If you consider inflation, they have come down kinda? lol
*stares at 20TB for $280 Seagate Exos*
Does it really need to?
Already asking for alot.
This is a bit of a cherry pick.
Sure the drives are dropping slower but at the end of the day, I have a mental ‘limit’ on hard drive prices.
I paid $250 AUD for 3TB once.
Then I paid $250 AUD for 5TB
Then 8 and finally, 16.
It’s taken some time but it continues to evolve. It’s going to take a very long time before an SSD which lasts in excess of 5 to 10 years, matches HDD speeds (you heard me) and costs less than $250 AUD for 16TB.
HDDs are getting cheaper at the high end.
SSDs are still new enough that they are still figuring out how to get economic viability where HDDs were a decade ago.
1TB for $100 is new in NVMEs for example.
That has been the case since the hard drive crisis from the end of 2011. Well, SSDs stagnated or even went a little up over a 1-2 years period a few years back but now they’re back in full swing. If this continues (which isn’t a given, I’d say it’s 50/50 chances) it’ll be hard to justify spinning rust (all the “but but but unpowered SSDs can lose data in as little as X time” aside).
For what it’s worth, we’re coming off of the bottom of a bust cycle in the NAND flash space.
The OP’s graphs basically capture the NAND market from the previous boom through the current bust. So from that specific perspective, SSD prices have been dropping like a rock. The only catch with that window is that it fails to capture the cyclical nature of the market - and thus fails to illustrate how SSD prices go back up.
In practice, SSD prices have hit their lowest point. They are going to rebound here until the next bust in 2-3 years.
Get ready for incessant “SSD cartel” “price-gouging” posts for the next 2~3 years.
If they ever stop producing hard drives, I’ll have to start burning archival discs or something.
I don’t think hard drives are going away anytime soon. Seagate just releases their dual actuator drives to market recently so not only are hdds not going away but they’re still actively being innovated and improved upon.
Yea, good luck with that, the formerly japanese Verbatim is now just a label for some Taiwanese/Hong Kong generic manufacturer, and if before there were some discussions about the BD M-Discs not being worth it and being mostly the same process now they don’t even bother to use the MILLEN metadata, the difference being only on the box label (and price). What’s worse some people reported some really bad quality issues (like 50% failures). So nope, you’ll need to stick with the mainstream.
Pray that we at least keep this perk where the discrete storage is something common and cheap, and not some oddity like any of the dead formats or something reserved for Enterprise use with crazy prices (think tape). Already most people are using just what they get in their devices and that is morphing into stuff soldered into motherboards or even included into SoC (think CPU, but with more functions, but only one chip). And very often it’s even encrypted and you can’t get access to it …
I believe that is just the nature of the beast. SSDs are much simpler from a manufacturing standpoint and benefit from general advances in chip production that keep driving the costs down.
NANDs are still produced in 14-15nm afaik. The only reason they got more capacity is 3d stacking but that has an obvious cost wall.
The timescale is rather short in the grand scheme of things and SSDs have been massively oversupplied in the last little over a year. We’ll have to wait and see how this develops, SSD prices could start to rise if the correct for the oversupply.
3 years ago I paid $280 for an 18TB Easystore this year I paid $200, both were the best deals of the year so I’d say prices are still coming down just more slowly than we’d maybe like.
Not only a short timescale, but one that starts in the middle of the very outlier economic conditions brought about by COVID and the responses to it.
Spinning rust storage prices are hold in place by the WD/Seagate cartel.
They can’t do the same shit with Samsung, Micron, intel, etc. in the game.
can someone help me figure out why they arent going down?
OP cherry picked info to say what they wanted to
HDDs have hit a wall of physics, not of engineering. Well technically it still is engineering but the issues are ones that require new better understanding of physics to solve.
Me I am hype for the LTO price crashing on the next few years.
The main cause is that when it comes to 12TB HDDs and higher , there are only a few manufacturers like WD, Seagate, and Toshiba. However, in the case of SSDs, everyone seems to be making one—MSI, Gigabyte, Samsung, Asus, and more. With HDDs, there’s no real competition based on cost or price anymore; it’s more about who can reach 40 or 50TB first. who can reach 40 or 50TB first.
Again, cherry picking by only using mid sized HDDs against low capacity SSDs.
12tb is mid size now? shame that this hobby got expensive so quick with larger drives costing way more than the usual midpoint
The trick is to get the lightly used 12TB drives from the people who just upgraded to 20TB drives.
But even if you buy new it’s not really expensive per se, the issue is more when expenses happen all at once. If you expect that $350 18TB drive in the post to last about 5 years, that’s $350/5/12 = $6/month, which really isn’t that bad (rough estimate assuming the value will drop to 0, and ignoring opportunity cost; also energy is free)
The trick is to get the lightly used 12TB drives from the people who just upgraded to 20TB drives.
Good luck finding those in Europe. Second hand stuff is being sold here at almost new prices (or above new!). Been so many times that it was not worth buying second hand because the price difference was barely 5 a 10% vs New + 2 year warranty + 2week return.
it’s still a big clump sum unfortunately. paying 400-500€ for one 18tb drive and needing two, that’s way too much money. i used to buy two drives for 500€ at most
Ignoring this graph.
The 2tb HDD I have in my build list cost about the same as the 1tb Samsung m2.
At that point I might as well go for a 2tb ssd honestly.
this is actually bad news, because el cheapo ssds are not good for “unpowered” long time storage
expensive 1 bit per cell ssds maybe, but not multiple bits per cell (and those are the cheap types of ssds)
so for long time hoarders nothing really changes until hdd supply lasts, let’s hope hdd supply will last for long years
1 bit per cell ssds
Are they even there on the market anymore? I couldn’t find any in my country’s dominant tech store chain, and there are barely any MLC drives (it’s just Samsung SM883 up to 1TB and Dell 400 up to 480GB)
Supply and demand.
SSD/NVMe prices have fallen dramatically and offer big performance, space and power efficiency benefits to most users. Many computer enclosures don’t even have bays to install 3.5" HDD’s anymore. If you’re building a PC for a user desktop or buying a laptop, most users will be more than satisfied with one or two NVMe sticks on the motherboard. There’s many more desktops and laptops than servers, so demand is higher and storage manufacturers have accommodated by shifting their production capacity to that product line.
So storage manufacturers have devoted more effort into maximizing materials and manufacturing efficiency/capacity to SSD/NVMe’s than HDD’s to accommodate consumer demand. HDD’s are now being considered more of a lower-volume niche/enterprise product, where capacity is more of a driver than price.
SSD/NVMe prices have fallen dramatically
depends on the country
Pretty common. Drive manufacturers aren’t able to reduce costs much because most of the cost cutting measures were figured out already. With SSDs there is still plenty of opportunity