Hard Drive Cost per Gigabyte

Megalith

Megalith

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Backblaze has looked into hard drive costs and found that the rate of change has slowed dramatically: from January 2009 to January 2011, the average cost for a hard drive decreased 45% from $0.11 to $0.06 ($0.05 per gigabyte), but from January 2015 to January 2017, the average cost only decreased 26% from $0.038 to $0.028 (just $0.01 per gigabyte). While the leading factor (e.g., interest, manufacturing hurdles) seems unclear, the challenge for storage industries is certain, being that data requirements are growing but the cost per gigabyte curve for hard drives is flattening out.

The manufacturing and marketing efficiencies that drive the pricing of hard drives seems to have changed over time. For example, the 6 TB drives have been in the market at least 3 years, but are not even close to the cost per gigabyte of the 4 TB drives. Meanwhile, back in 2011, the 3 TB drives models fell below the cost per gigabyte of the 2 TB drives they “replaced” within a few months. Have we as consumers decided that 4 TB drives are “big enough” for our needs and we are not demanding (by purchasing) larger sized drives in the quantities needed to push down the unit cost?
 
Meanwhile, still waiting on that price parity that was projected to happen around this time between HDD and SSD storage
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I think we are still decades away from that. Not sure if 3D NAND based on silicon will even be the solution. We may need new materials to get the kind of density / cost needed.
 
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drescherjm said:
I think we are still decades away from that. Not sure if 3D NAND based on silicon will even be the solution. We may need new materials.
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Well full disclosure, the graph I recall seeing came directly from SanDisk back in 2012-2013. Probably to get shareholders excited.
 
The cost of SSD's seems to have flattened out too. They aren't decreasing the way they were last year at this time.
 
Armenius said:
Well full disclosure, the graph I recall seeing came directly from SanDisk back in 2012-2013. Probably to get shareholders excited.
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I think in next couple decades we will hit the wall with everything tech wise. We just won't have the materials to make future tech. Silicon is reaching the limits of what it can do. I am sure most things been tested by now and synthetic materials would be cost prohibited.
 
Armenius said:
Meanwhile, still waiting on that price parity that was projected to happen around this time between HDD and SSD storage...

Damn cell phones :rage:.
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1/2TB and 1TB SSDs have still come down in price tremendously and even at 5x - 10x the price of HDD's are worth it for home use due to the still growing increases in speed over platter drives.
 
I think the storage needs of the "average user" factor in pretty strongly here. Probably no more than 1 in a 100 users wants more than a couple TB of storage. Probably 1 in a 1,000 or even 10,000 want more than 4TB. Honestly 4TB is a WHOLE lot of porn family photos, game backups and MP3s. Far more than most people, even "digital hoarders" would accumulate.
 
If you are part of the majority of folks that are primarily streamers, why do you need a lot of storage? Other then OS, user installed programs, and the occasional picture, you don't really use much storage space. Probably why phone makers haven't really felt the need to expand on board space anywhere near the speed of advancing technology.
 
That's like asking unless you're somebody that lives in an area that gets hot, why would you need air conditioning.

well, yeah.
 
Dead Parrot said:
If you are part of the majority of folks that are primarily streamers, why do you need a lot of storage? Other then OS, user installed programs, and the occasional picture, you don't really use much storage space. Probably why phone makers haven't really felt the need to expand on board space anywhere near the speed of advancing technology.
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Well, personally, I'm now streaming from my own library of misbegotten backed-up CDs, DVDs, Blurays and family photos/videos.

Granted, it'll still be a while before I fill up nearly 11 TB on my NAS.
 
vegeta535 said:
I think in next couple decades we will hit the wall with everything tech wise. We just won't have the materials to make future tech. Silicon is reaching the limits of what it can do. I am sure most things been tested by now and synthetic materials would be cost prohibited.
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I think we're already there. Gpu's have done well, but CPU's not so much. Maybe lack of competition from amd, maybe not. The last large jump we got was the old core 2's. The i5/7 was great when it came out, but much less of a jump. Skylake to kaby is just a joke it's so small. Amd has only just caught up.

Cell phones are faster, but I see that as just minaturizing and lowering power requirements of the CPU. From that respect, still a long way to go.

When you think about it, when was the last time we had a large jump in performance?
 
Maybe I am misunderstanding the methodology yet I have to ask, why isn't Backblaze reporting the cost they paid for the hard drives, no matter make or model?
 
It the average cost that they paid for drives that they bought at their discount prices they get when purchasing 100s at a time. Although they do at times shuck externals so the listed drives may or may not be internal drives.
 
