>>106265747 (OP)
hard drives are reaching the physical limits of electro-magnetism, the only way they've got any more storage space is by making the platters thinner and stacking more, but it's quickly becoming impossible to fit any more platters in the same form factor, I doubt we're going to get a 32 tb HDD
which means if you want long term storage for vast amounts of data your options are going to be limited based on need
if you don't give a flying red fuck about price or reliability, then microSD cards are your best bet, a shoebox full will cost several billion dollars or so but you can fit all the data any sane human could want to store in it
if you want to be able to read AND write to the data but use it for long term storage then you're gonna want to go with tape drives, they're insanely underdeveloped, so as the demand for better storage goes up the price is going to drop, the drive itself is the most expensive (and largest) part, but you can get the tapes for significantly cheaper than any HDD per tb, so you've gotta ask how much you wanna store, for the same price of one drive (secondhand) you can get nearly 100 tb of storage in HDDs, if that number seems small to you then tape drives are your best bet.
if you never want to write to them again then you could look into advanced storage techniques, blue ray prices will get weird moving forward, but are still somewhat cheap and easy to use, price per gig is pretty high compared to hard drives, but you can store a shitload of them in the same space, so if you want to burn 100~ gigs at a time and stick them away without them slowly taking over your life, try blue ray, once you get to about 100 tbs however the price has already been eclipsed by HDDs and tape drives both
any other technology is too new, you're not going to get cheap reliable storage for better than tape drives for at least the next 20 years
