Hard Drive Cost per Gigabyte | Hacker News Reader

Hard Drive Cost per Gigabyte

backblaze.com

217 pointsingve133 comments

I wrote a thing to pull the prices of all the hard drives on Amazon every 12 hours and sort them by price per GB. https://diskprices.com/

I hope that's not the sort of thing that gets you banned from Amazon forever. That would be kind of harsh.

As my understanding of the terms of service goes, it's allowed as long as I don't compare the prices to other sites.

It's not an abuse of the API because prices are not being compared against products on other stores. However he is abusing their affiliate policy by not including an associates program disclaimer on the page.

There's a disclaimer at the bottom.

It's not disclosing that you make use of affiliates. Read section 5 of the associates program agreement.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreemen...

looks like the one thats the cheapest on your site @ $0.022 (Seagate Expansion 8TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STEB8000100) ) is actually on sale and works out to $0.0186 right now. I may jump on that quickly....

Yeah, the Prime Day promotion isn't exposed through their API so I can't account for that easily.

figures. that's a damn good deal though; too bad its limited to 1 per customer.

I presume you get affiliate revenue too. Does that cover your hosting fees? Your site is hard disk drives redux, could you apply the same recipe for a comparison site to anything else with a numeric bang per buck quantifier, to then profit?

I suspect there are few such categories but you could put together an interesting store that way if the affiliate marketing paid its way.

I turn a small profit on the affiliate revenue, yes.

> could you apply the same recipe for a comparison site to anything else with a numeric bang per buck quantifier

Absolutely. I've done this with flashlights, for example.

How did you select those disks? Did you just hard code a list of ASINs to query through their API or is this done by scraping Amazon front-end?

Amazon's product categories are identified as BrowseNodes, each has a unique ID. I found the IDs of all the relevant BrowseNodes, then use the API to query what products are available in each BrowseNode. I then use a ridiculous list of regexes to parse the product names to figure out the capacity and drive type, as Amazon's tags for those fields are really unreliable.

I only ask because the HDD list in particular seemed to be quite short. The last time I did this, I scraped the internal hard drive category (from the front-end) and filtered everything out that was smaller than 4TB and still ended up with at least 200 drives.

For tags, are you using the "Size" or the <ns2:HardDiskSize Units="TB">4.0</ns2:HardDiskSize> tag?

I did a few test queries and found those specific tags to be pretty reliable.

If you're open to it, we can discuss it outside of HN to see if there's a better way.

disclaimer: I do not have any vested interest in Amazon affiliate programs, I work with their API for my day job and always looking to learn.

*edit: are you using the advertising api or the mws product api?

Just a heads up, when I filtered on just SSDs, the top of the list was a BarraCuda HDD (ST3000DM008). It seems to have been incorrectly placed under SSDs on Amazon.

Bookmarked your site though, thanks.

I'm still wondering why external drives are cheaper than internal ones.

It seems silly that if I wanted to buy an 8TB drive for my desktop I should buy an external and toss the enclosure.

My only guess is market pressure because of higher demand. Possibly externals drives are pulled from older stock? Does anyone have another explanation?

Just a guess, but, one factor could be a shorter warranty?

Plus some external drive customers immediately shuck the device and receive zero warranty.

People who shuck on /r/homelab often find totally different models when buying a few from the same place. It lets drive manufacturers stick any drive they want in the enclosure as long as it's the advertised capacity and RPM.

"My only guess is market pressure because of higher demand."

That's exactly right. In the mass consumer market (ie. people buying hard drives at retailers), a lot more external drives are sold than internal drives. Larger market → more competition → lower prices. On the other hand, for companies buying directly from manufacturers or from distributors, I would bet an internal drive sells for (a bit) less than the comparable external drive. Though I have never seen a price sheet. Would love to hear confirmation from someone in the industry.

Externals also often only have 1 yr warranties vs 2, 3, or 5 for bare drives in my experience.

Be careful about what drives you do this with - I've seen reports of some of these drives not having standard SATA headers once they're shucked.

Are you referring to the 2.5" HDDs with native USB connectors? I've never come across an external 3.5" HDD like that.

Brian from Backblaze here. I don't have any more info than you have, but some of us assume it is a form of the "IT Tax". Basically anything for "businesses" or "datacenters" the sellers charge (unreasonably) more than if it is a product for "consumers". Only a tiny number of consumers ever buy a 20 pack of internal hard drives. Thus they are given the "business tax" pricing increase.

The cost of a USB enclosure is about $2. So if the IT markup is larger than $2 the USB enclosure version, you'll see the same internal drive wrapped in a USB enclosure for less. Stupid? Yes.

Nice! Is this open source? I'd love to contribute to this.

