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Disk Prices

diskprices.com

170 pointsLeoPanthera65 comments

Full of scams.

Used section is filled with "refurbished" 0 hours SMART drives. Those are >40K hours drives with wiped SMART. Sometimes people doing the wiping are sloppy and you can dig into previous smart logs. Example:

    SMART Extended Self-test Log Version: 1 (1 sectors)
    Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
    # 1  Extended offline    Aborted by host               90%     11829         -
    # 2  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      5586         -
    # 3  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     41650         -
    # 4  Vendor (0xb0)       Completed without error       00%     41252         -
    # 5  Vendor (0x71)       Completed without error       00%     41251         -

I bought this one "0 hours refurbished", ran Short offline after a year with 5K and another (clicked by accident so quickly aborted) a week ago with 11K. 52K hours total.

New section is full of "new" MaxDigitalData refurbs. Same drives as in Used section, but with new sticker and wiped SMART. :)

This is really an Amazon problem right? It's not the fault of the site. The guy who runs it does claim to attempt to filter out scams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32629542

But that seems like a nearly impossible endless job.

I dont see any attempts. Plenty of Hitachi drives listed in NEW section. Hitachi doesnt exist for a long time now, and last drives with that branding came out in 2018.

I dont know if I would blame Amazon in this particular case. You need to know what "refurbished" drive being sold with empty SMART actually is. Some sellers will disclose those as wiped, tested and certified (by the seller), others will try to sell as brand new old stock.

Products that are sold after the year they have been manufactured are not scams.

Nobody sells 4 year old 'old new stock' drives in bulk. Just to make a point first Hitachi from the list:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E939BFY?tag=synack-20&linkCode=...

"2M hours MTBF rating & 5-year limited warranty"

Product Warranty: For warranty information about this product, please click https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71+GyVRorWS.pdf [PDF ]

"This Limited Warranty applies to new HGST HDDs purchased from an authorized HGST dealer by the original purchaser for normal use and not for resale."

"To determine the warranty period for your specific Product, please visit www.hgst.com."

hgst.com? sure looks like legit 5 year warranty for this new drive! What do the customers say?

> Do not buy from Quiet Day Shopping - USED drives Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2021 Verified Purchase Purchased 2x OEM Bare drives, sold as new. Received 2x beat up drives used for > 2khrs according to SMART logs on the drives. Lots of wonderful SMART errors on the drives as well. Had to pay $15 to ship them back. Very damn annoyed. Do not buy from "Quiet Day Shopping", you will not receive new OEM bare drives, but will instead receive used and abused garbage. Really, don't purchase drives from this page. You're unlikely to receive what you want.

For those that need a reliable drive, ignore every drive listed that doesn't have a 5 year warranty and that pretty much filters out all the scams.

edit: and filter for new and use your normal Amazon smarts to not buy if there are few reviews or from a seller that has poor ratings. It would be helpful if diskprices.com showed the number of reviews and average review for the drive as well as who it is sold by and what their review count and average review is. Also a filter for shipped/sold by Amazon (I'm aware of commingling of inventory). And a filter for the number of warranty years.

Also good idea to run a tool like f3 (fight flash fraud) before putting anything on the disk.

As a maintainer for https://ec2instances.info I absolutely love sites like this. Nice and clean. Just like that site this is statically rendered into a large HTML file and delivered to the client, with data updated every 2 hours via scraping.

And sure enough if you search 'disk prices' or 'harddrive prices' this is the #1 result which I am certain helps with their Amazon Affiliate revenue.

> https://ec2instances.info

I saw this the other day. What’s the story with the site? Are there “hidden gem” instances that you can find? Or is it just a better GUI for browsing what instances AWS offers?

Well the story started > 10 years ago, I think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2473941

It's mostly the latter -- a better GUI.

>>I absolutely love sites like this. Nice and clean.

I agree. Although it would be cool if you could sort by column. I wonder if you could sort using a client-side javascript function instead making a new web request.

I would love this if it added if the drive is a Shingled Magnetic Recording or Perpendicular Magnetic Recording. That's a key difference between drives.

tough when they keep trying to sneak that in without changing the model number though

Never ceases to produce a sense of amazement in me when I see something that reminds me of the ever on-going dynamic of size-inflation/price-deflation in storage.

I am dating myself but I can still remember what an amazing thing it was when my school got a 10MB Winchester hard drive (external -- about as big as a laser printer).

Of course, at that time the only long-term storage I had any experience with was 5.25" floppies with somewhere between 256K and 512K storage, I cannot recall for sure.

