For consumer, and "online" hardware I fully agree, but were going to have tape for a long time to come.

As a medium, for offline, offsite it still reigns king. Density, reliably, and durability remain high, vs platter based drives or SSD.

I know of at least two companies that keep tape going for compliance reasons. At the end of each year, they do a pretty large archival snapshot, and send it off to storage. It will remain there till some lawyer asks for it, and will most likely end up copied by a third party for the sake of integrity.

For one of them, the archive tapes are becoming a concern, the media is fine, but finding hardware is going to become a problem.

There are some interesting regulations in finance, I know at least one bank that keeps offline backups on tapes, but wonder how often do they test it.

My experience with them tells me, they are not the most tech savvy bunch. If they ever need to use backups with the software they were provided decades ago / by modern fast failing agile company (according to taste), even if they can get the source it will be very hard to compile and run them. Reproducible builds is not exactly a solved problem.

> Reproducible builds is not exactly a solved problem.

Indeed, but we are getting there (over 90% of packages from Debian stretch amd64 and 99.9% of OpenWRT packages):

https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/ https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/openwrt/

they need to put their entire environment into docker container and archive the images! theyll be able to recreate their whole environment at any time in the future!

...ill see myself out

SSD's haven't displaced drives for bulk data center storage because it's all about $/GB and although SSD's are getting cheaper, spinning disks got cheaper in the same way. Intel is not going to compete on price, but on performance. So rest assured that spinning disks will be with us for a while.

Bulk data is the key there, for many other use cases servers are already using SSDs and once the economies of scale will cause another order of magnitude decrease in cost I think spinning disks will be much more expensive in $/GB than SSDs. Chips are cheap, robust, quite dense and should have a much longer operating life than anything mechanical. The writing is on the platters.

Not just this; HDD technology has been stagnating, while SSD technology still has yet to reach its full potential. In the last five years, HDDs haven't really gotten cheaper (other than market returning to pre-flooding equilibrium). On the other hand, SSDs have gotten easily 4x cheaper in that same period of time.

Plus, since SSDs aren't using the latest process technology (as far as I'm aware), they still have a few more years of Moore's law ahead of them. Shrinking transistor size means increased density (and at lower cost, once you recoup the cost of the mask).

> Plus, since SSDs aren't using the latest process technology (as far as I'm aware), they still have a few more years of Moore's law ahead of them. Shrinking transistor size means increased density (and at lower cost, once you recoup the cost of the mask).

Nope. SSDs have already hit the wall and dug into it a ways. Everybody is doing 16nm/15nm NAND flash and struggling to get ~40nm 3D NAND out the door, but they can't beat the $/GB of planar NAND. Sub-20nm TLC flash has had serious problems with the data just plain leaking out of the memory cell, to say nothing of the scary low program/erase cycle counts. The only thing that really kept the SSD market advancing over the past year was the widespread adoption of better error correcting codes to cope with lower quality flash.

shrinking transistor size may also mean reduced durability, so it's not all roses. we'll see.

If we halve the size of NAND memory cells we can afford to allocate an additional 20% of them for reallocation when other cells fail. It's not a perfect solution by any means, but it is a solution to increase the lifespan nonetheless.

I could see a world in which that changes due to a significant jump in reliability. If these chips are truly 1000x winners in write cycles, that changes the math significantly in terms of $/GB/hr, which is truly the important number for large scale data center storage.