This is good work! I might reference your project in an article I've been writing about responsible affiliate sites.

Great site, I can see I'll be using it alot!

What would be really nice is if you could add in a m2 ssd drive type.

What's the risk of getting counterfeits, or getting used drives sold as new?

Now that NewEgg's also into the 3rd party re-seller shenanigans, I've been getting my hardware from BB or Fry's more often.

Zemo's right: "And the Avengers [Amazon / NewEgg]? They went home. I knew I couldn't kill them. More powerful men [Walmart] than me have tried. But if I could get them to kill each other [3rd party re-sellers]..."

Just in case you weren't aware, when I view your website on my Windows 10 PC or Android smartphone all of the prices have an 'Â' preceding the £.

Screenshot: https://vgy.me/f9rd4b.png

The page doesn't seem to be declaring an encoding - on my computer set to Japanese the browser is assuming Shift-JIS and making a mess of everything

Odd, some appear to be missing. The cheapest 10 TB on that list is $417. I can get a Seagate IronWolf for $341 on Amazon[1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST...

I made one for scan.co.uk: https://hur.st/scandisk/

Nice work! The German version unfortunately isn't able to display Euro signs properly "â‚¬0.250" is what I see with Chrome.

You can fix the encoding problem on your site with:

   <meta charset="UTF-8">

This is super handy!

To anyone using it, always click through and see what the product is. Right now it says the cheapest per GB internal drive is this one[0].

Turns out it's actually just the external inclosure. It doesn't actually come with storage.

[0]: https://www.amazon.ca/StarTech-com-10Gbps-Enclosure-SATA-Dri...

I would be interested in seeing the log of the prices on the vertical axis. The curve seems to fit the exponential decline in prices that I expect to see. I think the difference in regimes would be more clear cut that way.

Just picking the end points and the middle, I see: (11 cents, 2009), (5 cents, 2013), (2.8 cents, 2017). So it went from slightly more than halving in cost in the first 4 years (55% reduction) to slightly less than halving in cost in the second 4 years (44% reduction). There's definitely a bit of a slowdown there, but not the huge difference that the article claims.

Of course, the first half includes the Thailand flood, and the second half doesn't. Googling for some historical data leads me to http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte, which claims that (from 1980-2010), the cost of a gigabyte has been halving in about 14 months, which is closer to the decay pre-Thailand flood.

That is exactly what I thought - it seems to follow the exponential decay. A quick and dirty graph with logarithmic scale on price: https://imgur.com/a/90a4p

Pretty much a straight line, except for the Thailand hiccup.

There's a clear regime shift in the slope pre/post Thai floods. It's not a surprise that the floods set back Kryder's law by years, but does anyone have any insight in why it would affect the rate of progress and switch hard drives to a much slower rate of improvement? Surely the floods wouldn't still affect investment or R&D? Or is the timing merely a coincidence and reflect consumer demand being saturated, switches to SSD etc?

There was also some consolidation at that same time. For example, Western Digital purchased Hitachi in 2012. At around the same time, Fujitsu, Lacie, and Samsung also were acquired.

http://www.itcandor.com/hard-disk-suppliers/

Yeah I had to buy a new HD recently and was a little shocked that there are only really 2 manufacturers + Toshiba. No wonder prices aren't great.

Yep, the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manu...

has an excellent "consolidation diagram":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manu...

Why do you phrase it "2 manufacturers + Toshiba"? Why not just "3 manufacturers"?

Agreed its a little weird, but if you look at best sellers the first Toshiba is on the 3rd page.

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Internal-Har...

AFAIK Toshiba is the smallest one of the 3, it is not their primary business, and there's a high likelihood of their HDD business being sold off to one of the 2 big ones in the near future.

Lacie, as far as I am aware, never manufactured their own hard drives. Look here for example in 2006 http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1,85231,85262

> Thank you for your email. We use a few different manufacturers, so we would not be able to tell you which drives go to which item (except the 500GB drives which are Hitachi). In general we do use Western Digital, Seagate, and we did use Maxtor before they were bought by Western Digital. For DVDs, we use Samsung.

Wikipedia says , much earlier:

> As a subsidiary of Quantum, La Cie was licensed as the exclusive manufacturer of Apple-branded external SCSI hard drives, using Quantum hard disks.

This confirms what I remember. A 3D modeller I worked with was deeply upset when Maxtor took over Quantum as the 2Gb SCSI disks that were carried around at the time were LaCie, apparently with Quantum disks which were allegedly the best for replaying video frames. At the time I did not know LaCie was owned by Quantum. Back then there wasn't the internet to quickly Google brands so you only had marketing information to go on.

o_O Maxtor purchased Quantum in October 2000. This is the same month when Adwords left beta. What the heck are you talk of? By 2000 home broadband is beginnning to spread, dial up Internet is everyday in most of the so called developed world.

