The biggest cost for cloud storage services is not disks. Never has been. They're pretty cheap all things told. It's the per rack operational costs that dwarf them. The cost of electricity, cooling etc. You're also paying for the durability and accessibility that is built in to the software. It's why you see, e.g. backblaze obsessing about their server specifications and how many disks they can cram in to the server. Everyone is trying to maximise the rack data density, and trying to tow a really fine line on having just enough compute power in the individual server.