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.
*stares at 20TB for $280 Seagate Exos*
Does it really need to?
Already asking for alot.
If you consider inflation, they have come down kinda? lol
I’d assume there really isn’t much room for HDD prices to come down in contrast to SSDs since the latter always fetched a premium until the technology started becoming more commonplace.
they’ve barely moved in 4+ years though
I’ve got a Samsung 970 evo 1tb for 99 EUR in 2020. Last week (2023) I’ve a Kingston KC 3000 2TB for the same price.
This is not what I call “barely moved”.
depends on your area
I’ve bought a used Crucial MX500 250GB for 30€ in 2019.
Last week I got a Crucial MX500 1TB for 45€.
I can get a 2TB for below double-price but I only need 1 TB and I read that it has a different build with lower speed (lower TLC, smaller DRAM or something, I don’t know).
Exactly 4 years and certainly not barely moved.
they’re near 100€ here, but sure, 250gb was 100€ 10 years ago.
I think it’s simply a matter of physical limitations, we basically reached the physical limit of how hard disk work storing while ssd relie on microchips and we are becoming capable of making more and more circuitry in the same amount of silicon which makes it cheaper
$16.99 …what are your thoughts on it? For the price I’m thinking of trying a few out, but I’m learning about datahoarding first.
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.
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.
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
Now do 18TB SSDs.
In the $300 range…
Even if they’re “only” SATA speeds, that would be such a game changer for a NAS
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)
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.
SSD prices will likely rise in 2024. The market has been massively oversupplied, but they are reducing manufacturing to compensate. It will take some time to reflect in the MSRP but it’s coming. Buy now while it’s cheap!
Get ready for incessant “SSD cartel” “price-gouging” posts for the next 2~3 years. It always happens every time these cyclical markets recover from troughs.