SSD controllers are cheaper than the fixed costs of hard drive motors, actuators and clean-room assembly. Adding an extra platter gets you more incremental GB per dollar, but getting that first platter working is much more expensive than the minimum viable SSD.
Cost is still up there but only about 2.5x as expensive as 2.5" HDDs... a 2 TB HDD is about $80 while a 1 TB SSD is ~$100-120. And there are (kinda shitty) 2 TB SSDs that are hitting $250 these days (eg Micron 1100).
You can get them for sure[0] and they're not really that expensive at all. That particular one gave me about 95MB/s write speed on large files.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/...
Sorting by price on Newegg, if you're looking for a cheap laptop drive you can choose right now between a 320gb HDD for $28.55, a 60gb SSD for $19.99, or a 240gb SSD for $31.99.
For a 1TB drive, you're looking at $38.50 HDD vs $109.99 SSD.
Large SSDs remain fairly expensive for now, but the low end is being eaten.
Reliability and mean time between failures figure in to the equation as well -- at both the low end and the high end.
Data centers don't want to be swapping out bad drives all the time, and low-end consumers can't afford to buy new drives all the time. Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did.
I personally do like to buy laptops with mechanical drives in them, because I can get a lot of storage without paying insane prices, and because I want the drive to last as long as possible. And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me.
> And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me.
I'm pretty sure you're cherry-picking the data you're willing to look at. It's definitely not true that any datacenter ever avoids SSDs due to worries about drive failure rates. These days, high-end consumer or enterprise SSDs are warrantied to survive more writes than it is physically possible to send to a hard drive during the same 5-year span. Flash memory write endurance stopped being a serious concern by the time consumer SSDs reached capacities that made them sufficient for use as the sole storage device in a mainstream laptop.
Controller/firmware bugs are the only source of SSD failure that you have a non-negligible chance of encountering in the wild, but the rate of such failures is very small, especially if you stick to the major reputable SSD brands. And that's in the consumer market where the vendors aren't specifically validating each SSD model with your specific servers before you put anything into production.
But in a laptop, a device that you lug around, move around while working, and sometimes even drop, a precise mechanical device has a much larger chance to misbehave, to my mind. Its I/O load is way lower than in the datacenter, too.
Power failure behavior of most consumer oriented SSDs is also data corrupting.
Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD).
At that point, HDDs will essentially only be found in external drives and data centers. The writing will be on the wall, and R&D will slow down, starting a cycle that will lead to collapse.