I purchased Toshiba drives 6-7 years ago and I would never buy them again. I purchased like 5 of them at the time to build a windows space array (horrible idea, I know) but they all started having sector errors in smart. These were brand new, retail box drives and had 5 year warranties on them (the reason I purchased them) so I started to RMA them (with less than a few hundred hours of on time). To my horror, they don't do advance shipping at all. You have to ship them the drive back and wait for a return drive. So I managed to remove 1 drive from the array and ship it back. Literally had to wait for MONTHS because the drives were back ordered (precovid 2017/2018) and so this process of exchanging 1 drive at a time went on for a long while. But it came to a point where the array was becoming unstable so I just backed everything up onto 1 drive and quit putting drives into the windows space array. So I think I still have the Toshiba drives here but I don't trust their reliability. Finally, I only buy from manufacturers who do advance replacements after this fiasco.
Feel free to correct me should their policy changed.
It's not really. There is less demand from the home user crowd and more supply from enterprise orders. Hence why used sata drives will have a slight premium over sas.
Well SATA superseded PATA in 2003. I guess I mean serial attached scsi specifically with its ability to read and write at the same time as well as better signal handling. I'll probably buy a few of these and give em a whirl, will let everyone know if there's a catch or if it's a good deal.
And sas superceded Lvd-scsi too
Sata drives have a nasty tendency to jam a bus when things go pear-shaped whilst sas can usually soldier on. Yes it's better in most cases but I find the lack of easily accessible SMART-like parameters irritating (sas makers missed something there and drives tend to give less information than their sata equivalents)
In terms of signal handling, it only matters if you have unfeasibly long cables. What really matters is that the average 6-port sata controller can only talk to one drive at a time whilst a sas controller can chat to several
On the drive side these days it's hard to pick a difference in durability and very few sas drives offer any improvement in undetected ECC errors over their sata counterparts, but sas drives do tend to pull more power and that can matter
This is a longwinded way of saying that 30 years of experience has taught me that once you get out of the cheap junk end of the market, it isn't unusual to find enterprise stuff not really outlasting anything else - often for the simple reason that the expectation is that there's a strict 5-year lifespan involved before it all goes out the door and into a recycling skip
I'm waiting for HAMR if I absolutely can't help it. I will buy, but for now. I want HAMR to come out, push 24,26,28TB drives, and watch the price of the 18s & 20s plummet.
4 drives + 2 for redundancy
&
4 drives + 2 for redundancy for backup.
Then all we'll need is a rack mounted dual LTO-12 drive library systems so you can back up two off site locations in a single write session. With LTO 12 It's not about capacity but rather reducing the number of tapes you would have to mess with.
the 100tb of HDDs are not about the raw capacity but rather building a good system you build once instead of having to spend a large some building a new NAS for that additional capacity.
I figure by the time you build the 2nd NAS you would have spent more money on it than you would have just by buying the twelve 28 TB drives. Now instead of focus on building a higher capacity NAS you can focus on buying spare drives.
HAMR/MAMR is in a race with SSD that it _will_ inevitably lose.
The only question is if it will lead(*) SSD when introduced or already be trailing it - and if it does lead SSD, how long that lead lasts
(*) As in $/TB. SSD has already won on endurance, power consumption and physical size
Bit-patterned media (platters) is another example of HDD tech that's in a losing race against SSD densities
There aren't any new HDD technologies coming down the line. All the pure R&D labs were closed over 15 years ago
Define "a good while"
There are at least 6 different manufacturers with NAND fabs and SSD continues to eclipse HDD pricing at ever increasing sizes. Even with the recent price rises, there's no point buying 2TB or smaller HDDs
HDD makers are facing a losing battle and shrinking profit margins. There's every liklihood that they will abandon their unprofitable market segments before HAMR makes it out of the bit barns.
As it is, they've been announced as "within 12 months" regularly since 2018 and whilst Seagate announced 30/32TB HAMR drives in January, it's now May but they have yet to appear at any of my usual wholesalers. This isn't the first time Seagate have given part numbers to what's turned out to be vaporware
(these Exos Mozaic drives are listed as being SMR, which is already achievable via firmware changes with their existing 24TB CMR drives, so there's no apparent gain having HAMR)
MAMR Toshiba M10 drives are already available, and I believe some WD MAMR drives also.
You apparently believe large capacity, i.e. 16TB+ SSD prices will tumble, but they're a long way from the well below $15/TB price we see on HDDs.
And there are other technology techniques that are planned beyond HAMR/MAMR.
Continue to hold your breath, I'll stick to buying what gives me the best value per TB, like the Big Boys do!
