HD Manufacturers aren't lost.
Price of an SSD scales linearly with capacity. Price of an HD doesn't. It'll be quite a while before one can get a Terabyte of solid-state storage for the cost of an HD.
And I'm not optimistic that Moores law will last very much longer. You can't make smaller atoms. For that reason I don't anticipate Terabyte chips, ever.
BTW the best solid-state storage performance would not attach to a disk interface, it would be a card that plugs in to a PCI-X slot.. That's also a more natural manufacturing format for a big bunch of chips. And if HD manufacturers get optical write addressing working, the physical limits are hundreds of Terabytes per disk. (What would one do with a hundred Terabytes inside one's PC?)
My guess is that a future PC will have maybe 40-80Gb of solid-state storage soldered onto the motherboard and a hard disk as an option when the user needs larger amounts of local storage. A smart way to use the solid-state storage would be as persistent cache for a network filesystem. The problem with diskless workstations has always been that they forget everything when they are powered down and then thrash the network and the server when they power up.
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David McLeman
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