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HDD Prices Soar, Sparking Fears of Incoming Shortage

erek

erek

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“On the pricing front, typical retail indicators confirm this trend. A 3.5-inch, 1 TB desktop and surveillance HDDs are trading up about 4% QoQ to roughly US$53, and 2.5-inch, 1 TB notebook drives are up about 3% to near US$50 per unit. These product classes have seen price increases for three straight quarters, with the most recent quarter the steepest since Q4 2023. Some analysts expect HDD shortages to become more apparent by 2026, and suppliers may prioritize larger, higher-margin data-center customers, which could extend further price pressure into the consumer area. After NAND flash shortage powering SSDs, HDDs are now in high demand and may remain like that for more quarter to come. Companies like Seagate are already investing a ton of resources into HAMR HDDs with the capacity of roughly 55 TB for enterprise.”

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/344108/hdd-prices-soar-sparking-fears-of-incoming-shortage
 
GPU's, CPU's, SSD's. RAM, and now Hard Drives.

This is spiraling out of control.

How long before absolutely everyone is priced out of this hobby and it completely destroys the enthusiast PC community?

Heck, if no one can afford a "gaming" PC, how long before games stop being sold on the platform?

In 2009 I built a pretty capable (for the time) machine for one of the kiddos. Started with an dual core Athlon, but unlocked it to 4 cores, and unlocked the extra cache to essentally make it a Phenom II and the pushed it to 4.2ghz, and equipped it with some OC version GTX460.

The end result was a pretty capable machine for the time, and my all in price (excluding mouse, keyboard and monitor) was about $500.

Now there has been some inflation, but per CPI-U $500 in 2009 is equivalent to about $750 today. Good luck building a pretty capable machine with all new parts and a discrete mid level (~Nvidia x60 series) GPU for $750 today. It simply won't happen.
 
I don't even care.... Jensen started this with his Ai empire of garbage. What has Ai done for you expect unemployment. I can see nuking sit at home jobs answering questing. I mean who the hell wants to wait on people all day from home. My brother's wife does that and her BP is sky high due to lack of activity.
 
It's bad for the high-end but even low-end PCs are pretty powerful nowadays. We've come a long way from, "I have to upgrade my video card just to run Quake 3" or "Giants: Citizen Kabuto is a slideshow on current hardware". Seems like many gamers are fine with esports and indie/AA games that have graphics that are "good enough". It just sucks for those of us that want the best on AAA games.
 
Well how much cpu ram or storage do you really need? I am sure you could just get higher performance cloud packages to give you enough power. It is how all this will end eventually IMO. Just buy a terminal pc and pay for access and usage subscriptions.
 
Out of curiosity how is hard drive size determined? There is nothing inherently special about the platters that leads to hd capacity similar to what is seen in the semiconductor industry? They just sprinkle more magnetic dust on it in higher densities before having to move up with more platters?
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
GPU's, CPU's, SSD's. RAM, and now Hard Drives.

This is spiraling out of control.

How long before absolutely everyone is priced out of this hobby and it completely destroys the enthusiast PC community?

Heck, if no one can afford a "gaming" PC, how long before games stop being sold on the platform?

In 2009 I built a pretty capable (for the time) machine for one of the kiddos. Started with an dual core Athlon, but unlocked it to 4 cores, and unlocked the extra cache to essentally make it a Phenom II and the pushed it to 4.2ghz, and equipped it with some OC version GTX460.

The end result was a pretty capable machine for the time, and my all in price (excluding mouse, keyboard and monitor) was about $500.

Now there has been some inflation, but per CPI-U $500 in 2009 is equivalent to about $750 today. Good luck building a pretty capable machine with all new parts and a discrete mid level (~Nvidia x60 series) GPU for $750 today. It simply won't happen.
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i think the industry wants us to stream games now

look at Amazon Luna, etc
 
Sucks for everyone that still intrested in the hobby but mine been waning the past couple years to almost nothing at this point. I am more then satisfied doing most my gaming on my PS5. People laughed that everything will move to the cloud in the next 10 years but it is becoming more of a reality with every year. Dumb terminals for all!
 
vegeta535 said:
Sucks for everyone that still intrested in the hobby but mine been waning the past couple years to almost nothing at this point. I am more then satisfied doing most my gaming on my PS5. People laughed that everything will move to the cloud in the next 10 years but it is becoming more of a reality with every year. Dumb terminals for all!
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Same thing happened to me. Just was quick and easier to grab a pair of ps5s for my wife an I to play than to build again. Nicer to just sit in front of that after being in front of a pc all day for me. But yea, this contributes to the problem lol.
 
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1 TB drives really seem to be the wrong thing to look at if worried about a price spiral. Data centers don't want bottom of the barrel consumer drives.

Those units end up being sold at just above manufacturing cost. Price increases there are likely driven by general inflation and shrinking economies of scale as the market for small HDDs continues to wither away.

If prices are going up for large capacity drives OTOH would be newsworthy (and alarming for anyone wanting to build a NAS in the near future). This appears to be a nothing burger.
 
