The hdd being dead will surely come as a surprise to the couple of 12TB rusties spinning joyously in my case right now.

HDDs would be much more important today if flash storage didn’t exist.

did you know that SSD are not memory stable if they dont get electricity every now and again...

Spinning platters are prone to catastrophic mechanical failure and tape can undergo delamination. What of it?

Do you know how much data is stored on ssds in data centres?

One family down the street from me still drives a Saturn! Yet no one is going to say "Saturn isn't dead!".

Nope. It is like - suddenly every truck everywhere is Saturn. The unit count may be lower but the total tonnage moved grows. While HDD shipments have fallen fourfold counted in units, if you check total exabytes delivered you will see they are shipping a lot.

I think the retail market is maybe dead but datacenters are still a fairly large customer I’d think. HDDs really shine at scale where they can be fronted by flash and DRAM cache layers.

They are still cheaper than flash for cold data, but that’s not going to hold for long. Flash is so much denser the acquisition cost difference for a multi-petabyte store becomes small next to the datacenter space and power needed by HDDs. HDDs require research for increasing density while flash can rely on silicon manufacturing advances for that - not that it doesn’t require specific research, but being able to apply the IP across a vast space makes better economical sense.