What bust? What do you think cloud providers are using for long term storage? SSDs in datacentres are for databases and hot data-sets. Anything that is written for archival purposes or only read infrequently goes to HDDs.
HDDs are still the most cost-effective way of storing data and probably still will be for some time yet.
HDDs won't go away any time soon and that's also exactly what he says but the industry is nowhere close to moving as much product as it did in the past, and the number of companies has been reduced to pretty much three. Technology also isn't going to improve drastically any more while NAND storage only needs that much of a price reduction to match HDDs, currently about 15 vs. 50 Euro/TB. Not spitting distance but it's getting darn close.
It says, after all, "boom and bust" not "rise and fall".
Also, no, tapes are more cost-effective. An LTO-8 tape is about 80 Euros, that's less than seven Euros per TB (uncompressed).
Are databases and cloud services more common than office terminals used across almost every industry, though? Losing out on sales of HDDs for regular machines to both businesses and home use still seems like a huge detriment.
Is it though? Customer acquisition is harder with retail customers, so they're probably saving quite a bit of money by selling in bulk to data centers. Also, with capacities getting higher, I don't know if looking at total shipments is all valuable.
They're losing the low margin, low end market and retaining and probably expanding the higher margin, high end market.
Yup, I have two drives in a a RAID 1 on my NAS, and I'm considering adding two more. No problems for 5-6 years I've had it.
So for me, HDDs aren't going anywhere. In fact, I'm likely to buy more because streaming services are sucking and I'm looking to store more content locally. I have a bunch of DVDs to rip, and I'll probably get a much more "DVDs" as well going forward.