I'd always assumed La Cie's storage business model the past however many decades was to take stock drives from other manufacturers and put them in nicely designed enclosures. The premium on their stuff has always seemed to correlate to the nicer materials and design on the cases, not the drives themselves.

I guess occasionally they also seem to tap the early adopter market when a new storage interconnect comes out (FireWire 800, Thunderbolt etc). They often seem to be one of the first out of the gate with support when Apple add a new port.

A LOT happened in the ~2011 -> ~2013 timeframe, including the largest consolidation in hard drive manufacturing history (outside of maybe ~1992).

Toshiba acquired Fujitsu's HDD business in 2010.

Seagate acquired Samsung's HDD business in 2011 (remember they acquired Maxtor in 2006 as well).

Western Digital acquired the HGST group in 2012 (makers of the best damned 2TiB drive I've ever seen in my life)

You're left with 3 hard drive manufacturers, of which two are major SSD vendors for enterprise. This reduction to 3 vendors has a lot more to do with pricing than almost anything related to consumers's HDD purchases (who's growth since 2010 is something like 8%, it'd be better to invest in S&P 500 then run an entire consumer hard drive business)

How many people were buying Fujitsu, Samsung and HGST drives before the acquisitions?

My impression was that most people were buying Seagate and WD drives for a long time, and the rest were bit players. So I'm not sure how much the aquisition actually changed in the market. It effectively wasn't very competitive to begin with. Much like the CPU market, where Intel and AMD are the only two big players. Or the desktop operating system market, divided mainly between Microsoft and Apple.

> How many people were buying Fujitsu, Samsung and HGST drives before the acquisitions?

People? Not sure. But I was seeing a ton of Fujitsu and HGST drives in Dell and Apple stuff.

> How many people were buying Fujitsu, Samsung and HGST drives before the acquisitions?

Many many many. But the purchasers weren't consumers or even businesses, but other storage vendors higher up the value chain (see: emc, netapp, etc).

I think it's a "perfect storm" of all of the above. All around the same time, there were the floods, consolidation in the market reducing competition, and the large consumer shift to SSDs (and probably consumers "topping out" and deciding 4 TB drives are enough).

IMO the last effect is the largest. In any technology, the continuous cost decreases we're used to rely critically on a constant stream of consumer dollars, especially as the low-hanging fruit is plucked and you have to work harder to get further improvements. HDD companies know the writing is on the wall and that huge investments in R&D are going to take longer to pay back as the consumer market dries up.

Is it just the flood? Or is it cloud providers and big data corps were buying all HDDs they could get - and the consumer market got the remaining rest

What happened at about the same time as the Thai floods is that areal density hit a brick wall. The timing is just a coincidence. The reason that 4TB remains the cheapest capacity is that it turns out 4TB is the most you can store using a conventional four platter drive, which is the most efficient configuration to manufacture. AFAIK all 6TB drives have five platters which of course costs more to make. 8TB drives are either six platters in a helium filled case or five platters with shingled recording, the former being expensive and the latter having significant performance implications. Fortunately for Backblaze, their use case is relatively well suited for singled drives which is what makes 8TB drives economical for them.

The key flaw in this analysis is that the author is only using consumer grade drives from Amazon. And yes, I think what is going on is that consumers don't really need much more than 4TB. Heck, most consumers have trouble filling 1 or 2TB. It's for the same reason that drive managed SMR drives haven't really been a big thing, in the consumer market. Who cares about 15-20% more bytes when you can't use all of the bytes in a 4TB CMR drive?

Companies at the "hyper-scale cloud companies" (e.g., Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google) can actually use the extra bytes, and they are probably the ones that will be able to use the 10TB, 12TB, 14TB, 16TB etc. drive that are on the vendors' roadmap[1].

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/3162084/storage/seagates-road...

It may be that Amazon might not be interested in stocking these drives because they won't sell enough of them to consumers. And if some of the discussions proposed in Google's "Disks for Data Centers"[2] paper come to fruition, such as adding a second disk actuator arm, or changing the height of the disk drives, there might be a further diversion between drives optimized for the consumer market and drives optimized for the "hyper-scale cloud market". (Note: the intent of Google publishing this paper is to hopefully allow discussions amongst the community of hyper-scale cloud storage customers to work with the HDD vendors for something that helps the whole high capacity storage industry.)

[2] https://research.google.com/pubs/pub44830.html

I think that is the point, rather than the flaw, of this article.