Teenyman45 said:
1/2TB and 1TB SSDs have still come down in price tremendously and even at 5x - 10x the price of HDD's are worth it for home use due to the still growing increases in speed over platter drives.
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Eh because of the shortages etc., most 500GB and 1TB drives are $30-50+ over priced.
 
Even 1/2TB SSDs are still reserved for premium products and 1TB SSDs are basically out of the mind of almost everyone on the planet. Those are reserved for mostly power users and people who knows what they are doing and what they want.

I would use 1TB SSDs (my 1/2TB SSD game drive is filling up), but I would never replace all of my Spinners in my system with SSDs, too expensive and density is too low (per Sata device), with no sign of major capacity increases to Spinner levels anytime soon.
 
chenw said:
Even 1/2TB SSDs are still reserved for premium products and 1TB SSDs are basically out of the mind of almost everyone on the planet. Those are reserved for mostly power users and people who knows what they are doing and what they want.

I would use 1TB SSDs (my 1/2TB SSD game drive is filling up), but I would never replace all of my Spinners in my system with SSDs, too expensive and density is too low (per Sata device), with no sign of major capacity increases to Spinner levels anytime soon.
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Same here. I need a good amount of storage. I currently have 10 TB + my 250gb ssd. I can't imagine spending the money on 10tb of ssd! Plus it's very unnecessary. How much data do you really need fast access to? I know my music collection doesn't care :p

I think it'll all be solid state of some sort one day, just not for a while at this rate. The data densities and change in cost has pretty much stalled.
 
It's really a demand issue. I'm not as [H] as some here, but certainly more so than the average user. That said, I have a server at home for the bulk of my storage, and nothing larger than a 1TB drive in any other system, mainly because that was about the cheapest I could buy. My laptops have no bigger than 256GB SSD, which is way more than needed. My wife is the shutterbug of the family, and uploads all her pictures to social media. We are Netflix junkies, so don't have much personal video to store. The idea of 8TB hard drives is nice, but it'd be like buying a 10,000 sq ft home for the three members of my family. Lots of unused space collecting dust.
 
Teenyman45 said:
1/2TB and 1TB SSDs have still come down in price tremendously and even at 5x - 10x the price of HDD's are worth it for home use due to the still growing increases in speed over platter drives.
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MLC is still around $1/GB. That is 35x the price of a platter drive. While TLC is much better now reliability wise than it was even just a couple years ago, I still wouldn't waste my own money on a SSD using TLC.
 
We recently got a KD400 to essentially be a media NAS for most of the house after tinkering with a few different usb/portable drives and hitting the limit on many fronts from storage size/compatibility/and means of transmission. I was really happy to see a reasonable price for an 8TB WD Red. After ripping most of our 3d BD's and copying 15 years worth of tv/movies etc. from various drives to it there's about 2TB left on it.

Been watching SATA III and M.2 SSD's prices since the beginning. I remember last year when they forecast the nand shortage and price increases. I was happy to get a OCZ 960GB in March for ~$250. I was psyched because I finally was able to convert a rig to fully platterless(not even an optical). Since then I've watched them rise and average $280-340 on NewEgg and Amazon. The Samsung's and Intel's are truly ridiculous at $320-450 range now. Only Sandisk and Mushkin seem to be hanging in that $259 level but not sure about speed performance levels or lifespan to fully commit to them. Point being SSD prices dropped and, then as forecast, have climbed again for SSD's. Platters, meanwhile, are gaining in size with adequate transfer speeds and prices making price per gigabyte analysis a little more complicated than these graphs indicate.
 
Bandalo said:
I think the storage needs of the "average user" factor in pretty strongly here. Probably no more than 1 in a 100 users wants more than a couple TB of storage. Probably 1 in a 1,000 or even 10,000 want more than 4TB. Honestly 4TB is a WHOLE lot of porn family photos, game backups and MP3s. Far more than most people, even "digital hoarders" would accumulate.
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Maybe...though with games being 50+ GB and 4K video media, I can see that changing fairly soon.

I think the real limitation there is/will be ISP bandwidth restrictions.
 
Armenius said:
MLC is still around $1/GB. That is 35x the price of a platter drive. While TLC is much better now reliability wise than it was even just a couple years ago, I still wouldn't waste my own money on a SSD using TLC.
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Most consumer grade SSDs are TLC these days and reliability wise still seem better than WD Blue or the cheapest Seagate drives. At that point you're looking at about $0.25 per GB for 512GB and 1TB SATA III SSDs and $0.30-$0.60 per GB in an .m2 form factor. The upper range includes Samsung 960 pro, which seem like a "solid" buy.
 
