HDD pricing

silk186

silk186

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 26, 2008
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I've been wanting to replace several smaller HDD with a single larger drive and retaining a 2tb for back-up. I was looking at drives from 2tb-6tb and they were all around £30 per tb. The pricing scales linearly with no sweet spot in pricing. What is going on with the pricing? Is this likely to change? HDD are not doing much to compete with SSD.
 
silk186 said:
HDD are not doing much to compete with SSD.
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That's because they're not competing.

I would say that Hard Drive prices are quite stable at the moment and are not likely to change in any drastic manner. Just stay on the lookout for a good deal. You might even consider purchasing an external drive and cracking it open.
 
Disappointing, they will fall farther and farther behind SSD.
 
silk186 said:
Disappointing, they will fall farther and farther behind SSD.
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Not for bulk storage. I mean when will we have a 4TB SSD that costs less than $150 US like we can get 5XXX rpm hard drives today? I believe this will not happen this decade for SSDs and when it does won't 10TB hard drives be $150 US?
 
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Considering a 1tb Crucial M500 is $400 today, I would think that a 4tb drive is within the realm of possibilities of reaching $150, rather quickly...
 
Hard drive prices will eventually fall down but not really that quick. Thinking that a 80GB hard drive 15 years ago cost as much as a 4TB drive today. :)
 
SSDs and HDDs are not really competing anymore, at least in the consumer segment.
HDDs are for bulk storage, SSDs for everything else. Why anyone would buy a mechanical drive for a laptop or a desktop main drive is beyond me.
I can't really remember thinking "I could save a few bucks and get a drive is orders of magnitudes slower, louder, consumes more power and is not shock resistant".
 
From what I have seen, they have been steadily dropping in price. I have seen a few 4tb drives drop into the $120-150 range, and 3tb drives for under $80. However, they have been slow to drop, but then again, SSDs are being slow to drop in price as well. Not to mention, in current trends, as a new generation of SSDs are introduced, the price/gb jumps back up while the older generation is simply phased out, then the new generation drops to the previous generation's price/gb. So no, SSDs aren't really catching up to hard drives in price/gb either. Price/gb in the storage market has remained relatively static.
 
It's come down and with the latest 5 and 6TB drives it will push the 4,3,2's down as well.

Recent example, the HGST NAS started out around MSRP, $189 for 4TB and $149 for 3.

Now it's $175/$124 and less when on sale.
 
omniscence said:
SSDs and HDDs are not really competing anymore, at least in the consumer segment.
HDDs are for bulk storage, SSDs for everything else. Why anyone would buy a mechanical drive for a laptop or a desktop main drive is beyond me.
I can't really remember thinking "I could save a few bucks and get a drive is orders of magnitudes slower, louder, consumes more power and is not shock resistant".
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I don't know what prices you are looking at, but slick, SSD is still stupidly expensive.
 
Out of curiosity I checked if 6TB drives were available to consumers yet and they are! They're actually not all that expensive either, at least not as expensive as I expected.

$319 for a WD 6TB red: http://www.ncix.com/detail/western-digital-wd60efrx-6tb-red-22-99935-1493.htm

Mind you that's the only model at that price the others are more like 600+.

Probably half that in the states though. This should hopefully drive the price of smaller drives down. I could use 2 more 3TB to expand one of my raid 10 arrays.
 
STrooperTK421 said:
I don't know what prices you are looking at, but slick, SSD is still stupidly expensive.
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They are not. My first SSD, an Intel X25-M G2 160 GB cost me the equivalent of 550$. My second SSD, a Crucial C300 256GB was still over 500$. You can now get a MX100 256 for just over 100$ and get a much better performance. From my experience, 256 GB is enough for amost any system unless you waste space or install the whole Steam library. If you look for the alternatives for much less than 100$, what harddrive to you get? Of course, your media library should not go to the SSD.

You just have to consider what you get over mechanical drives by buying SSDs and the decision is obvious. This is like comparing a Ferrari to a shopping cart. You cannot just compare by price per gigabyte.
 
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Red Squirrel said:
Out of curiosity I checked if 6TB drives were available to consumers yet and they are! They're actually not all that expensive either, at least not as expensive as I expected.

$319 for a WD 6TB red: http://www.ncix.com/detail/western-digital-wd60efrx-6tb-red-22-99935-1493.htm

Mind you that's the only model at that price the others are more like 600+.

Probably half that in the states though. This should hopefully drive the price of smaller drives down. I could use 2 more 3TB to expand one of my raid 10 arrays.
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Well not half. The WD 6TB Red and the Seagate 6TB are $300 here in the U.S. But relatively speaking, it's not bad considering that I once paid $200 for a Seagate 1TB drive back when they were getting lower in price. Man was I happy that day!
 
Dangman said:
Well not half. The WD 6TB Red and the Seagate 6TB are $300 here in the U.S. But relatively speaking, it's not bad considering that I once paid $200 for a Seagate 1TB drive back when they were getting lower in price. Man was I happy that day!
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I still can't believe my friend bought a 9GB Seagate Barracuda SCSI drive for $2000 around 1996-1997. non-linear editing was expensive back then.
The most I paid for one drive was $345 for a 345MB Maxtor SCSI drive for my Amiga 3000 Video Toaster system in 1993.
 
Ouch......that is crazy.
I recall paying a couple hundred for a 20G Maxtor @ Staples around the late 90's.

This was before NE/Amazon and online of course so choice was limited.
 
omniscence said:
They are not. My first SSD, an Intel X25-M G2 160 GB cost me the equivalent of 550$. My second SSD, a Crucial C300 256GB was still over 500$. You can now get a MX100 256 for just over 100$ and get a much better performance. From my experience, 256 GB is enough for amost any system unless you waste space or install the whole Steam library. If you look for the alternatives for much less than 100$, what harddrive to you get? Of course, your media library should not go to the SSD.

You just have to consider what you get over mechanical drives by buying SSDs and the decision is obvious. This is like comparing a Ferrari to a shopping cart. You cannot just compare by price per gigabyte.
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More like a sports car with a pickup truck. One is built for speed, the other is built for storage.

Yes, prices dropped rapidly in the early generations. However, for the past 2 years or so, price/GB of SSDs have remained relatively stagnant. I don't think we'll see the rapid price drops anytime soon.
 
HDD prices are falling, but it's been very gradual. Amazon briefly had the WD 3TB Green at $95, then it went back to $108. As the new 5 and 6TB drives become more widely available, they'll help push prices down further on the smaller 3 and 4TB drives.
 
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