> The key flaw in this analysis is that the author is only using consumer grade drives from Amazon

? This is Backblaze, a commercial storage company. They buy in bulk in thousands of drives, not from Amazon, and the prices are what they paid. As they say, "The price you might get at Costco or BestBuy, or on Amazon will most likely be higher." It's the trend and comparisons which matter, not so much the absolute price.

In the article the author asserted that BackBlaze was typically only using consumer drives. So that makes them very different from the companies in the "hyper-scale cloud storage" market.

And if the trends the author is talking about consumer disk drives, I would argue that's a very incomplete picture. It doesn't include the traditional enterprise users, and it doesn't include hyper-scale storage companies that are using the bigger disks. Or else why else do you think that Seagate is putting 14T and larger drives on their roadmap: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3162084/storage/seagates-road...

This is very different from what the article was asserting, which was that disks weren't getting much bigger, and that they aren't getting cheaper per gigabyte. Even from a trend perspective, it's just not correct. (For example, it's not taking SMR disks into account; but that's because the consumers will probably not be interested in SMR drives.)

> BackBlaze was typically only using consumer drives

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. If anybody is curious, in our blog posts we list the exact serial numbers of all of the drives. See here for an example: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/bl...

We have been at this for a while, and the distinction between "consumer drive" and "enterprise drive" is not what most people think it is. But in the end it simply doesn't matter -> the differences between failure rates of individual MODELS of drives in one line is larger than any difference in failure rates of "consumer" vs "enterprise".

It's not just "consumer drive" versus "enterprise drive". It's also "consumer drive" versus "hyper-scale cloud storage drive". Google used to use consumer drives (and the latter category didn't used to exist) but the world has moved on, and if you are looking for the lowest storage TCO (again, please see Google's "Disks for Data Centers" paper), I'm going to suggest it's a lot more than just using 4T drives.

Hint: you're assuming the only cost is just the raw spindle. You also need to take into account the cost of power, cooling, some portion of the server that the disk is attached to, the cost of the tray, etc., etc., etc. This is all in the "Disks for Data Center" paper, so I'm not giving away any corporate secrets.

Disclaimer: I work at Google and I am a co-author (but only in a very small way) of the "Disks for Data Centers" paper. We have also been at this for a while...

> Hint: you're assuming the only cost is just the raw spindle.

Not me, not sure who you are responding to? I was just correcting the record that Backblaze ONLY used "consumer" drives when some of our drive serial numbers are "enterprise" drives, I wasn't commenting on total cost of ownership.

Backblaze has our own spreadsheet of total cost of ownership, and we are mostly deploying 8 TByte drives right now because the increased density means renting fewer cabinets and paying less for electricity. I'll just make the point that the spreadsheet takes the inputs of WHICH DATACENTER because different locations pay different amounts for electricity.

> I am a co-author of the "Disks for Data Centers" paper.

I read it when it came out, it is filled with good ideas, concepts, possibilities, and suggestions. Very worth reading. However, it is all about spinning drives, which may not be the lowest cost and highest performance in "X" number of years. There is a lot of disagreement around this point (even within Backblaze) but I think "X" is "really close" like within two years. Even if the individual SSD costs more per GByte, like you brought up, the savings in electricity (our number one datacenter cost) are really good which might make up for it soon (again, depending on the region they are deployed in).

But for at least the next two years (and possibly five?), I think we all know we're deploying spinning drives. :-)

Well, the Backblaze blog post only talks about the raw spindle costs, and strongly implies that 4TB drives were the lowest cost option and ignores the existence of any disks larger than 8TB. Which is true only if you are talking about consumer drives and only concerned about raw spindle costs. Otherwise, it's a highly misleading post.

The electricity cost and the fractional share of the disk tray and server to attach the HDD are mostly constant no matter whether you use a 4TB, 8TB, 10TB, or 14TB disk. So if you are only worried about renting fewer cabinets and paying less for electricity, then if 8TB drives make sense, 14TB drives would make even more sense, no?

Of course, you have to worry about more than just bytes; you also have to worry about IOPS. So it starts being about whether you can use nearly all of the IOPS in every drive. (This is why having a "hot pool" and a "cold pool" of disks really don't make that much sense. You'll leaving money on the table by wasting the potential usable IOPS in your cold pool. Instead you can get a much more TCO positive solution by mixing your hot and cold data so you case use most of the IOPS and most of the bytes for all of your drives.)

But if you think SSD's are so "cheap", why not use 14TB drives plus SSD's? Perhaps because using SSD's for storage (as opposed to cache) really isn't that cheap as people think. Sure, lots of IOPS, but unless the bytes you need to read are the right ones to be stored in the SSD, the cost per byte for SSD's is quite astronomical, even taking electricity, server attachment costs, etc., into account.

