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Comment by TonyTrapp | Hacker News Reader

I keep telling this to friends who complained that hard disk manufacturers are plotting against them by not lowering hard disk prices long after floods have damaged hard disk factories. You have to consider how absolutely incredibly cheap this stuff actually is. Take a high-quality wooden shelf. It's just a couple of wood boards, right? Yet it may cost ten times more than a USB stick or even an embedded development board. It's crazy.

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And the Doctors. You have to consider that $500 for a 15 minute visit at the doctor is ridiculously cheap, given the reduction in pain / the increase in productivity you usually gain from following their advice! /s

Yes, some stuff seems to be unreasonably cheap or expensive in some context. But it's the market that prices it, and collusion is always bad for everyone (except the conspirators).

Hard drives are being price gouged. The prices on the low-end have stayed the same since pre-flood and the $/tb hasn't improved in a long time. Also the fact that the almost identical( and sometimes exactly identical down to serial number) externals often cost half as much as the internals( with only some extra warranty to cover the difference). It's a broken market.

Only true for lower capacity drives. You can buy 14TB for <$14/TB while 1-2TB is still $30-45/TB.

The going price/capacity target for prosumer scale (>6TB) is $15/TB.

Given the proliferation of lower-performing SMR drives, effective HDD prices have actually gone up rather than down. We're forced to pay the same price for grossly inferior products.

Your shelf is so expensive, normally, because of physical laber.

While i agree that a hard drive cost can bottom out, i don't think we have bottomed out at the right price.

Why would it make sense, at all, to produce a 300gb drive in 2020? It doesn't. Are they using machines which are not able to create better plates in 3,5" sizes? If yes, they probably ride those machines for a long time. Should be paid of by now 10x

The price of a 2 TB drive is the same as it was before the floods that were probably something like 10 years ago.

There's no excuse.

It's an excuse to buy an SSD.

And it's precisely what's responsible for falling HDD volumes and rising SDD volumes.

Which, in turn, is precisely what's responsible for stagnant HDD and falling SSD prices.

I can get a big-enough 480GB Sandisk SSD for $55 right now, and a 2TB SSD for $190, manufacturer direct. Looking at their WD_BLACK HDD, that's actually a buck cheaper than their 500GB HDD. For 2TB, I'd be looking at $99 instead of $190; at less than 2x the price difference, the SSD is a far better option for most people.

Of course, the HDD goes all the way up to 10TB (at $320), at which point, so it still comes out ahead for bulk storage. SSDs hit a breakpoint at 2TB, where price and complexity go up astronomically. I can either drop a few grand on a specialized product, or around $1000 on several drives and build a RAID. So there's still a market. Just not a particularly big one.

Prices are based on first sensible link on their web page (presumably, most popular product). You can go up or down in price if you click around, go off-brand, but the qualitative picture doesn't change. HDDs require a lot of infrastructure, and the market is evaporating.

I suspect the upper end will disappear soon enough.

I do still want some kind of bulk storage. I want to back up my photos somewhere reliable, but there seems little left. Tape is thousands of dollars for the hardware, while optical is now tiny. Nothing seems to compete with the volumes, economies-of-scale, or R&D budget of integrated circuits.

Cheapest ssd $/tb is x2-3 that of the cheapest hdd. That's still significant.

That'd actually be acceptable to me, since I wouldn't feel the need for redundancy--but it looks like the cheapest 1TB SSD that can be found is $67, while I can get HDDs for $15.88/TB. That's x4.2 the price of an HDD, definitely not practical for me.

Yes the cheapest ssd is more expensive /tb than the optimal one( which is ~1tb atm).

>And it's precisely what's responsible for falling HDD volumes and rising SDD volumes.

Eh, I'd say that its because a SSD does 50,000 IOPS+ and HDDs do about 150. Once SSDs came out and started being mass produced that spelled the death of HDD in most devices. Dropping the price of HDDs to near 0 won't stop that.

At home I need about 20 TB of storage (without counting redundancy). I'm not rich enough to do that with SSDs.

And fwiw, HDD go up to 18 TB nowadays.

I was comparing specific lines of drives -- mainstream lines from a major vendor (WD/Sandisk).

SSDs also go way up in size, but prices spike after you hit a corner.

There's no reason to expect the price of a two-platter hard drive to go down over time, and hard drive tech has not quite improved enough to allow for 2TB from a single platter without using shingled magnetic recording. Drives with at least 1TB per platter appear to have been on the market since just after the floods (2011/2012).

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