Really?
Before the flood, I seem to remember you could get a 1TB Samsung F1 7200rpm drive for £30.
Now, an equivalent drive will set you back around £35, and it's taken a long time to reach that level...
Before the flood, I seem to remember you could get a 1TB Samsung F1 7200rpm drive for £30.
Now, an equivalent drive will set you back around £35, and it's taken a long time to reach that level...
I bought...
1TB WD Green EARS HDDs in 2010 for $70. 2TB WD Red HDDs in spring 2014 for $89. 1TB WD Black HDDs in fall 2014 for $90.
Just spot checked the same drives...
1TB WD Green EARS HDDs go for $57. 2TB WD Red HDDs go for $89. 1TB WD Black HDDs go for $71.
So prices are slowly falling but I don't think that we're going to see the rapid falls we were accustom to in the last decade due either to technological constrains or consumer demand, likely both.
From 2000-2005 we went from 20GB to 500GB drives, a 25x growth in 5 years but in 2010 we only had 2TB drives which is just a 4x growth. It's 2015 the largest consumer HDDs you can get from WD, Seagate, and HGST are 6TB, 8TB, and 10GB respectively. That's 3-5x growth for the 5 year period. Why has growth slowed? Is it a technological constraint or a lack of investment?
In the early 2000s you could only play music and movies you possessed so there was a big demand for storage space for all your ripped CDs and DVDs. In 2007 Netflix introduced online streaming and today we have thousands of choices for streaming video or music on demand which combined with cloud storage options negated our need for high capacity drives. I think the fact that people are opting for 120GB SSDs over 4TB HDDs demonstrates that the consumer need for extremely large hard drives is in decline.
In the past the HDD makers were very competitive but if you look at WD, Seagate and HGST today you can see they're no longer competing on drive capacities. HGST is the only one that even bothers to sell a consumer grade 10TB HDD. Western Digital has been diversifying for years; first it was portable backup solutions, then NAS drives, NAS solutions, Surveillance and Data Center drives, and just today they announced they're buying Sandisk, a major SSD player.
I think the industry as a whole is moving away from HDDs and for that reason they nolonger need to compete so ferociously on price points.
As for SSDs, most of the optimization goes to improving bandwidth (where most people won't notice a real-world difference between an SSD plugged into SATA2 and M.2 PCIe baring 8k/4k video creation), but anyone will notice a real-world difference in increased IOPS, which no company cares about and they plateaued at ~100k IOPS for the past few years (i.e. some of the low-end Sandisk SSDs with 4k IOPS are subjectively as slow as HDDs).
That's 3-5x growth for the 5 year period. Why has growth slowed? Is it a technological constraint or a lack of investment?
Could be technological. A few years ago I read that magnetic hard disk areal densities were doubling roughly once a year. However, unlike the process node shrinks that allow Moore's law, don't disk improvements come from either small incremental things or huge improvements like giant magnetoresistance (GMR) heads? So the companies could have, for the time being at least, run out big technological advances.
In fact, while I'm not following this at all closely (for various reasons I'm planning on keeping a 4 TB cap on my home storage), the biggest new thing I've read about is shingled recording (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording), where writes are partially overlapped, and rewrites are expensive. Per that Wikipedia article, this can add 25% to the capacity of a drive ... which in the context of a previous doubling per year isn't much, it's more of a small incremental improvement.
The other side is demand, of course. I'm not sure on general principles that consumer demand for big drives is down that much, for a small SSD for active stuff + a big nearline drive for media makes a lot of sense. Especially if your Internet connection is capped like mine. This is the approach I've taken since 2007 (with heavy use of high quality CD-Rs for the 2000-2006 period).
Another factor might be an accumulation of people losing too much data on their big hard disks.
Finally, I have to wonder if the big cloud storage providers are slowing down big capacity disk purchases. That'll in part depend on how they use them, do they split out disk farms from compute, or use more homogeneous approaches, such as "moderate" sized disks attached to most machines?
A SAS interface adds $20 currently; models and Newegg prices:
Constellation ES ST32000444SS 2TB $265 7/15/11 SAS
Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0023 4TB $230 10/21/15 SAS
Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0033 4TB $210 10/21/15 SATA
Your old price might be lower than normal due to that sale, and/or whatever prompted Samsung to get out of the business; the current price is close out inventory of older generation technology.
£30 in 2010 would be £34.35 in 2014
(I had to do it that way, it only goes up to 2014)
[1] http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/resources/inf...