People won't buy drives much bigger than their workload can use. It's possible that 60TB drives would only be used in massive storage systems, not PCs.
People will, if it comes bundled with their computer.
Nearly every grandparent I've run across has a >100GB hard drive (if not >500GB). They're all using roughly 20GB of that drive, after a couple years.
With only very rare exceptions, people don't choose what goes into their computer. They buy what looks good for a price that they're willing to pay, for the simple reason that buying a computer is full of more buzz-words, acronyms, and useless numbers than any other purchase I've ever made. It's insane, and it gets people to buy more than they need, so the sellers won't stop doing it.
> "People will, if it comes bundled with their computer."
But what will a computer look like in 10 years?
What I've been noting, from the whole mobile explosion, is that people really don't care if their computer only has 64GB of storage. Of all the complaints that people have about tablets and phones replacing 'real' computing, disk space rarely enters the discussion.
So even if tablets and smartphones don't notably replace traditional PCs, their effect on consumer perception of the necessity of large disks can't be ignored.
Sure, it's easy to market 'more gigabytes than your old machine' to a regular person. But so is "faster boot" and "less waiting".
That's why laptop makers can't seem to ditch spinning disks fast enough.
And what motivation does a PC builder have, to continue bundling increasingly-capacious hard drives with little markup? Why not bundle increasingly-faster and increasingly-cheaper SSDs and save the spinning drives for higher-margin positions as add-ons and external storage?
I'd be incredibly surprised if the market for spinning disks doesn't shrink over the next 10 years. They'll certainly remain, even for consumers. But there's no good argument that they'll still be standard.
As far as I've seen, disk space hasn't been in computer-purchasing discussions at all for a few years now - salespeople just say "more than enough" and leave it at that. If you know otherwise, you're in a special class of consumers, and it still matters to you. Plus, if we get 60TB drives tomorrow, we'll have new ways to fill it within the week, and some people will do so, just as we've done to this point.
I totally agree that spinning disks are on the way out, except for high-storage purposes. And then only until flash storage meets / exceeds their density (solid state has a habit of doing this). And I totally agree that the HD size means nothing to most people buying computers. But it does drive sales over smaller numbers, so we'll keep seeing them go up as long as that's true. Maybe the tipping point is now, but I'm not putting any money on that.
As for 'boots faster / less waiting', it isn't something that's generally quantifiable because it comes with a wide range of caveats. Even if it were (I haven't seen any, but I haven't PC shopped for a while), most people I know are well aware that computers slow down over time. They may not know why, but they have seen it happen to every computer they've ever owned - "It wasn't this slow when I bought it" is a common complaint. On top of that, the vast majority of people I know simply don't shut down their computer until an update forces them to. Computers resume from sleep very quickly - my laptop is awake and responding by the time I can get my hands on the keyboard to punch in my password. Cutting that time in half gains nothing, it has reached the 'fast enough' point that it's not an incentive.
