Data Hoarder

Price per gigabyte is what we should be looking at and not specific models of drives.

Cost per TB on hdd's is what I look at and it doesn't move down much if at all.

Well, this is pretty normal. Just wait when Micron will enter with the new fab fully active.

why do we keep posting these?

The good news is HAMR drops next year, and that will substantially lower prices.

WD has all but said they will not be able to answer HAMR next year, and will have to compete on cost with smaller drives.

And Toshiba and HGST have been silent.

All that adds up to Seagate getting to 32-40TB next year, and the rest of the players having to slash prices so buyers can get two drives and save a lot.

Yeah no shit. HDDs have been at the price floor for twenty or thirty years. Mechanical complexity dictates minimum cost. What keeps them relevant is expanding capacity. Finer control - even for the same components! - can significantly increase reliable data density. Plus, you can add more platters and only duplicate a few other moving parts.

On a good day, hard drives can offer fifteen-ish terabytes for $200.

By the time SSDs can match that, HDDs will probably be 40+ TB for the same price.

Even if those curves meet - what's really going to squelch the hard drive market is that laptops and smartphones won't touch them. Why in the name of god would you put a spinning disk in a moving object, after 2020? If your device needs as much storage as money can buy - not even a fat gaming laptop will fit 3.5" drives, and all that space comes from disk area. SSDs are going to push out HDDs in much the same way LCDs pushed out other flat-screen tech. It's a virtuous circle of sales encouraging research that improves products and results in more sales. there's probably gonna be a point where 1TB SD cards cost five bucks... and actually hold 1TB.

It's probably because of a physical limitation, kinda like what happened to magnetic tape back in the day. Give it a couple decades, the same thing would probably happen to ssds

Maybe not as dramatic of a price change but the prices for HDD are dropping. You couldn't get an 18TB hard drive for under $280 last year. Now they're on sale for $200.

It's probably because of a physical limitation, kinda like what happened to magnetic tape back in the day. Give it a couple decades, the same thing would probably happen to ssds

Maybe not as dramatic of a price change but the prices for HDD are dropping. You couldn't get an 18TB hard drive for under $280 last year. Now they're on sale for $200.

It's when a cheap substitute clears the low end of the market and only the expensive top remains profitable to make. Similar to iGPUs. You won't find a RTX 4010-4030 for $100, because the gpu built-in the cpu is just good enough for non-gamers.

Look at Seagate share price.. hasn’t tank

Past performance is a terrible predictor of future performance. Ssd prices dropped a lot since the pandemic since demand dropped and the factories are still there. As usual this normally means that new factories will be delayed and prices will be relatively higher going forward for a while. Now the longterm trend still favors ssd but 2022 Is a shitty year to base your price projections on

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.

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.

in my country 1 tb nvme ssd are cheaper than 2.5 inch sata HDD of same size, and it sucks because my server is 10 year old and has only sata ports

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.

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).