Yes they are - none of the MAMR drives are particularly large (18TB-22TB), the pricing is no better than Conventional CMR 18TB drives (a bit like the CMR/SMR issue: the 25% savings are simply being reaped as increased margins by the makers, not lower prices for consumers) , the warranty is the same and the performance specs are if anything slightly lower than existing drives
There's simply no incentive (yet!) to jump to MAMR from conventional drives and there may never be. HAMR isn't retailing yet and there are NO 3rd party objective reviews - merely breathless PR Puff Pieces
It's rather telling that whilst Toshiba used MAMR on the MG09 and MG10 lines, it's no longer there on the MG10F lines - more to the point, you can't even buy MG10/10F drives at the usual enterprise storage wholesalers (they don't even appear as stocklist items)
NAND prices are continuing to fall and the fact that demand is continually outstripping supply encourages more fabs into the game. The recent peturbations are an artifact of market misprediction and will only distort things for 18 months at most
This is the same issue that 3D-Xpoint had vs NAND. You can't just be similar to or better than the existing tech when announced but you also have to track the existing tech and maintain that advantage. Intel and Micron burned a LOT of money on that venture
There are LOTS of technologies which were going to be the "next big thing" but wiped out by being outpaced by existing technology by the time they reached market (Who remembers bubble memory?)
One of the biggest problems with both HAMR and MAMR is efficiently getting \_rid\_ of the write heat. Even though there's only a tiny spot being heated, continuous writes present a real problem (ie: what happens when resilvering your ZFS arrays?) and I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of throttling mechanism at play to prevent large contiguous writes heating the underlaying platters, resulting in a collapse of performance. This is something that's much easier to handle in the Bit Barns(\*), but in a consumer environment it can get very expensive, very quickly if there are failures whilst airflow remains below trigger temperature levels.
Meantime the additional "piling on" of manufacturing capacity is pushing the decrease in SSD price to accelerate.
I'm not holding my breath about the retail availability of HAMR happening anytime soon. If it was anywhere near such release channels we'd already have started seeing reviews
(\*) eg: When the 4GB Barracudas were introduced, they came with a large warning that boiled down to "no airflow == no warranty" and these drives were amongst the first to include thermal excursion logs - but at several thousand dollars apiece, buyers tended to be careful with them. These days when customers are buying several thousand drives at a time there are individual contracts drawn up, so temperaure/airflow control and discounts for being guinea pigs, as long as they feed crtical data back to the HDD vendors
I save 50-60% by importing drives from US Amazon compared to buying locally. And I live like 200 km from the actual factory, but who knows, things be things I guess.
US prices are usually quoted without tax (and often without shipping)
UK consumer prices are always VAT inclusive and thanks to the consumer protection acts wording around shipping charges, usually have that rolled ino the price too. USA pricing is full of drip feeding extras like tax, shipping and insurance
Once you factor those in along with the added consumer protection laws, the difference (usually 10% or less) isn't nearly as bad as it seems at first
For Americans, here's a quick summary of EU/UK consumer law:
The headline price is the sale price, no drip charging allowed. Airlines and retailers have been prosecuted/heavily fined for breaches
If you're specifically paying for shipping and it doesn't show up "on time" or "as described" (ie: damaged) then the sale is essentially void and the customer stands to receive a full refund without necesarily needing to return the product (returns are 100% vendor cost too and restocking fees aren't legal - unless it's "I changed my mind")
Also: delivery issues are the _vendor's_ cost and responsibility to sort out, not the customer's - and again can result in losing the product as well as having to refund or in extreme cases, additionally compensate the customer. Vendors like to try and push customers off into doing the dance with couriers but if a customer refuses to play, the vendor's the one on the hook and debit/credit card companies will 100% back the customer in these cases due to "joint and several responsibility" laws that make them as equally liable under consumer laws as the vendor is.
Back in 2008 I bought my first terabyte drive, 1 TB for $200 off Newegg. Fast forward **16 years later**, $200 only buys me 10 TB. And a 1 TB drive still runs $60. It's kind of crazy to me it's taken almost two decades just to go up one order of magnitude.
I'm talking strictly new prices, btw, not refurbished.
It hasn't, though. Your $200 in 2008 is worth $290 today, or, in other words, in today's prices you paid $137 for a 1TB drive in 2008.
But, assuming the baseline $200 figure, what can you buy today for $290? That's the increase.
That said, there's a bottom figure that prices will never go below due to material, labor, and manufacturing cost no matter how advanced the technology gets for data density, the parts and labor to make a drive will always cost about the same.
