5 ms·

Really? Before the flood, I seem to remember you could get a 1TB Samsung F1 7200rpm drive for £30. Now, an equivalent drive will set you back around £35, and

Really? Before the flood, I seem to remember you could get a 1TB Samsung F1 7200rpm drive for £30. Now, an equivalent drive will set you back around £35, and it's taken a long time to reach that level...

toyg 11y ago
Physical disks are not going down in price because their market volume is shrinking, their technology is just not evolving. On consumer machines, the 5400rpm drives are being replaced by other 5400 or by SSDs, not by 7200rpm. So the 5400 disks don't go down in price, whereas SSDs do (albeit slowly, due to technological constraints).
- cdr 11y ago
  I'd say SSDs are going down in price pretty dang fast. The technology is advancing far more rapidly than HDDs could ever dream of. The Samsung 850 EVO 500GB is already ~25% cheaper than the equivalent 840 was a year ago, with better performance. Not to mention the high performance NVMe drives we're starting to see, where the price:performance is even better.
  - toyg 11y ago
    i think the main parameter people judge price reductions for disks is "$ per GB", rather than anything related to performance. SSDs are getting better and faster, but the price per GB is not exactly crashing.
hga 11y ago
Really. Seagate enterprise highest duty cycle "nearline" drives, 5 year warranty (which I not long ago had to use for one of the 2 I bought back then). A SAS interface adds $20 currently; models and Newegg prices: Constellation ES ST32000444SS 2TB $265 7/15/11 SAS Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0023 4TB $230 10/21/15 SAS Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0033 4TB $210 10/21/15 SATA ADDED: Samsung magnetic hard drives are going to be bad for historic price comparisons, for Seagate bought their unit in 2011 (http://www.seagate.com/about-seagate/news/seagate-completes-aquisition-samsungs-hdd-business-pr/ http://www.seagate.com/about-seagate/news/seagate-completes-...). Per that press release, "To ease the transition of products and technologies, Seagate will retain certain Samsung HDD products under the Samsung brand name for 12 months"; Your old price might be lower than normal due to that sale, and/or whatever prompted Samsung to get out of the business; the current price is close out inventory of older generation technology.
cptskippy 11y ago
This is all anecdotal but... I bought... 1TB WD Green EARS HDDs in 2010 for $70. 2TB WD Red HDDs in spring 2014 for $89. 1TB WD Black HDDs in fall 2014 for $90. Just spot checked the same drives... 1TB WD Green EARS HDDs go for $57. 2TB WD Red HDDs go for $89. 1TB WD Black HDDs go for $71. So prices are slowly falling but I don't think that we're going to see the rapid falls we were accustom to in the last decade due either to technological constrains or consumer demand, likely both. From 2000-2005 we went from 20GB to 500GB drives, a 25x growth in 5 years but in 2010 we only had 2TB drives which is just a 4x growth. It's 2015 the largest consumer HDDs you can get from WD, Seagate, and HGST are 6TB, 8TB, and 10GB respectively. That's 3-5x growth for the 5 year period. Why has growth slowed? Is it a technological constraint or a lack of investment? In the early 2000s you could only play music and movies you possessed so there was a big demand for storage space for all your ripped CDs and DVDs. In 2007 Netflix introduced online streaming and today we have thousands of choices for streaming video or music on demand which combined with cloud storage options negated our need for high capacity drives. I think the fact that people are opting for 120GB SSDs over 4TB HDDs demonstrates that the consumer need for extremely large hard drives is in decline. In the past the HDD makers were very competitive but if you look at WD, Seagate and HGST today you can see they're no longer competing on drive capacities. HGST is the only one that even bothers to sell a consumer grade 10TB HDD. Western Digital has been diversifying for years; first it was portable backup solutions, then NAS drives, NAS solutions, Surveillance and Data Center drives, and just today they announced they're buying Sandisk, a major SSD player. I think the industry as a whole is moving away from HDDs and for that reason they nolonger need to compete so ferociously on price points.
- bitL 11y ago
  HGST 8TB is keeping its high price for about a year already. Prior to that they had wonderful 4TB drives for ~$100 for home NAS, the price for 8TB version is like 6x higher and their 4TB drives are no more since WD acquired them (and Seagate's 8TB home drives have poor reliability, HGST being the only reliable HDD manufacturer atm). Seems like we are in a sort of a limbo when there aren't any reasonably priced SSDs >1TB and HDDs are stuck at 8-10TB for a while already. As for SSDs, most of the optimization goes to improving bandwidth (where most people won't notice a real-world difference between an SSD plugged into SATA2 and M.2 PCIe baring 8k/4k video creation), but anyone will notice a real-world difference in increased IOPS, which no company cares about and they plateaued at ~100k IOPS for the past few years (i.e. some of the low-end Sandisk SSDs with 4k IOPS are subjectively as slow as HDDs).
neckro23 11y ago
A 1TB spinning-rust disk is quickly becoming a niche product. Looking quickly on Amazon, a 1TB drive is ~$50 while you can get a 5TB for ~$150. The price has plummeted, just not at that capacity.
SixSigma 11y ago
According to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator [1] £30 in 2010 would be £34.35 in 2014 (I had to do it that way, it only goes up to 2014) [1] http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/resources/inflationtools/calculator/flash/default.aspx http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/resources/inf...

