I have been hoarding for a while now and to me storage prices really seem to have plateaued in the last few years, and it doesn't seem to be picking up as we get back to normal after the pandemic. So I don't think waiting for a couple years is going to save you much. Personally I'd just keep an eye out for good deals like Best Buy WD Easystore sales, or Black Friday in general, and pull the trigger then.
Black Friday is definitely a good option. I'll also point out that WD and Seagate are working on 20TB-30TB drives that should be coming out in the next couple of years which should, in theory, drive the prices down further for smaller capacity drives.
A couple of years is a life time in tech, but despite that, I think the one thing that should be the deciding factor is if you’re actually going to need the space in the mean time. If not, waiting won’t make a difference. On the flip side, if you’re going to need it in the next couple of years anyway, then it might be easier to recognize that $320 over 2 years is less than $0.50/day… taking the initial hit and take advantage of it earlier will probably work out great.
Where can you get two 16 TB HDDs for $320? Cheapest I could find was a 14TB Toshiba N300 for around $320 each and I'm on the fence about getting them because they're supposedly pretty noisy. Were the models OP mentioned not for NAS use?
I was referring to drives like the Seagate 16TB HDD Exos X16. That said there are MDD drives that are apparently cheaper but I haven't heard of them before.
In general, technology gets cheaper for better products over time. Short term that's not always true, but the longer timescales you look, the better is it for consumers.
A year or two is a long time, and probably worth waiting.
In general, technology gets cheaper for better products over time. Short term that’s not always true, but the longer timescales you look, the better is it for consumers.
Yeah that's why I linked the graph above. I asked here because I thought someone might have looked into this before and have a better insight on it. Maybe they've read about foretasted chip shortages or some kind of technological improvement with manufacturing? I am not sure. It's something I only sporadically see articles about.
A year or two is a long time, and probably worth waiting.
If the price of a HDD on sale this year is equal to the average price of the same tier of HDD two or three years from now I'd probably just pull the trigger now.
There are a number of storage technologies in the works right now. However, I think they will result in a new type of memory device rather than HDDs getting cheaper. Kind of like how a stack of CDs isn't cheaper now than it was in 2005, rather there are new types of storage that offer more memory and longer life spans.
So if you are definetly going HDD, prices are probably not going to get that much cheaper, if any cheaper at all.
I'd say keep an eye out for sales & that will probably make a bigger difference than waiting a set amount of time.
I wasn't sure about that considering HAMR and HDMR drives are being developed like Seagate's Mozaic 3+ which has 30TB.
That tech looks super cool & might be worth waiting for, but from what I've been reading it is still being perfected and will likely see big improvements fairly quickly after release.
Heres a clip from this article I think is relevent: Teh said the new drives have double the capacity of storage systems using conventional 16TB perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drives, and this can be doubled again over the next four years. The company is projecting 4TB platters in the next couple of years, with 5TB coming shortly thereafter, and 6TB out beyond the current roadmap.
So there's a chance you wait for those drives, pay a little extra cuz the tech is new, then have something twice as good get released a year or two later.
It's definetly a tricky situation & ultimately up to you and what you want. Do you need that extra storage asap, or is it more of a eventually kind thing? Does new tech have its own intrinsic value to you, or is it more about price per terabyte?
Good luck with your decision! I know how hard these kind of choices can be. You never know what the market will look like after you finally make that big purchase.
Waiting can be good if there is something on the horizon, but often with tech if you wait for the next thing you'll find there's another new thing on the horizon then. You do kind of have to decide that you're putting your stake in the ground at some point
My stake is really that 30 TB mark. That should be enough to consolidate all my storage conveniently in one spot. I don't need incredibly fast transfer speeds so I think an HDD would do fine.
Then whenever you're ready. Just do a table of price per TB and go then. Best Buy usually has WD Elements on sale every other week where you can pick up an external for cheaper, then just shuck it and you get a WD red or white you can just pop into your NAS. I did 16TBs not too long ago and they were the cheapest per TB
There was a race to the bottom for SSD prices that ended roughly in July 2023, leading to losses with manufacturers having to sell under production cost; this is why NAND/SSD prices increased since then and will probably only slowly start to decrease at the end of 2024. At the same time, there is very interesting technology in the making, I just read about SSDs with up to 1000 storage layers coming in the next few years. Same goes for HDDs, although less so and prices seem more predictable there; my focus for the next few years would be completely new storage methods competing with HDDs/SSDs, but I don’t think any of this will reach consumer markets at competitive prices until 2028. My prediction: HDDs will decrease like in the past years, SSDs will start really decreasing in price with the start of 2025 and it will take a few years for completely new storage methods to arrive.
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
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