DanNeely said:
1 TB drives really seem to be the wrong thing to look at if worried about a price spiral. Data centers don't want bottom of the barrel consumer drives.
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And as a consumer who wants a 1TB hard drive? Especially for $53. You could have a SSD in that price range if you really wanted
 
Me with my stash of M2 SSDs, DDR4, and 600+ TB of HDDs
uncle-scrooge-mcduck-money.gif
 
PC industry has been driven by gamers. for the normal person, there's nothing a 10yr old PC cannot do. hdd prices were driven by usage in datacenters too, normal people don't buy 20TB or even 4TB drives. Now those same datacenters have trillions to spend and will pay more.

These shortages may be driven by AI, but don't expect prices to come down. they never do.
 
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I got two WD 10TB Blacks from newegg, sent one back. Wanting to get a Helium filled drive for low noise... hopefully the sales come back next week before price increases again.
 
My unraid box has 5 HP Branded Samsung PM1643a 3.84TB SAS SSDs and 5 HGST Ultrastar DC HC520 HDD that I got for $80 each at GoHardDrive. (now $200 each!)

I wanted to add more but the price already went up. And I wanted new WD Purples for my cams. Might have to bite the bullet on that.
 
Why don't all the AI builders just go to court and get a search warrant for all of us, and confiscate any systems less than 10 years old. Plus any spare HDDs, SSDs, GPUs, etc
 
sfsuphysics said:
Out of curiosity how is hard drive size determined? There is nothing inherently special about the platters that leads to hd capacity similar to what is seen in the semiconductor industry? They just sprinkle more magnetic dust on it in higher densities before having to move up with more platters?
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I would assume density stability would be the leading determination and the physical form factor of 3.5” HDD being a hard limit. It has to slide into a drive cage.
 
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Yeah, I think I'm done with this shit for a while.

My current rig has a B550 AM4 board and 5800x3d with 64GB that I bought in 2022. Last month I made a snap decision to buy a 9070 XT, because who knows when GPUs will skyrocket again due to the RAM situation.

This will keep me going for many more years. I really don't play many new titles and have hundreds of games in my Steam backlog. I actually enjoy playing the older games from 10+ years ago. The way these prices are being manipulated is disgusting and I'm done playing their game. I'll sit it out on the sidelines for as long as it takes.
 
Twisted Kidney said:
There was once a day I thought I might have a strange storage fetish. I have an incredible amount of storage around here. From eight inch floppies, to 20MB Maxtor hard drives, to 8TB m.2 drives.
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I kinda had one of those until SSDs showed up. Before SSDs I built SCSI rigs. 15k rpm server drives, etc. Built a couple disk arrays. Ok so I like fast. Then boom SSDs showed up and I could get more useful performance for a couple hundred bucks. Now with M.2 SSDs I hardly even care anymore.
 
zandor said:
I kinda had one of those until SSDs showed up. Before SSDs I built SCSI rigs. 15k rpm server drives, etc. Built a couple disk arrays. Ok so I like fast. Then boom SSDs showed up and I could get more useful performance for a couple hundred bucks. Now with M.2 SSDs I hardly even care anymore.
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I need capacity, I can't wait for the day I can go all SSD for not 15 billion dollars. Luckily I'm all good with HDDs for now unless sudden death or something 🤞

1765851451926.png
 
sfsuphysics said:
Out of curiosity how is hard drive size determined? There is nothing inherently special about the platters
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History lesson here from a genuine old fart.

When 8" floppies were introduced and IBM developed the "Winchester" hard drives (for 14" platters) there was a demand for more storage in the new categories of small business systems that used 2 floppy drives. As a result, 8" hard drives were developed that would fit into the same system or drive cabinets AND use the same power connectors that 8" floppies used, including AC.

When 5 1/4" floppies were introduced, the cycle repeated, with 5 1/4" HDDs and then half-height HDDs, copying half-height FDDs. Optical drives and tape drives adopted this form factor.

When 3 1/2 floppy drives were introduced, the same cycle occurred.

There have been oddball HDD formats like 2 1/2" and 1,8" and a 1" microdrive, but none of them got much market acceptance.

As an old fart, my memory isn't what it once was, so others please add to/correct what I just wrote.
 
LightsOut41 said:
I bought a 16GB Toshiba refurb for $180 in Sept. Same drive is now $240.
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Looking at tracked prices for what I think was the drive you bought, the refurb version's been crazy volatile the last two years; and you just lucked in to buying it at one of it's periodic lows. Looking at all the 16tb drives nothing is standing out as an overall trend; some drives are just a lot more volatile in prices than others. I have no idea why.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0B1PFQXLC?context=search
 
sfsuphysics said:
Out of curiosity how is hard drive size determined? There is nothing inherently special about the platters that leads to hd capacity similar to what is seen in the semiconductor industry? They just sprinkle more magnetic dust on it in higher densities before having to move up with more platters?
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I'm by no means an expert, but the era of "one sector on the platter = 1 bit" ended a long long time ago.

They started shrinking shit so small that this approach was no longer reliable. So these days they have something that almost resembles intra-drive RAID, where they use statistics across multiple regions of the platters - or something like that - to determine what an individual bit is supposed to read.

And with each platter shrink it gets more and more complicated.
 
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