Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "The Wobbly Future of the Hard Disk Drive Industry" video.

The old near line storage was tape. I went from Seagate to working on tape drives, because as big as HDDs were getting, there was a need for more storage to archive data. But tape was continually in a race for capacity, with disk drives nipping at their heels. Eventually, arrays of cheap disk drives simply turned into the long term storage solution as well, so they wiped out the market for tape and optical disks as well. I recall the words my old boss at Micropolis said to me when, as a brash 19 year old, I read about optical disks and said to him "optical disks are going to replace our magnetic disks". He told me then that magnetic data could easily surpass optical disks since they were limited by the wavelength of light. That was the late 1970s, and it came true. Will disk drives come to a complete halt? It seems unlikely. HDDs have a use going on into the future for large, cheap storage.
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