I remember my parents upgrading from their 386 with a 20mb HDD to a 486 with a 400mb drive and thinking we would never fill it.

Yeah, I remember seeing my first 20 MB hard drive in a computer magazine advertisement. That fantastic piece of kit cost something like $2000.

Definitely way, way out of the price range of a hobbyist kid like me, who was still using 5.25" floppies[1] and later upgraded to the 3.5" floppies when I got an Amiga.

Also, a bit earlier but still around the same time (it's kind of all a big blur to me now) was the age of machines like the Timex Sinclair, which only had either 16k or 48k of RAM.

So when those 20 MB drives rolled around, they were a massive amount of storage in those days.

I also remember when the first MP3s were released.. they were each something like 3 MB in size, and took forever to download over my modem connection. These were also the days of ASCII porn... sorry about the digression... but, yeah, that's what the stone age was like..

[1] - a bit of trivia about 5.25" floppies: we used to use hole punchers to cut a hole in the side of the disk in order to be able to write to it. Covering this hole with some tape would physically prevent the disk being written to. You could buy disks with a notch already professionally cut in the side for you, but IIRC it was cheaper to buy them without and cut the hole out with a hole puncher yourself. That's why you'll see some disks with a square notch in the side (that's the one professionally cut) and some with a semicircular hole (that's the one done with a hole puncher, by a hobbyist).

> a bit of trivia about 5.25" floppies: we used to use hole punchers to cut a hole in the side of the disk in order to be able to write to it. Covering this hole with some tape would physically prevent the disk being written to.

Hole puncher? Kitchen scissors I tell ya!

On the C64 them 5"1/4 floppies were one-sided, so we'd make a hole to use them as two-sided disks. Basically we'd take two floppies, flip one upside down, take a pair of scissors and use the other to cut a hole at exactly the correct spot. While we'd be doing that we'd "pull" the disks inside the sleeves to the diagonal opposite of the scissor to make sure we'd not cut into the floppies.

I've probably done it hundreds of times. I do still remember the exact feeling and could do it in a heartbeat : )

For Sinclair it is easy to remember the dates:

ZX80 ->1980

ZX81 ->1981

and those had 1KB RAM, the 16K (or 48K) came right after with the Spectrum, which is 1982.

The first hard drive I owned was a Seagate ST506/412 5-1/4" (10MB). IIRC I got a great deal and paid only $1k. This was pre PC and I connected it (with some difficulty) to my CP/M machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST506/ST412

Mine was a couple years after yours. Seagate ST-251 40 MB hard disk on my 10 MHz 8088.

Nice tool, especially when looking at refurbished disks. But for new disks, in Germany you can use geizhals [0] to cover many more shops than just Amazon: Cheapest new disk on Amazon.de is 18.43€/TB (the 15€ unit is refurbished) while geizhals lists 16.24€/TB shipped.

Also available in AT, PL and UK, though I don't know how well these are covered.

[0] https://geizhals.de/?cat=hde7s&sort=r&hloc=at&hloc=de&v=e&t=...

I love Geizhals. Filling "Sopping baskets" with stuff I would like to have and then just deleting it is a hobby of mine. Geizhals is the tool to go for this hobby. :)

Yeah, geizhals is great (having idealo as a backup is also nice).

Back in the old days I used pricewatch.com for the US, but it's offline now and I can't find a proper alternative, which I find really odd. :/

Some of the brands at the top of the new HDD price/GB list are pretty suspicious and should probably be avoided:

* "MaxDigitalData" is selling relabeled disks from other manufacturers under their own brand name. Given the prices and some of the reviews, I strongly suspect that they're wiping SMART data on used drives and reselling them as "new".

* The "Avolusion" external drives all have reviews complaining that they stop working unexpectedly.

Yep, would be nice to filter by "name brands".

I prefer https://shucks.top/ which often indexes very good deals, if you're willing to crack open the casing to extract the juicy drive within.

That appears to be limited to WD and Amazon, or am I missing something?

I see pricing columns for Amazon, Best Buy, B&H, ebay, and newegg, but yes it does seem limited to WD branded drives.

Top of the page literally says "WD external drive price tracker."

And US only.

Non-starter. Only indexes price for USA.

That's like 90+% of HN users

I doubt that, but I’d be very interested in actual numbers to confirm either way.

It is missing a few cheaper ($15/TB vs $17.8/TB) options for large drives from diskprices (Toshiba and Exos ones).

Disk Prices on Amazon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156292 - Jan 2020 (222 comments)

The missing piece here is to cross-reference with a failure/reliability reporting service to produce Price per TB Hour.

