Storage Prices

[pandather]

Hi. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. I really miss [H]ardNews. I guess it’d be pretty depressing today anyways. Uh, I am wanting to get into photography and videography when I have the money to spend on a nice camera, but that comes with the cost of lots of disk usage. The current storage prices are very concerning. I’m thinking of just spending like all my money (well I already have ) on more tech to get a NAS setup with raid and hopefully like 100tb of storage space. It’s like $2k to get started with a raidz2 28gb setup. crazy. Are we thinking prices will drop?

I’m a little worried that the “bubble” will last until HDD production is pretty much phased out in favor of SSD and it will be difficult to find storage at these costs again. I’ve had a terrible mentality about this whole tech situation over the past year and I want to know what everyone is thinking before figuring out what hundreds of dollars worth of components to spend the next thousands of dollars on…

My 5TB of storage here is full already and I could also use bulk drives today to repartition stuff and things like that.

 

[kram182]

Been holding off wanting/needing to buy a 32TB HDD too ($1200+ )

HDDs aren't going anywhere anytime soon production wise because of cost per TB even to enterprise/DCs - I wouldn't worry about that

As for when the pricing/DC buying spree will end? When you find out let me know so I can buy mine - you wanna wait possibly that however long(er) or just scratch your itch and take the hit now? I voted yes cause better you than me

 

[mwroobel]

It basically comes down to buy what you need vs buy what would be nice. When you could shuck 20TB's for $249 then buy a whole disk shelf. When it is 3X (or more) the cost you need to do some more thinking.

 

[kydsid]

Ditch the raid, use software parity protection, get host/sas controller, buy used sas disks and save a grand on that 100tb build.

 

[ochadd]

I would buy what you need for the next 6 months to a year. How long had you anticipated 100 tb to be enough?

 

[pandather]

I haven’t gotten the camera yet (probably the farthest out tech purchase since it’s pricey and there’s other more volatile stuff I’d like to purchase first) but I think regardless of what I fer I’ll run through it pretty fast. I’m starting to take lots of videos and those take up space, the llms do, some games do, 100TB would hopefully last me 5-10 years. With a nice camera I’d to record in 10 bit 422 4k60 but even then I’m worried about things filling up eventually. Even without the camera I filled up 5tb in 6 months.

next 6 months to a year i'd maybe only need 12tb or so. I thought RaidZ pretty much was software parity proection for the zfs filesystem? I'm unsure if there's any good options for things with drives with uneven capacities, are there?

 

[ochadd]

Wouldn't worry about RaidZ or RAID. Using a single 12-14TB drive for storage and a second disk, preferably USB, for backups is straight forward. Then if you stick with the camera thing long enough to exhaust your storage, decide what to do then.

 

[stormy1]

3 of the biggest drives you can comfortably afford.
2 in a zfs mirror.
1 in a usb case for backups.
1 disk fail protection, bit rot protection, not the fastest.

 

[LukeTbk]

I’m a little worried that the “bubble” will last until HDD production is pretty much phased out in favor of SSD and it will be difficult to find storage at these costs again

that only occur if ssd get really competitive price wise (they should eventually be cheaper than hdds, but it is much slower than expected price on ssd did not continue to decline as fast and HDD density did not stall and their cost per TB production wise went down quite a bit), HDD production has far to have started any phasing out.

Some prediction of the past ended up all wrong, 2026 hdd shipment in exabytes will completely eclipse 2025 and break all records, will about double the year 2020, 2.25x time 2023, the reason you see high price for HDD is not a lack of supply, never been close to this, but demand for them, 85-90% of capacity for big tech still come from HDD.

I doubt any phase out would occur the next 10 years... even 15 years seem highly improbable, I would not base the decision in anyway about some risk of that tech going away anytime soon, HDD volume and profits never been better than today.

 

[ochadd]

By the time SSDs relegate HDDs to antiquated status, the amount of storage in a single device will be significantly higher. In enterprise gear, you can get 120 TB SSDs today and 256 TB any day now. More QLC and 5-7 bit per cell nand technology is coming. I would not rush to adopt spinning rust. I've been buying used enterprise gear for home storage for many years. My home server has one U.2 SSD and one HDD for backup. Then one USB HDD I keep offline to backup the backups.

I just had to use both backups due to my REFS data store on the SSD getting corrupted due to a UPS failing during a tornado a few weeks ago. My online backup was missing one of the vdisks due to my incompetence and had to go back to late 2024 or 2025 to get it. It wasn't terribly expensive data but saved probably a week of evenings worth of work having it. Went back to NTFS for everything.

 

[myzz]

3 of the biggest drives you can comfortably afford.
2 in a zfs mirror.
1 in a usb case for backups.
1 disk fail protection, bit rot protection, not the fastest.

This is exactly what I do.

SSDs are totally unnecessary for photo/video work unless you're editing directly off the drives.

Get email alerts to sites and pull the trigger on a deal when you find one. I lucked out and found some 20tb Easystores for somewhat close to pre-apocalypse pricing recently. But it's getting worse day by day.

Also look into programs to compress and archive footage... once you complete a shoot, ditch or compress the excess footage or photos.

 

[myzz]

Oh - can't believe no one mentioned - SSDs are not good for long term storage when unpowered!