MavericK said:
Maybe...though with games being 50+ GB and 4K video media, I can see that changing fairly soon.

I think the real limitation there is/will be ISP bandwidth restrictions.
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Yeah, 4K / UHD discs might get the ball rolling again. I'm not sure though, given how many people stream media these days vice buying discs...

Games? Maybe....Even if AAA titles hit 60-75GB per game, you can still get >50 of them on a 4TB drive. And no one wants to run AAA titles off a huge, slow HDD, they want to run them off an SSD.
 
Teenyman45 said:
Most consumer grade SSDs are TLC these days and reliability wise still seem better than WD Blue or the cheapest Seagate drives. At that point you're looking at about $0.25 per GB for 512GB and 1TB SATA III SSDs and $0.30-$0.60 per GB in an .m2 form factor. The upper range includes Samsung 960 pro, which seem like a "solid" buy.
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The 960 Pro uses 3-bit MLC V-NAND.
 
Bandalo said:
I think the storage needs of the "average user" factor in pretty strongly here. Probably no more than 1 in a 100 users wants more than a couple TB of storage. Probably 1 in a 1,000 or even 10,000 want more than 4TB. Honestly 4TB is a WHOLE lot of porn family photos, game backups and MP3s. Far more than most people, even "digital hoarders" would accumulate.
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And nobody will ever need more than 640KB of ram...

My HTPC has 8TB of storage. 4TB for TV shows, and 4TB for movies, home video, pictures, etc.
My family would like to double the 4TB I have setup for TV shows (they like to record the entire season of some rerun shows and then go back and watch them by original air date)

My desktop have 5.25 TB. 250GB for the system disk, 1TB for home movies, Photos, etc., and 4TB for everything else, like games, video capture, movies I'm editing, etc.


I do agree that most people would be fine with a 250 or 500 GB SSD.
 
And here I am with four 256GB SSDs, bought back when they carried a much higher per GB price, and only a pair 4TB enterprise drives in RAID1 for media storage.
 
Bandalo said:
I think the storage needs of the "average user" factor in pretty strongly here. Probably no more than 1 in a 100 users wants more than a couple TB of storage. Probably 1 in a 1,000 or even 10,000 want more than 4TB. Honestly 4TB is a WHOLE lot of porn family photos, game backups and MP3s. Far more than most people, even "digital hoarders" would accumulate.
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Agreed. With the rise in popularity of legal, free or inexpensive streaming, I don't think we're seeing the same kind of demand growth that we used to see.

I sure would like to see SSD prices drop closer to platter drive prices, though.
 
nutzo said:
And nobody will ever need more than 640KB of ram...

My HTPC has 8TB of storage. 4TB for TV shows, and 4TB for movies, home video, pictures, etc.
My family would like to double the 4TB I have setup for TV shows (they like to record the entire season of some rerun shows and then go back and watch them by original air date)

My desktop have 5.25 TB. 250GB for the system disk, 1TB for home movies, Photos, etc., and 4TB for everything else, like games, video capture, movies I'm editing, etc.


I do agree that most people would be fine with a 250 or 500 GB SSD.
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I've got around 10TB on my NAS. You've got 8TB on your HTPC. You and I are not anything close to the "typical" user. There's people out there that want or need >4TB on their home networks. They are not anything close to mainstream though, and that's what's my point is. Until LOTS of people are clamoring for >4TB drives, the price will never come down.
 
Like anything else, storage products advance until they find a 'sweet spot'. Then further advances slow to a crawl, because there's not enough market for it. Toasters, microwave ovens, cars, stereo amplifiers, digital clocks, watches, etc.. Of course the best example is cpus, who wants to buy a whole new computer if you have a Sandybridge K cpu? Practically nobody, except the bleeding edge enthusiasts and those who don't understand why their cpu isn't the bottleneck where their computer is slowing down. There simply isn't any need for it for the general public to line up to buy enough to make increasing production (and competition for market share) to reduce the prices. Further speed is just a pursuit of excess, for the sake of excess. It's like buying a Bugatti Veyron to drive 99.999% of the time to work in bumper to bumper traffic.
 
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THRESHIN said:
When you think about it, when was the last time we had a large jump in performance?
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The jumps in performance, as predicted, will slow down as we reach physical limitations.

But, as other technologies, beyond transistors and silicon, come along we could potentially see bigger jumps.

And no, it's not due to consoles gamers...
 
I don't think that consumer habits are effecting HDD sizes as much as people here are speculating. Enterprise environments surely consume well over 90% of all HDDs. And they want bigger drives. Higher density and cheaper to run per TB. If anything consumers not keeping things on HDDs and streaming everything or keeping it on someone else's server in the could is increasing the need for big, affordable HDDs in the datacenter.
 
