Consumer SSDs and hard drive prices are nearing parity
The prices of mainstream consumer SSDs have fallen dramatically every year over the past three, and by 2017 they are expected to be within 11 cents of the per-gigabyte price of hard disk drives (HDDs).
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-arc of a capacity race on both sides of the storage aisle. Samsung's $800 2TB 850 Evo had just shown consumer SSDs scaling into terabyte territory, while Intel and Micron's 3D NAND announcement promised tripled chip density — the manufacturing shift that underwrites the steady per-gigabyte decline this article quantifies.
The counter-move was already visible: Seagate answering flash with a three-drive lineup of helium-sealed 10TB hard drives starting at $460, defending the cost-per-terabyte high ground rather than fighting for the desktop boot drive. Price parity by 2017, within 11 cents per GB, would redraw which technology owns which tier of the market.
First-order effects
- Mainstream PC buyers get flash-speed storage at near-HDD pricing by 2017, making SSDs the default boot drive rather than an upsell — directly eroding the entry-level HDD segment Seagate sells into.
Second-order effects
- Seagate and rival disk makers are pushed further up the capacity curve, competing on terabytes-per-dollar via sealed-helium designs instead of resisting flash head-on — the same logic behind their later bet on heat-assisted magnetic recording.
Third-order effects
- Storage splits structurally: flash absorbs the client market while spinning disks retreat to bulk data-center tiers — a division so durable that a decade on, IDC still projects tens of billions in annual data-center HDD spending. And parity proves reversible: the AI-fueled memory shortage shows supply shocks can reprice both media overnight.
The trend: Flash and magnetic storage converge on price, split the market by workload tier, then diverge again whenever memory supply tightens.