Not unlike Bitcoin, hard drives have been pronounced dead for many years, but they’re still alive and kicking. Don’t get me wrong, I love SSDs, and I use them everywhere, but the biggest SSD I have can only store 1 TB of data. There are SSDs which can store more, but they’re prohibitively expensive.

Another interesting property of HDDs is the fact that they can store data for 10+ years, which is not the case for SSDs. That’s why I’m pleased to see that HDDs keep improving in terms of storage capacity and speed. The latest development in HDD land is dual-actuator design.

This architecture can double the speed of an HDD, bringing it closer to SSD territory. Looks like conventional hard drives are going to stay with us for a while.