As a result, I believe using large numbers of spinning drives will make sense for a lot longer than you think.

But other commercial storage companies like Dropbox are seeing different trends and apparently find that 14TB drives are cheaper per TB than 4TB. Is Backblaze an outlier?

I don't think I've seen them publish such a view. Could you point to where they do?

My memory was a little off; they support SMR drives but it's not clear if they deployed them or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11283970

Many people are saying here that the slowing of the rate of change is due to business consolidation... I would argue that it is probably due to physics instead. The traditional way of storing more data on a platter, shrinking the size of each bit, has just about run out. Each bit is now stored on a handful of atoms. The drive manufacturers are trying new things to get around this problem (e.g. shingling) but once each bit is down to a few atoms you can't really go any smaller. Further improvements in disk technology will probably have to be a bit more radical.

Except oddly enough, you can frequently buy a drive wrapped in a USB enclosure for 10-15% less than the bare drive...

Plus, the sleep modes on a lot of "consumer" drives significantly slow them down when used in a desktop environment (as well as creating second long pauses in RAID arrays with more than 5-6 drives), and the option to disable that "feature" is slowly disappearing on drives without the "enterprise" tax.

Market segmentation shenanigans like this would never fly in a healthy competitive market are now very common.

That's true. Honestly I'm just hoping that HGST keeps their reputation as reliable HDDs even though they've been bought by WD. Backblaze always found that they fail less often.

And SSD costs still 10x per GB... Hoping that comes down.

Agreed, I'm having to constantly manage space and move media files to external drives to keep using a SSD for my primary drive. I bought 30GB, 128GB, and 256GB drives as prices came down and I had hoped 1TB drives would be under $200 by now. Not even close. What is worse, I built a new desktop and planned to use a M.2 SSD for even higher speeds. That's a long way off now and will probably have to wait for the next build.

Truly a first-world problem but damn, where are my cheap SSD's?

They're here.

Samsung 960 EVO 500GB at $250. That's insane my friend. I guess it depends how long you've been in the game.

I remember my 40MB drive being huge after we upgraded from a 12MB drive. It was truly hard to find enough to fill it up with.

Once tiny tiny sad thing, they shifted the entry models since. I used to find 40$ average but good brand (intel) ssd; now it's impossible.

That's exactly the opposite of the way I expected things to turn out. Hard drives with their moving parts have a floor on the price, just because you can't get all those parts any cheaper; the only way to get the $/TB lower is to keep making them bigger. SSDs have no such problem, so I expected on the low end we'd see SSDs undercutting hard drives by a lot. Where are the $20 SSDs?

Here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010Q588D4?tag=slicinc-20&...

I often run from usb flash drives, never tried a recent micro sd; I wonder how different they are in terms of everything.

There is no reason to produce $20 SSD's at this time. There is more demand than production so it makes more sense to produce large, high profit drives.

I'm now using the 256GB drive (a 850 EVO Pro) as primary with the old 128GB holding my music collection and it's a pain to manage. Ubuntu FDE with multiple drives under /home isn't as simple or reliable as I would like, and I want to move everything back to one single fast drive.

I should probably take the time to reformat & reinstall across both as a ZFS partition, then wait another year for 1TB prices to come down. 1TB SSDs just aren't cheap enough yet for me to justify buying one. 500GB will fill up again very quickly once everything is on one drive.

I'll frequently shoot a few hundred camera raw photos, then export many as 16-bit TIFF to be stitched into large panoramas or fused together (using exposure bracketed photos). This uses huge amounts of disk space and I want a minimum of 100GB free space as a buffer.

1TB SSD's are 250$ which is close to 200 if you don't need crazy performance.

IMO, more importantly 500GB SSD's are 150$ which are much bigger than 256GB drives as you OS takes up a lot of space.

>> 1TB SSD's are 250$ which is close to 200

On one hand, some people pay $200 for an entire computer.

On the other, $200 is what an ordinary hard drive used to cost.

Bought my laptop new for $299 in 2012 as Windows 8 was coming out and discounts on machines with Windows 7 pre-loaded we common. A couple years ago having upgraded to Windows 10 I grew exasperated with it and replaced the HDD with a ~500GB SSD, maxed out the memory, and switched to Linux (Ubuntu Mate). It now runs Android Studio or Eclipse better than it ever did.

>> I'm having to constantly manage space and move media files to external drives to keep using a SSD for my primary drive.

SSDs have added a storage tier. You're doing the natural thing; just get better at it.

Intel has created a hybrid solution with 3D XPoint. You can plug a relatively inexpensive Optane module (32GB/~$80) into an X299 chipset motherboard and you'll get most of the IOPS benefit of solid state using a traditional disk in a transparent manner; the Optane module provides a huge cache with lower latency than flash.

