I am so tired of people, especially people who pretend to be computer experts online, completely failing to understand what Moore's Law is.

Moore's Law != "Technology improves over time"

It's an observation that semiconductor transistor density roughly doubles every ~2 years. That's it. It doesn't apply to anything else.

And also for the record, Moore's Law has been dead for a long time now. Getting large transistor density improvements is hard.

I gave the subject a check. From Tom's Hardware, industry predictions are like:

Or, doubling roughly each 4y. Based on that the state of art disks would 500TB roughly in 2040. Make it ~2050 for affordable external storage.

However note that this is extrapolation over a future estimation, and estimation itself is also an extrapolation over past trends. Might as well guess what I'm going to have for lunch exactly one year for now, it'll be as accurate as that.

To complicate things further currently you have competition between two main techs, spinning disks vs. solid state. SSD might be evolving on a different pace, and as your typical SSD has less capacity it might even push the average for customers back a bit (as they swap HDDs with SSDs with slightly lower capacity).

Moore's law is about circuit density, not about storage, so the premise is invalidated in the first place.

There is research being done into 5D storage crystals, where a disc can theoretically hold up to 360TB of data, but don't hold your breath about them being available soon.

Do you have to archive all the porn in the Internet?

Hard drive density has stagnated. There haven't been any major technology breakthroughs since 750GB PMR drives came out in 2006. Most of the capacity improvements since then have come from minor materials improvements and stacking increasing amounts of platters per drive, which has reached its limit. The best drives we have, 24tb, have 10 platters, when drives in the 2000's only had 1-4 platters.

Meanwhile, semiconductors have been releasing new manufacturing processes every few years and haven't stopped.

Moore's Law somewhat held for hard drives up until 2010, but since then it has only been growing at a quarter of the rate.

Right now there are only 24TB HDDs, with 28TB enterprise options available with SMR. The big breakthrough maybe coming next year is HAMR, which would allow for 30tb drives. Meanwhile, 60TB 2.5"/e3.s SSDs are now pretty common in the enterprise space, with some niche 100TB ssds also available in that form factor.

I think if HAMR doesn't catch on fast enough, SSDs will start to outcompete HDDs on price per terabyte. We will likely see 16TB M.2 Ssds very soon. Street prices for m.2 drives are currently $45/TB compared to $14/TB for HDDs. Only a 3:1 advantage, or less than 4 years in Moore's Law terms.

Many enterprise customers have already switched over to SSDs after considering speed, density, and power, so if HDDs don't keep up on price, there won't be any reason to choose them over SSDs.

sources: https://youtu.be/3l2lCsWr39A https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagates-mozaic-3-hamr-platform-targets-30tb-hdds-and-beyond

We can argue as much as we want about whether moore's law covers technological development in general or be pedantic like good old fundamental Christians and only read what the words say.

The bigger problem is that we have reached the era of what we could tentatively call "wal s'eroom". Thanks to enshittification (another one of those slippery words!) I predict that technological progress reverses from now on by 50% every 2 years.

2028: ~363TB 2029: ~439TB 2030: ~531TB

This is what I came up with.

And I was impressed by Seagate launching their Mozaic 3+ 32TB HDDs...