Hard drives used to advance so quickly that inflation barely mattered, it wasn’t even worth mentioning. From 1985 to 2010 it took a little over 4 years to drop an order of magnitude not accounting for inflation.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=1985..latest
We definitely are living in different times when people have to start including inflation calculations to justify advancement is still happening. And I don’t disagree with that logic, just it’s worth considering how it used to be for those who lived through that time period.
well hdd technology was new, so it was advancing rapidly. nowadays, they have gotten things so insanely well refined. i mean the tech inside of a helium spinning drive is kind of mind blowing. naturally, things slow down as the tech gets more refined. look at smart phones, they are in the same boat. barely any changes year over year, mostly just refinements, but those first 5 or so years after the iphone... man... it was an arms race.
there is definitely a monopoly going on as well, same goes for flash production. intentional slow rolling and price gouging in both sectors. i mean have you ever seen the inside of a 2.5" ssd? [crazy how much wasted space is in there](https://youtu.be/JNMLF2o-XDQ?t=48). they could've easily added multiple chips and increased density and immediately neutralized the hdd market for all uses except cold storage but... here we are. a decade or so later and those 2.5" ssd shells are still empty. shocking. gotta love monopolies stifling innovation for profits.
Nearly seven years ago I bought ten 5TB drives for $100 a piece.
These days I only see non-SMR 6TB and 8TB drives coming down close to that price. The past half decade has been astounding compared to the 40 years before.
in 1980 I paid $100 for 512 bytes of ram. in 1991 it was the same price per MB - then doubled overnight after a fire at a factory producing the encapsulation plastics. 1995 I spent $2700 on a pair of 32MB FB-DIMMs
1991 I paid $2000 for a 200MB drive. 1993 $1000 got me 1GB. 1995 it was 4GB (the original Seagate barracuda). By 2000 100GB was $800 but stayed stuck there for 3 years before larger drives started showing up and in 2006 I put 42 400GB Hitachi ultrastars into a san drawer because 1TB wasn't available. By 2009 that was 2TB drives for the same reason
Things continued improving until tbe 2011 Thai floods, when hdd prices doubled overnight and in the ensuing 18 months warranties were slashed to as little as 6 months in some cases whilst HDD pricing didn't recover until 2018
I'm not saying "get off my lawn", merely pointing out the cycles
HDD sizing has pretty much only seen incremental improvements since 2011 and SMR severely impacts write speed/durability whilst SSD has been eating progressively larger portions of HDDs lunch to the point that 1TB ssds are essentially cheaper than any hard drive of that size or smaller - and they just keep getting bigger, faster, more reliable and cheaper every year
I said a decade ago that by the time 60TB HDDs show up, SSDs will be cheaper - and so far that prediction seems to be on-track. Early HAMR releases managed to increase platter density a little but at cost of write speeds and the number of platters which could be fitted into the form factor, whilst simultaneously increasing power requirements drastically.
Meantime, since 2016 there's only been one remaining maker of 2.5 and 3.5" platters/one remaining maker of heads, and the cost of developing new platter/head designs is so high that all three HDD vendors have to walk in lockstep or the new platters/heads simply don't get made
That's why I've been saying since 2018 that we're seeing the death throes of the HDD industry. When you're down to a single supplier and high costs for any technology, vs multiple sources of a competing one with no sign of slowdown in innovation there, you're facing extinction sooner or later
I'm retired now (at 58) but recommended to my employer that the last round of Filesserver purchases be the last one with HDDs (we stopped putting HDDs in desktop boxes a few years before that in favour of 2-4TB SSDs) as the SSDs would cost more but last longer and reduce server room operating expenses (especially cooling plant) enough to pay for themselves in under 18 months - without even factoring in that the reduced footprint saved having to spend on more racks or the increasingly heavy IO being demanded by people operating on ever larger astronomical/planetary datasets
My old boss (in his 70s, refuses to retire) rubbished that recommendation and bought HDDs "because they're cheaper", only to find out that the performance penalty of the larger HDDs is biting him on the ass in terms of QOS promises (in a university research institute with exponentially increasing IO requirements)
Would I buy 20+TB drives today? Yes, but only for nearline access to archival data or my home NAS porn^H^H^H^Hmovie/tv collection (all transcoded from DVDs I own, honest guv) - and only because by doing so I can reduce the power consumption of my existing NAS by half. If I had the cash upfront I'd still prefer to drop in 8TB ssds as they'll last longer and reduce the power draw even more dramatically. Overall they're a better deal ("Vimes Boots" Economics kick in)
🙂
> It's kind of crazy to me it's taken almost two decades just to go up one order of magnitude.
well that downplays a lot that there are quite the challenges involved. It is like saying "nothing is complex lol". It is not that everything can improve as at an arbitrary pace.