Tell me about it.

It's even worse as a Mac user. I'm currently in the process of replacing my aging iMac with a new one and since I need about 1 TB of storage and won't allow any spinning drives, Apples wants me to pay about 840 € for upgrading the default fusion drive to their 1 TB SSD, which is of course very fast storage, but painfully expensive. I'm actually considering opting for the smaller 512 GB SSD and getting an external 1 TB SSD from Samsung later.

interestingly, to keep the profit margin, they are also pushing for SSDs that have even higher per GB cost, e.g. Optane.

They also perform 10x better...

Sort of. For sequential I/O, you'd only see 10x if you use an interface faster than SATA for the SSD. Otherwise, you're limited to 600MB/s, which is only 3x a modern Barracuda.

For 4K random I/Os, you might actually get better than 10x out of an SSD. Though, does anyone have real-world experience with sustained random I/O this much smaller than the underlying native block size? Do the published IOPS numbers last 24x7 or does performance start falling off after some number of hours/days?

My impression is that it really can't. Not unless we move away from flash and onto something like mram or memristors that allows tighter feature packing (if i understood things right).

The major SSD vendors seems to have decided that their niche is not bulk storage, but fast RW.

I noticed and was irritated with the 4 Tb anomaly when I was setting up a RAID6 trying to achieve 30 Tb of usable space after mirroring and a hot spare.

Enterprise class,btw

Judging by the price points it seems that they're not buying enterprise level HDDs. There is no way you could buy an enterprise HDD today at $0.02 per GB. I bought a 4TB Seagate Constellation a couple of months ago and the price was more like $0.06 per GB.

They mention it in their article, as well as many of their other articles. They use "consumer" drives.

For a more in-depth explanation, see https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/

Copy and pasted from my response in a different comment:

> BackBlaze was typically only using consumer drives

TL;DR - Backblaze uses both "consumer" and "enterprise" drives. But check the individual drive serial number, that is more important than arbitrary marketing groupings.

When can we finally start measuring cost per TB ?

The need to constantly multiply numbers by 1,000 is rather annoying. Yes, we can all do it, but still.

I want to hear from people who are:

1) Coders, not designers

2) Use machine only for production, nothing "fun"

Do you ever feel the need for going above 256 G?

I have 3 operating systems installed- Win10, Win7, Arch, About 20GB of media, Office 2015, etc on my primary production machine but I'm still using less than 120 GB. I'm asking because I'm wondering if any developer has a reason to not go for sub-100$ SSD ~ 256 GB and instead opt for 4TB of HDD?

I've filled well over 500 gigs with VM images.

Now, whether I actually need 500+ gigs of VM images is another question. I could definitely clean up and pare them down to just what I need, which would no doubt be much less than 500 gigs. But time is money, and it's just cheaper to buy more disk space than spend my time being an overpaid garbage collector.

Pictures take up the majority here. I do not keep them on my primary (SSD) harddrive though.

Then there's also video, which is getting more and more popular (gopro, drones) with filesizes not really going down much due to things like FullHd and now 4k.

Edit: I did not register your 'nothing fun' point properly. I guess you mean a pure working machine? Then no, I do not see a reason to have a hard drive above say 512gb. Do keep in mind that code-bases grow quickly though, I have about 25gb of source code on my main work machine.

Only because consumer filesystems suck.

I'd love to have a completely versioned filesystem, at all times, regardless of how big it got.

I am working on such a thing. Would you be interested in testing it?

I didn't see this before! Please feel free to ping it my way, and I'll let you know what my experiences are.

zfs can almost get you there. snapshots are p fast. interesting concept.

HammerFS in Dragon Fly BSD automatically maintains versions, though it is still not mature, and it is starting to look like it will never reach maturity.

I'm guessing you mean for a work machine as an entertainment machine(like gaming) would easily use more than 256G. My dev machines have 120G ssds and that's enough. The real number crunching happens on a machine that has 2 960G ssds in raid-0. I know, that's not exactly safe, but all the data on there is ephemeral anyway.

Coder full time, photographer (commercial) part time.

Coding (OS + projects, including docker images) less than 150GB.

Photo/video - Active 400GB, Archived 2TB. (Use a 5TB spinning when not in use and a 256GB SSD when working.) Various backups.

- If I were to give a recommendation and you're not stuck to a laptop, get the fastest SSD you can find. * Intel 750. * Samsung 960 EVO M.2.

Versioning may eventually get us to 500GB and game development may need some more space.

Only when testing things: VMs, iOS simulator images, etc. can add up if you have a broad support matrix.

