content: Account Deleted By User SSDs are not yet cheap enough to store one terabyte of data as cheaply as a mechanical hard drive so they can't explain the trend.   1 TB of storage on mechanical hard drives was massively cheaper in 2009 than it was in 1999.  There has not been anywhere close to as much of an improvement in mechanical hard drives between 2009 and 2019, due to people thinking that mechanical hard drives are a dead end like typewriters and compact discs were in previous decades.  If there was such an improvement then storing 1 PB on a home system should be possible by now, even if it would require multiple hard drives.   How can storing terabytes and petabytes of cloud storage have gotten so much cheaper in the last decade?