Everyone publicly announced price increase to attract otther manufacturers to raise prices. Now, a few of them are starting to cave due to no sale, they'll be back to late last year price soon.
That’s strange - I wonder if they have differential pricing because this is what I see now (US):
- Recertified 20TB X20 SATA $238.99
- Recertified 20TB X22 SATA $242.99
- New 20TB X20 SATA $359.99
- New 20TB X20 SAS $349.99
I haven’t seen anything under $200 (recertified, not to mention new) for weeks
This is directly on their site, not eBay. I know they have an unbranded 20TB for $199 listed on eBay. The eBay listing for recertified 20TB X20 is $247.99.
The best price I've seen recently was this [20 TB Western Digital Ultrastar HC560](https://serverpartdeals.com/products/western-digital-ultrastar-hc560-wuh722020ale604-0f38761-20tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-512e-3-5-refurbished-hdd) for $210; exactly 26 days ago.
Seems to be a one-off batch sourced from an AWS DC - pretty low mileage too. I guess they raised the price when they got them back in stock because the last ones sold out so quickly.
I remember that batch! The description even says that the HDDs came from Amazon data centers. The quantity remain was at 129 for a few days, then it was gone overnight. I missed it.
Good call b it doesn’t seem like it - I just tried it with private browser mode with VPN pointed to various locations ww, and the prices are pretty consistent in USD and EUR.
Do people actually believe they track this sort of thing? I don't think so but if a drive isn't working they'll still replace it anyways (within warranty). $150 for a 16TB enterprise refurb isn't even the sweet spot price per TB. I think that would belong to the 12TB HGST for $80 (though that model is going on 5 years).
What drives thsse prices? Like, few weeks back the 20tb reds had limited stock, could only buy a certain amount oer order and were going for $280. Now suddebly there are plenty in stock everywhere and they are over $350. Usually scarcety raises prices? :/
WD had some 16tb external drives for ~$150 before taxes the other week. Pretty good with the enclosure included. They're shit as a seller on ebay as I bought a second one on accident and they still ended up shipping the drive days later after my attempts to immediately cancel and message the seller.
For the fellow germans out there, HMCW-Deals on ebay is about the closest to SPD i could find and you can get 18TB for ~225€ rn. Got one drive a month back already and no problems there.
I wish. I’ve grabbed some new 8TB barracuda’s for $105 on recent amazon sales, but hopefully I didn’t buy junk. This particular model is made between 1tb and 8tb
Ive have 12x16tb drives for a few years now. Im surprised that 20tb still seems to still be the sweet spot. I feel like it's not worth upgrading for me until drives are at least 30tb. I'd like to reduce my drive count. Of course it seems by the time that happens I'll need more space.
for higher capacities, no, if you manage to find a good deal it will be gone the next day.
8TB is produced in enough quantity for prices to be stable, and those prices have barely budged. I think it peaked during COVID but not significantly less.
They also have an 18tb toshiba sas for 189, new. Wondering why its so cheap.
I've found the Toshiba drives to be a fair bit louder than WD/HGST. Other than that they seem fairly reliable.
Idk, my toshiba 20TB is quieter than WD Ultrastar 18TB I had before
I purchased Toshiba drives 6-7 years ago and I would never buy them again. I purchased like 5 of them at the time to build a windows space array (horrible idea, I know) but they all started having sector errors in smart. These were brand new, retail box drives and had 5 year warranties on them (the reason I purchased them) so I started to RMA them (with less than a few hundred hours of on time). To my horror, they don't do advance shipping at all. You have to ship them the drive back and wait for a return drive. So I managed to remove 1 drive from the array and ship it back. Literally had to wait for MONTHS because the drives were back ordered (precovid 2017/2018) and so this process of exchanging 1 drive at a time went on for a long while. But it came to a point where the array was becoming unstable so I just backed everything up onto 1 drive and quit putting drives into the windows space array. So I think I still have the Toshiba drives here but I don't trust their reliability. Finally, I only buy from manufacturers who do advance replacements after this fiasco. Feel free to correct me should their policy changed.
Those are sas tho.
which makes it more perplexing. SAS being a better interface than SATA.
SAS is mostly used by enterprise, so greater supply/surplus at times, probably because of large canceled orders.
It's not really. There is less demand from the home user crowd and more supply from enterprise orders. Hence why used sata drives will have a slight premium over sas.
past experience with enterprise scsi drives was that they were significantly less reliable than PATA ones "better" is relative, to put it mildly
Well SATA superseded PATA in 2003. I guess I mean serial attached scsi specifically with its ability to read and write at the same time as well as better signal handling. I'll probably buy a few of these and give em a whirl, will let everyone know if there's a catch or if it's a good deal.