This is likely a stronger argument for setting up a server to run those in parallel.

I've got 512gb and it keeps being close to full.

A windows xp, 7 and 10, a few Linux vms, source checkouts for GCC and clang and a few build trees, some traces that end up being a few GB, it all adds up.

Agreed... most space is used on media (including 3D designs, layouts, etc.). Code is just really compact, even when you have a huge local version tree.

The only counter example I can think of are large databases/VMs... which most wouldn't keep local anyway.

Really, with the speed (latency/bandwidth) of modern networks vs rotating media there seems little reason for local storage that isn't flash drive fast... other than security or minimizing bandwidth.

My VM folder is 408gig. 13 VMs (Windows, OSX, Linux), multiple versions, some with 1 or 2 snapshots (like just before my app is installed so I can test the installer)

So yea, I need > 512gig and no, I don't want to run things from an external drive.

When I worked at Microsoft, you needed a large drive to have multiple copies of the Windows source code and prebuilt object files (which made building modified components much faster). Especially when you needed to work out of multiple branches, for example to fix a bug in a shipped version of Windows for a patch as well as in the current in-development version. SSDs made building much faster, but having only 256GB would have been limiting, depending on how many subdivisions and branches of the Windows source code you needed to work on.

I also had another machine solely dedicated to running VMs. I had a scheduled script every morning that would create a VM from the daily build of my team's branch, setup various tools on it, and make snapshots along the way. I liked to keep old VMs around so I could do a manual bisect and find out what build introduced a bug. Having a 1TB hard drive was very nice because I could go longer without having to purge old VMs.

Another former (although more recent) Microsoftie here...

It's a lot better than it used to be, because the switch from Source Depot to Git means that you can use branches instead of having multiple copies of the repo if you want to work on multiple things at once (which to me was always the one huge PITA about Source Depot, which was otherwise pretty good as far as non-distributed VCS's go). Combined with the build caching, you could probably get away with building Windows on a 256 GB drive now, even if most devs have more.

If you do any kind of machine learning training on your machine, you can consume an arbitrary amount of space.

One debug build of the software I'm working on professionaly is ~90GB (source + objects + third parties) so yes I need more than 256GB

I'm also using postgres databases that are around 60GB so a couple of DB and I max out your disk

As a side note, has anyone noticed that UEFI (and GPT) were forced down our throats just around the time everyone would have a 128, 256, or 512 Gb SSD boot/system disk?

All the hassle for accessing more than 2.2Tb on a boot disk when noone would have such device in use (GPT on non-bootable disks is of course perfectly accessible on most OS's without any need for an UEFI firmware).

Why connect UEFI with that? I use GPT with MBR boot just fine.

I do a lot of work in local VMs (testing in clean environments, debugging drivers, etc.), and those can take up quite a bit of room.

Large databases for backend development on old projects that have been around for decades. I currently have a 1TB SSD installed in my work laptop, and it is about 75% full.

I have around 20 VMs sitting on disk, several of which have over 20GB disk allocated. I run these in VMware workstation, for testing on different Windows versions, and Linux and BSD distros. They eat a lot of space.

I also have virtual network devices which rub in GNS3, which also take up a fair bit of space.

The impression i have is that all space will be filled one way or another. Either from work files, or simply as a dumping ground of media files. Shit just build up over time...

My "work" laptop has ~600GB used out of a 1TB ssd. Big chunks are eaten up by VM's and cloned source tree's with build artifacts. That said, I also have another 1-2TB on a build machine I connect to.

Same as some others, in jobs where I needed VM's yes, otherwise no.

I generate traces of distributed applications I run (essentially logs of functions called, time taken, and other metadata). While the applications run on remote server(s), it's often nice to keep local copies of these logs for analysis. These can be on the order of tens of MB per node per run and I can easily generate many hundreds of GB if I'm not careful while debugging or tuning an application.

All the time: virtual machines.

I have about 3TB of SSD on my workstation. It's about 3/4 full of builds. They're often staging branches of one kind or another, where the features I'm working on can be worked on in isolation.

When I worked at Microsoft, I had several TB of spinning disk. Management was too bloody cheap to buy SSDs ("If we buy you one, we have to buy everyone an SSD..."). I calculated that my lost time was costing enought for Microsoft to buy me a complete new insanely high-end workstation every three or four months, complete with monitors. Insanity.

I wound up buying my own hardware in that group, on several occasions. That was terrible.

