Notebook hard drives are dead: How SSDs will dominate mobile PC storage by 2018

If current pricing trends continue, the conventional notebook hard drive could die by 2018, replaced with fast, slim, and increasingly cheaper SSDs.

SSDs can generally transfer data faster and with less latency than hard drives, running silently and consuming less power. But they’ve traditionally been priced several orders of magnitude higher than a hard drive of the same capacity, limiting their use to higher-end PCs.

Quietly, however, that’s changing. The flash vendors designing the chips used within SSDs have aggressively introduced technology that continues to lower their cost. Meanwhile, hard drive vendors have spent the last 60 years whittling dollar after dollar from the cost of a hard drive, but face slowing price declines that should allow SSDs to catch up.

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