I've been noticing this for some time now. I remember buying WD 4TB Ext. HDD 2 years ago for little less than 7k. Now they are 8.5k or more.
I don't think the reason is that they want consumers to move onto SSDs.
There are so many applications where HDD is more than adequate and SSD would be a waste in those places.
Online storage cannot be used for everything, even on 300Mbps connection, it would still be faster to copy something from an Ext. HDD or local NAS over gigabit ethernet.
There is a real usage scenario which can be fulfilled only by hard disks.