I'm a coder, not a designer. I build corpora for natural language processing use. In the last 24 hours I downloaded 62GB of web pages for textual analysis. That represents about 10% of what I plan to download for this one project, but I just hit the pause button on the downloading so I could avoid hitting my home internet provider's monthly data cap. I have probably spent about a solid week in coding time on this, or a few weeks of tinkering time. A point I mention to highlight the fact that this is just one project... I do other things on top of this. This one is English only. There are maybe 50 or so common other languages that I've done at various scales. So yes, disk space is useful. Obviously I don't need all data for all projects loaded locally at once. But working with this scale of data on a cloud drive isn't really a great option, so some off-machine local storage is better, and on-machine local storage for any data that is being processed right now.

You say nothing "fun" but this is fun for me... I think work is allowed to be fun. It's not a day job at the moment, more of a hobby, but it relates to some day jobs I've had and would like to have, and gives me data I can play with to keep my skills up. It's valuable (production quality) data when processed, so it's not mere entertainment.

Like the MS people, I'm a Red Hatter and I just picked up 15TB last Spring to keep up with my storage needs. I have dozens and dozens of VMs. I consult/work on OpenShift and simulating an HA Cloud environment takes a few hundred GB. And when you have customers and projects on multiple versions, you need more. I tend to run N, N-1, and N-2 versions of each OpenShift in HA in VMs (3 Masters, 3 Infra, 3 App, 1 Bastion; 10 total), plus a storage VM, and some of our other relevant products on a 32 core/128GB HP z820 Workstation. Cheapest way I found to run a persistent lab environment. If I ever start doing OpenStack, I might need a small fleet of HP workstations.

Moral of the story is, you want you lab/dev box/env to match what you're trying to test/simulate. I need to simulate "clouds". If you're working on a single web app/site, you could get away with less.

I routinely have VMs and images of VMs taking about many hundreds of GBs. I could get by with 256GB, but it wouldn't be comfortable. I would clean up old images and software on my schedule, then be dictated when because someone cheaped out on a drive.

If something like that delays me just a day, it could easily cost more than a single high speed 1TB SSD. That isn't so unlikely because disk full errors always manifest as something else, particularly when the VM is filling a disk and its internal disk still has has more space.

Sure. I have a couple hundred TB in hard drive capacity and 1TB (4 x 256GB) SSD capacity.

I go for HDDs instead of SSDs because it would be cost prohibitive for me to achieve the same I/O bandwidth with SSDs that I can get on RAID 0 or RAID 10 HDDs and multiple 10GbE connections.

As it stands I'm already well into five figures between computing, storage and networking hardware. Replacing 24+ 8-10TB 7200RPM hard drives with equivalent SSD capacity would cost me nearly $100k in storage alone.

One thing someone like you could use is append-only storage of anything critical. The idea is you never delete a file until you run out of room for it. There's a whole series of versions of a file with your system pointing to the recent one. So, if something bad happens, you can rewind an individual file or the system as a whole back to some point.

It might take a lot of extra storage to do that. I could see never losing work being worth throwing terabyte drives at a system only using 120GB. Add one or two for RAID, one for local backup, and some remote storage like Backblaze or Glacier for best results. The backups would just keep the current versions or periodic snapshots to reduce cost.

Note: I don't know if this feature is supported in the Windows ecosystem right now. Versioned filesystem was a feature of its predecessor, OpenVMS. It did much of what I described plus clustered apps. Only difference was storage was too limited for the versioning to really go as far as I'm advocating. Mainly just posting to give you an idea of how extra storage might help you should your OS support the use case.

Windows does have file versions, I can go in properties and do this but I think you have to set it up. I like your idea and I've been using git for the same (since I have very little binary data I don't feel bad using the free websites with a git commit -a; git push)

But this was another of my motivations behind this question- (which I didn't mention), why buy 1 4TB which will crash anyway but not 4 1TB. As people are getting more pro- I think Microsoft should lead with home RAID solutions. I know there was Windows Server Home but that's no more now. The OS should do integrated backup to various remote storages.

I thank you both for your replies. Far as RAID, it would be nice for Microsoft to do more in that area for desktops. I do remember when I used Windows there were RAID appliances that you could set right next to your desktop. You just plug in some HD's. Plug the appliance into the desktop. It does the rest.

I'm sure they're still around for anyone that wants better RAID than what Microsoft has. Probably got a lot cheaper, too.

Looks like windows does RAID (win 2000) and pooled storage (whs, win8). And you can setup particular folders for periodic backup and retrieve history.

But I'd like to be able to retrieve every single version for desired partitions/folders and the ability to store to cloud.

I develop on an i3.xl (950 gb)

My team has hundreds of terabytes of compressed data stored in s3 so I sometimes jump up to the limits when I am doing data pulls for analysis.

The lowering costs of 8tb HDD's combined with it being Amazon Prime day, means you can get one of these bad boys for only $150. I just ordered 2.

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-ST...

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