toyg 11y ago

Physical disks are not going down in price because their market volume is shrinking, their technology is just not evolving. On consumer machines, the 5400rpm drives are being replaced by other 5400 or by SSDs, not by 7200rpm. So the 5400 disks don't go down in price, whereas SSDs do (albeit slowly, due to technological constraints).

cdr 11y ago
I'd say SSDs are going down in price pretty dang fast. The technology is advancing far more rapidly than HDDs could ever dream of. The Samsung 850 EVO 500GB is already ~25% cheaper than the equivalent 840 was a year ago, with better performance. Not to mention the high performance NVMe drives we're starting to see, where the price:performance is even better.
- toyg 11y ago
  i think the main parameter people judge price reductions for disks is "$ per GB", rather than anything related to performance. SSDs are getting better and faster, but the price per GB is not exactly crashing.

hga 11y ago

Really. Seagate enterprise highest duty cycle "nearline" drives, 5 year warranty (which I not long ago had to use for one of the 2 I bought back then). A SAS interface adds $20 currently; models and Newegg prices: Constellation ES ST32000444SS 2TB $265 7/15/11 SAS Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0023 4TB $230 10/21/15 SAS Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0033 4TB $210 10/21/15 SATA ADDED: Samsung magnetic hard drives are going to be bad for historic price comparisons, for Seagate bought their unit in 2011 (http://www.seagate.com/about-seagate/news/seagate-completes-aquisition-samsungs-hdd-business-pr/ http://www.seagate.com/about-seagate/news/seagate-completes-...). Per that press release, "To ease the transition of products and technologies, Seagate will retain certain Samsung HDD products under the Samsung brand name for 12 months"; Your old price might be lower than normal due to that sale, and/or whatever prompted Samsung to get out of the business; the current price is close out inventory of older generation technology.

cptskippy 11y ago

This is all anecdotal but... I bought... 1TB WD Green EARS HDDs in 2010 for $70. 2TB WD Red HDDs in spring 2014 for $89. 1TB WD Black HDDs in fall 2014 for $90. Just spot checked the same drives... 1TB WD Green EARS HDDs go for $57. 2TB WD Red HDDs go for $89. 1TB WD Black HDDs go for $71. So prices are slowly falling but I don't think that we're going to see the rapid falls we were accustom to in the last decade due either to technological constrains or consumer demand, likely both. From 2000-2005 we went from 20GB to 500GB drives, a 25x growth in 5 years but in 2010 we only had 2TB drives which is just a 4x growth. It's 2015 the largest consumer HDDs you can get from WD, Seagate, and HGST are 6TB, 8TB, and 10GB respectively. That's 3-5x growth for the 5 year period. Why has growth slowed? Is it a technological constraint or a lack of investment? In the early 2000s you could only play music and movies you possessed so there was a big demand for storage space for all your ripped CDs and DVDs. In 2007 Netflix introduced online streaming and today we have thousands of choices for streaming video or music on demand which combined with cloud storage options negated our need for high capacity drives. I think the fact that people are opting for 120GB SSDs over 4TB HDDs demonstrates that the consumer need for extremely large hard drives is in decline. In the past the HDD makers were very competitive but if you look at WD, Seagate and HGST today you can see they're no longer competing on drive capacities. HGST is the only one that even bothers to sell a consumer grade 10TB HDD. Western Digital has been diversifying for years; first it was portable backup solutions, then NAS drives, NAS solutions, Surveillance and Data Center drives, and just today they announced they're buying Sandisk, a major SSD player. I think the industry as a whole is moving away from HDDs and for that reason they nolonger need to compete so ferociously on price points.

bitL 11y ago
HGST 8TB is keeping its high price for about a year already. Prior to that they had wonderful 4TB drives for ~$100 for home NAS, the price for 8TB version is like 6x higher and their 4TB drives are no more since WD acquired them (and Seagate's 8TB home drives have poor reliability, HGST being the only reliable HDD manufacturer atm). Seems like we are in a sort of a limbo when there aren't any reasonably priced SSDs >1TB and HDDs are stuck at 8-10TB for a while already. As for SSDs, most of the optimization goes to improving bandwidth (where most people won't notice a real-world difference between an SSD plugged into SATA2 and M.2 PCIe baring 8k/4k video creation), but anyone will notice a real-world difference in increased IOPS, which no company cares about and they plateaued at ~100k IOPS for the past few years (i.e. some of the low-end Sandisk SSDs with 4k IOPS are subjectively as slow as HDDs).

neckro23 11y ago

A 1TB spinning-rust disk is quickly becoming a niche product. Looking quickly on Amazon, a 1TB drive is ~$50 while you can get a 5TB for ~$150. The price has plummeted, just not at that capacity.

SixSigma 11y ago

According to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator [1] £30 in 2010 would be £34.35 in 2014 (I had to do it that way, it only goes up to 2014) [1] http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/resources/inflationtools/calculator/flash/default.aspx http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/resources/inf...