*stares at 20TB for $280 Seagate Exos*

Does it really need to?

Already asking for alot.

If you consider inflation, they have come down kinda? lol

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.

This is a bit of a cherry pick.

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Sure the drives are dropping slower but at the end of the day, I have a mental 'limit' on hard drive prices.

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I paid $250 AUD for 3TB once.

Then I paid $250 AUD for 5TB

Then 8 and finally, 16.

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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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

can someone help me figure out why they arent going down?

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

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.

Now do 18TB SSDs.

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

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.

Again, cherry picking by only using mid sized HDDs against low capacity SSDs.

One day I shall have a full nvme NAS with 12x 8TD nvme disks? :D

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!

Both are dropping. SSDs used to cost a fucking fuck load!

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.

Graph a 2TB and 4TB HDD

it's crazy that exactly one year ago i paid almost double the price for the same drive i bought last week

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.

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.

And a Toshiba N300 is the lowest quality drive out there.

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!

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.

You shouldn’t use such an old X16 12TB for analysis. It’s price will increase since they’re getting sparse.

They have gotten low enough im considering flash arrays for homelab.

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.

Which is more susceptible to an EMP, an SSD or an HDD?

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.

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.

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.

Price per gigabyte is what we should be looking at and not specific models of drives.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

this is why i made the decision to have all 16TB of my media server on SSDs