SSD prices are getting cheaper and cheaper. HDDs aren't.
SSD prices are getting cheaper and cheaper. HDDs aren't.
85 comments
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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.
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stares at 20TB for $280 Seagate Exos
Does it really need to?
Already asking for alot.
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If you consider inflation, they have come down kinda? lol
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Get ready for incessant "SSD cartel" "price-gouging" posts for the next 23 years.
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If they ever stop producing hard drives, I'll have to start burning archival discs or something.
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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.
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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 ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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can someone help me figure out why they arent going down?
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OP cherry picked info to say what they wanted to
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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
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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.
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SSD/NVMe prices have fallen dramatically
depends on the country
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Now do 18TB SSDs.
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In the $300 range…
Even if they’re “only” SATA speeds, that would be such a game changer for a NAS
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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
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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)
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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.
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Again, cherry picking by only using mid sized HDDs against low capacity SSDs.
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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.
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12tb is mid size now? shame that this hobby got expensive so quick with larger drives costing way more than the usual midpoint
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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)
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M.2 ssd are tge biggest deal but i only have one slot
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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!
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Get ready for incessant "SSD cartel" "price-gouging" posts for the next 23 years. It always happens every time these cyclical markets recover from troughs.
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Both are dropping. SSDs used to cost a fucking fuck load!
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Both are dropping, but SSDs are dropping more quickly
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One day I shall have a full nvme NAS with 12x 8TD nvme disks? :D
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$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.
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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
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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.
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they've barely moved in 4+ years though
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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.
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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".
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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
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But large SSDs still seem to be really high priced.
Like I have 300TB on HDDs. The largest reasonably priced SSD seems to be the Samsung 870 QVO at like $300.
But I really don’t want to have to connect and manage 38 disks…
And at $300 per, that’s over $11,000
Meanwhile I could get 17 18TB HDDs for $3000.
Over $8000 cheaper which is a lot IMO, and 17 disks isn’t so hard to manage compared to 38 IMO.
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You shouldn’t use such an old X16 12TB for analysis. It’s price will increase since they’re getting sparse.
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They have gotten low enough im considering flash arrays for homelab.
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They are getting cheaper, but because it is such mature tech, it doesn't happen nearly as quickly.
A few years ago I bought 12tb drives for 199, and now 199 gets you 18tb. So for the same price you get 50% more storage.
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few years ago that 199 was worth 20% more too 🤣
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Which is more susceptible to an EMP, an SSD or an HDD?
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First of all, on all your HDD price graphs there is a clear downward trend.
Secondly the way you are making the comparison doesn't make sense. On a device SKU level, a particular model of HDD is of course going to remain stable for the life cycle of that model because it's a complete monolithic design, a HDD factory kitted out for a particular model does just that and nothing else.
A SSD drive on the other hand is just a repackaging of flash chips, if Crucial manages to buy cheaper chips that fit you bet they are going to use them. And the chip fab can make many different chips, not just one model so it's not comparable economics at all.
What you need to do is compare price/TB on the current market, not of 3 year old devices.
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We make a product containing a 1TB 2.5" HDD.
Our cost price of a 1TB 2.5" HDDs have gone up over the last few years.
It is now significantly cheaper to buy a 1TB 2.5" SSD retail from Amazon than it is for us to by a 1TB 2.5" HDD wholesale.
However cheap 2.5" SSDs are often slower than 2.5" HDDs in some important use cases. A simple test of writing the entire SSD is often slower than writing the entire HDD (which is already not exactly fast when we are talking about 2.5" drives). More importantly cheap SSDs can randomly pause for a period of time... typically only a few seconds but sometimes more than 10 seconds while they do things.
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Well, it is still not comparable to the $/tb ratio offered by HDDs and I don't really think it will be close to it in the future. Also, they are used for different use cases, so I do not see any reason to compare it now.
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Price per gigabyte is what we should be looking at and not specific models of drives.
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Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
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this is why i made the decision to have all 16TB of my media server on SSDs
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There are lot of rumours that SSD prices are either going to up or remains static.
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Well, this is pretty normal. Just wait when Micron will enter with the new fab fully active.
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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.
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why do we keep posting these?
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Cost per TB on hdd's is what I look at and it doesn't move down much if at all.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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Look at Seagate share price.. hasn’t tank
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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.
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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
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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.
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What’ll be extremely nice is when the price per TB is less on an SSD than a hard drive.
Might be a while, but I would gladly take SATA speeds if that’s what it meant to get to that price.
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Graph a 2TB and 4TB HDD
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it's crazy that exactly one year ago i paid almost double the price for the same drive i bought last week
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I just assumed since spinning rust can outlast flash it will always cost more. I can't think of anyone using flash for long term storage or backups.
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It's cute how OP is comparing enterprise-grade HDDs with 5y warranty, with the trashiest consumer-grade SSDs with 2y warranty, some of which are QLC garbage that cannot be reliably used for long-term storage.
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My thoughts exactly... and in Euro's as well.
Compare them to US prices and WD Red's and the picture looks a lot different.
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And a Toshiba N300 is the lowest quality drive out there.
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Can we have ban for these "SSD soon cheaper than HDD" postings?
Please? Pleeeze! I implore you, I can't stand those people anymore... nargh!
85 comments
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.