Dead Parrot said:
If you are part of the majority of folks that are primarily streamers, why do you need a lot of storage? Other then OS, user installed programs, and the occasional picture, you don't really use much storage space. Probably why phone makers haven't really felt the need to expand on board space anywhere near the speed of advancing technology.
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You need the storage that your streams come from. The storage is still there, it's just not where it used to be. More in datacenters, less at home. Also big brother type of demand in storing security camera footage.

As someone who works in the industry, the reason for the flattening out is not for lack of engineering / R&D effort. The gains are just coming slower than they used to. There is plenty of datacenter demand for drives as large as can be produced and the people around here are mostly oblivious to the kinds of users that read a forum like this or Joe random laptop user, since that's not where the demand is right now.
 
DiabloRojo said:
Well, personally, I'm now streaming from my own library of misbegotten backed-up CDs, DVDs, Blurays and family photos/videos.

Granted, it'll still be a while before I fill up nearly 11 TB on my NAS.
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Master_shake_ said:
Because I have 8 more bays Ina 20 bay case that are empty...

I need to fill!
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THRESHIN said:
Same here. I need a good amount of storage. I currently have 10 TB + my 250gb ssd. I can't imagine spending the money on 10tb of ssd! Plus it's very unnecessary. How much data do you really need fast access to? I know my music collection doesn't care :p

I think it'll all be solid state of some sort one day, just not for a while at this rate. The data densities and change in cost has pretty much stalled.
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nutzo said:
And nobody will ever need more than 640KB of ram...

My HTPC has 8TB of storage. 4TB for TV shows, and 4TB for movies, home video, pictures, etc.
My family would like to double the 4TB I have setup for TV shows (they like to record the entire season of some rerun shows and then go back and watch them by original air date)

My desktop have 5.25 TB. 250GB for the system disk, 1TB for home movies, Photos, etc., and 4TB for everything else, like games, video capture, movies I'm editing, etc.


I do agree that most people would be fine with a 250 or 500 GB SSD.
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And here I am with a 500GB hard drive thinking... wtf? I bought a external WD 4TB hard drive when I bought my drone to store footage on it and I currently have 3.5TB free still after almost a year and the usable space is only 3.62TB.

The size requirements are going up (50+ GB games), net neutrality is getting fucked up, and I have a 1TB/month limit with Comcast on download. The United States seriously, when it comes to internet service we are a fucking third world country behind the rest of the world comparatively and their network infrastructures. Just the other week Gear of War 4 was free to download and I didn't download it because I didn't want to download a 60GB game just to play the SP for a little bit to try it out because I was like "It's too early in the month to use up that much of my monthly limit." Fuck me. The fact that I even have to think about this at all, and that Comcast is so in favor of destroying net neutrality really pisses me off.
 
zamardii12 said:
The United States seriously, when it comes to internet service we are a fucking third world country behind the rest of the world comparatively and their network infrastructures
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Fuck me. The fact that I even have to think about this at all, and that Comcast is so in favor of destroying net neutrality really pisses me off.
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Set your rate limit in the router to 3.2Mbps and you don't need to think about it anymore. Yes, it would take you nearly 2 days to download the game, but imo it's worth it for the peace of mind of knowing you will never be going above your data cap. Of course if you want to continue using the calculator and checking monthly data usage stats all the time then have fun...

I have to disagree with your third world comment. Think of countries like Cambodia, Botswana or Kazakhstan, where most people living outside of big cities have no broadband internet access at all. The only choice is satellite, which comes at a monthly cost that's higher than the average years salary there. Oh and you'll have to have a generator cause no electrical grid! So for crying out loud, the US is not as bad as those places, not even close. Actually we have one of the best internet infrastructures in the world, compared to other countries of similar size there is no contest (Russia, China, Brazil, Australia). Of course that kind of access to high-speed internet in rural areas is not cheap and the cost is distributed among all customers.

Sure there are better places like Singapore or Estonia, but those are small countries where it's much easier and cheaper to create good internet infrastructure. They're libertarian and naturally have very little regulation of ISP's, so maybe we can learn from them? It seems public opinion is on the side of highly regulated providers which in the real world leads to even higher prices and truly no incentive for actually improving infrastructure.

As for internet politics in the US vs rest of the world, at least in the US the internet isn't censored for reasons of political oppression like in China or Germany. ISP's prioritizing traffic - well they own the line so they can do that. I am in favor of allowing smaller providers to compete by allowing access to public telephone poles, this problem is another example of one created purely by unnecessary regulation repressing the free market.
 
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