It seems to me that in modern drives, there is no longer that much variance in average longevity. At least close enough that when I have tried to compare drives, the cheaper drive almost always ends up being the cheaper drive even when adjusted for longevity.

I can't prove it but it sure seems like once BackBlaze started posting reliability figures from their fleet it forced the hand of any manufacturer that was cutting corners to keep up their reliability or get hammered in the market.

I still have a bad taste in my mouth with regard to the Seagate HDD failure plague from about a decade ago.

Kudos to the BackBlaze team

I still reference the latest BackBlaze stats when I'm buying a drive, and only purchase models which have fared well.

Better to pay a premium up front rather than risk total loss when it dies prematurely. Seagate has screwed me over one too many times..

I go the exact opposite way these days, I buy 3 drives from 3 different brands and run them in a ZFS raidz. This reduces the risk of all the drives failing at the same time (which can happen with any batch of disks) but also makes it easier to determine which physical drive needs replacing when you have a failed disk in a NAS (since each disk is unique).

The first hard drive, listed at $126, is actually $285.90 on Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KTRKB6S?tag=synack-20&linkCode=...

This should be flagged for the affiliate link

Presumably it was a used drive and sold in the three hours between updates.

Support your local computer part store, folks :)

Amazon only isn’t that useful. Some people seem to think that its the only place to buy anything.

There is also https://www.serverhunter.com/ which I really love but is for renting servers.

May be worth posting this from Blackblaze 2017[1].

[1] Hard Drive Cost Per Gigabyte

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

This is giving me serious pricewatch.com vibes. RIP.

For the youngsters out there: In the late 90's and early 00's, pricewatch was similar to this, except multi-vendor and supported searches for a wide array of components, e.g. CPU, Mobo, RAM. Ended up being a major driver in enabling Newegg to quickly grow so big and dominate; back then, Newegg consistently had the very best prices on the most in-demand chips like AMD Thunderbirds.

p.s. Do some HDDs really only come with a 3 month warranty?

Some of these are sold as "Enterprise" grade drives. Does this site index used disks, or how is this possible?

Edit: Now I see it, thank you @BugsJustFindMe (it's tricky to notice all columns on mobile).

22TB is still the max? Guess I'll just wait for 30T :)

Those ones are marked as "used". It's an interesting idea because drives follow a bathtub curve for failures, so presumably gently used could be significantly better than new.

Most are marked "renewed". Many probably are near new. But yeah, I was a bit dis-illusioned to see the EXOS drives I love's prices were too good to be true, were "renewed".

I did pay $379 per 16TB EXOS back in early COVID as drive prices were spiking (it got much worse!). That they are $250 not-renewed is still great. But yeah, the $189/per price is renewed only, too good to be true. Still, I'm tempted. 25% off. These drives will probably be fine. Three riskier drives plus a free "spare"? That's a tempting trade off versus a real warranty. And if it does fail very early, I can probably get it sorted, probalby.

You're familiar with pcpartpicker.com?

Prices without quality means nothing. I went all in on X25-E from 2011 at 65nm with 100.000 writes per bit.

Nothing will ever challenge those disks.

A site like this would be even more awesome if it showed the power draw for a single drive idling (but not spun down). I'd love to move to a more power friendly NAS in the future. A few years ago when I last checked, larger WD drives actually had lower power draw, because at the time they were the helium filled ones.

I hope synack-20 enjoys the affiliate fees in exchange for their work on this site. Well done!

Still a bit shocking that for newest NVMes the price difference can be an order of magnitude (not mentioning Optane, which is two orders more expensive). I understand that packing more data into same form factor is more expesive, but still.

Neat, but it'd be nice if I could filter by min and max price.

One thing that’s missing is power consumption. Some drives have oddly higher power consumption, and that does add up with 24/7 and higher drive counts.

Big fan of clean sites, with a simple purpose. Shame there isn't a mobile friendly version though.

Would be useful to see/filter by drive type too i.e. exclude SMR, include NAS etc.

Of course a drive that's $126 on amazon.com is available for $466 on amazon.ca

hmm ... I unchecked all criteria other than internal SAS ... and there are only two (oddball) results ...

That's too bad that SAS drives are not being tracked well with a site like this.

The site only indexes drives sold on Amazon. There aren't a lot of SAS drives on there.

Thanks for pointing this out. Fixed.

They're doing amazon referral? Is that still a thing?

No Manufacturer column, and non-sortable. Needs a lot of work.

I was kinda hoping to see ultimate frisbee disc prices

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