One thing I often say to my customers (with basic needs) in general is not to spend time going through your personal data and making arduous decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of, because the cost of storage will keep coming down (and partly because I know that the vast majority of them will say that they should go through such a process then either never start or give up halfway through). Generally speaking I think this continues to hold true but I think there are exceptions. For example:
A major user of space on my 4TB HDD (pure data drive, I have a boot SSD) is my film collection; it mostly comprises of DVDs ripped to NVENC H.264 (I started a few years ago on older hardware) and some Blu-Rays ripped to H.265 in software. As a result of a quick experiment on my new build I found that re-ripping the DVDs to H.265 in software resulted in a reduction in file size of between 0.5GB and 1GB per film with the same quality settings (RF16 for DVDs), and from what I've seen so far the visual result is identical. I have approximately 200 films on disc so the saving when I've finished the task is not insignificant (at least 97GB freed up).
The 4TB HDD has been around the 50-60% capacity mark for quite some time, and given that I'm also doing things like scanning my parents' old photos in as 600dpi TIFFs (600dpi in case someone wants to print one in full photo quality from an inkjet, and TIFF to preserve as much quality as possible especially if a given photo is to be improved in some way), I expect more space will get used during my long-term use of the drive. Judging by past usage, I expect that this drive will get full enough to get something bigger eventually, especially if I carried on storing everything on this drive and not optimising usage with say my film re-ripping work.
My reason for the question in the thread title is that historically storage has always become cheaper, but the fact of the matter is that the cloud is a game-changer. In my line of work I'm fairly sure I'm seeing fewer customers who store lots of data on their computers because these days they take pictures on their phone and the content is backed up to the cloud, and they're happy with that. I trust the cloud with as little as possible let alone all my data and I doubt that's ever going to change. Logically though, I would expect that as fewer people purchase 'very high' capacity drives that the prices won't just keep coming down as they always have done. Cloud providers probably will buy enterprise-class drives so IMO their increased usage won't inherently drive mainstream prices down either.
I'm not one of these people who will happily drop hundreds of pounds on a bigger drive because "I want more"; the 4TB HDD I have is one of a pair that a customer gave to me when they upgraded their NAS! (I have the second one as a backup drive) Buying say an 8TB HDD (I'm going for NAS class drives in future because those seem a lot more guaranteed to have the APM function that I rely on so Linux will auto-power down the drive) is pretty pricey, I think it was just shy of £200 UKP last I looked.
The other thing I'm doing also breaks a general rule I recommend to customers whereby any data that they want to back up ought to be on their main PC and then having a simple backup system that copies it to external media (otherwise they would have to keep track of what's on each external media), is that I've archived some data off my PC to two spare HDDs partly to reduce the usage of my main 4TB HDD, partly to speed up some of my backups, and partly to reduce the need to replace my army of lower capacity HDDs which are almost exclusively cast-offs from customers; for example my 'archive disks' are two 2.5" 500GB SATA HDDs; I copy the data to be archived to both archive drives then delete from the main PC. I also have a spreadsheet that details everything that's been archived and when all my different types of backup have last been run and what they include.
A major user of space on my 4TB HDD (pure data drive, I have a boot SSD) is my film collection; it mostly comprises of DVDs ripped to NVENC H.264 (I started a few years ago on older hardware) and some Blu-Rays ripped to H.265 in software. As a result of a quick experiment on my new build I found that re-ripping the DVDs to H.265 in software resulted in a reduction in file size of between 0.5GB and 1GB per film with the same quality settings (RF16 for DVDs), and from what I've seen so far the visual result is identical. I have approximately 200 films on disc so the saving when I've finished the task is not insignificant (at least 97GB freed up).
The 4TB HDD has been around the 50-60% capacity mark for quite some time, and given that I'm also doing things like scanning my parents' old photos in as 600dpi TIFFs (600dpi in case someone wants to print one in full photo quality from an inkjet, and TIFF to preserve as much quality as possible especially if a given photo is to be improved in some way), I expect more space will get used during my long-term use of the drive. Judging by past usage, I expect that this drive will get full enough to get something bigger eventually, especially if I carried on storing everything on this drive and not optimising usage with say my film re-ripping work.
My reason for the question in the thread title is that historically storage has always become cheaper, but the fact of the matter is that the cloud is a game-changer. In my line of work I'm fairly sure I'm seeing fewer customers who store lots of data on their computers because these days they take pictures on their phone and the content is backed up to the cloud, and they're happy with that. I trust the cloud with as little as possible let alone all my data and I doubt that's ever going to change. Logically though, I would expect that as fewer people purchase 'very high' capacity drives that the prices won't just keep coming down as they always have done. Cloud providers probably will buy enterprise-class drives so IMO their increased usage won't inherently drive mainstream prices down either.
I'm not one of these people who will happily drop hundreds of pounds on a bigger drive because "I want more"; the 4TB HDD I have is one of a pair that a customer gave to me when they upgraded their NAS! (I have the second one as a backup drive) Buying say an 8TB HDD (I'm going for NAS class drives in future because those seem a lot more guaranteed to have the APM function that I rely on so Linux will auto-power down the drive) is pretty pricey, I think it was just shy of £200 UKP last I looked.
The other thing I'm doing also breaks a general rule I recommend to customers whereby any data that they want to back up ought to be on their main PC and then having a simple backup system that copies it to external media (otherwise they would have to keep track of what's on each external media), is that I've archived some data off my PC to two spare HDDs partly to reduce the usage of my main 4TB HDD, partly to speed up some of my backups, and partly to reduce the need to replace my army of lower capacity HDDs which are almost exclusively cast-offs from customers; for example my 'archive disks' are two 2.5" 500GB SATA HDDs; I copy the data to be archived to both archive drives then delete from the main PC. I also have a spreadsheet that details everything that's been archived and when all my different types of backup have last been run and what they include.