magnetic disk in areal density; Micron Technologies reports a laboratory demonstration of 2.7 terabits per square inch. And Samsung has announced a flash-based solid-state drive (SSD) with 15 terabytes of capacity, larger than any mechanical disk drive now on the market. SSDs are still much more expensive than mechanical disks—by a factor of 5 or 10—but they offer higher speed and lower power consumption. They also offer the virtue of total silence, which I find truly golden.

It does seem like in the long run, SSDs will probably be cheaper to manufacture than spinning disks?
There are also 8, 10, and 14TB SMR spinning disks on the market.
The author also doesn't mention 'special' hard drives like Dropbox uses - 14 TB.