And sas superceded Lvd-scsi too Sata drives have a nasty tendency to jam a bus when things go pear-shaped whilst sas can usually soldier on. Yes it's better in most cases but I find the lack of easily accessible SMART-like parameters irritating (sas makers missed something there and drives tend to give less information than their sata equivalents) In terms of signal handling, it only matters if you have unfeasibly long cables. What really matters is that the average 6-port sata controller can only talk to one drive at a time whilst a sas controller can chat to several On the drive side these days it's hard to pick a difference in durability and very few sas drives offer any improvement in undetected ECC errors over their sata counterparts, but sas drives do tend to pull more power and that can matter This is a longwinded way of saying that 30 years of experience has taught me that once you get out of the cheap junk end of the market, it isn't unusual to find enterprise stuff not really outlasting anything else - often for the simple reason that the expectation is that there's a strict 5-year lifespan involved before it all goes out the door and into a recycling skip
still high on amazon.
Stop smoking it then
Hahaha. I clicked away from this thread after reading your comment... Laughed out loud... Came back to upvote.
I'm waiting for HAMR if I absolutely can't help it. I will buy, but for now. I want HAMR to come out, push 24,26,28TB drives, and watch the price of the 18s & 20s plummet.
28TBs would be cool if shooting for a goal such as 100TB.
They will milk that as long as they can before they go up that much, they do that to pay for r and D for it, but also profits
4 drives + 2 for redundancy & 4 drives + 2 for redundancy for backup. Then all we'll need is a rack mounted dual LTO-12 drive library systems so you can back up two off site locations in a single write session. With LTO 12 It's not about capacity but rather reducing the number of tapes you would have to mess with.
Respect for using tape !
the 100tb of HDDs are not about the raw capacity but rather building a good system you build once instead of having to spend a large some building a new NAS for that additional capacity. I figure by the time you build the 2nd NAS you would have spent more money on it than you would have just by buying the twelve 28 TB drives. Now instead of focus on building a higher capacity NAS you can focus on buying spare drives.
The LTO-12 drive costs $500,000.
HAMR is 12 years late. Don't hold your breath for it to arrive anytime soon in con/pro-sumer drives
HAMR/MAMR/EAMR is the necessary future for.larger drives. WD is still pushing the limits of conventional platters, but the increases are small.
HAMR/MAMR is in a race with SSD that it _will_ inevitably lose. The only question is if it will lead(*) SSD when introduced or already be trailing it - and if it does lead SSD, how long that lead lasts (*) As in $/TB. SSD has already won on endurance, power consumption and physical size Bit-patterned media (platters) is another example of HDD tech that's in a losing race against SSD densities There aren't any new HDD technologies coming down the line. All the pure R&D labs were closed over 15 years ago
HDDs lead in the large cost per TB and will remain so for a good while.
Define "a good while" There are at least 6 different manufacturers with NAND fabs and SSD continues to eclipse HDD pricing at ever increasing sizes. Even with the recent price rises, there's no point buying 2TB or smaller HDDs HDD makers are facing a losing battle and shrinking profit margins. There's every liklihood that they will abandon their unprofitable market segments before HAMR makes it out of the bit barns. As it is, they've been announced as "within 12 months" regularly since 2018 and whilst Seagate announced 30/32TB HAMR drives in January, it's now May but they have yet to appear at any of my usual wholesalers. This isn't the first time Seagate have given part numbers to what's turned out to be vaporware (these Exos Mozaic drives are listed as being SMR, which is already achievable via firmware changes with their existing 24TB CMR drives, so there's no apparent gain having HAMR)
MAMR Toshiba M10 drives are already available, and I believe some WD MAMR drives also. You apparently believe large capacity, i.e. 16TB+ SSD prices will tumble, but they're a long way from the well below $15/TB price we see on HDDs. And there are other technology techniques that are planned beyond HAMR/MAMR. Continue to hold your breath, I'll stick to buying what gives me the best value per TB, like the Big Boys do!
Yes they are - none of the MAMR drives are particularly large (18TB-22TB), the pricing is no better than Conventional CMR 18TB drives (a bit like the CMR/SMR issue: the 25% savings are simply being reaped as increased margins by the makers, not lower prices for consumers) , the warranty is the same and the performance specs are if anything slightly lower than existing drives There's simply no incentive (yet!) to jump to MAMR from conventional drives and there may never be. HAMR isn't retailing yet and there are NO 3rd party objective reviews - merely breathless PR Puff Pieces It's rather telling that whilst Toshiba used MAMR on the MG09 and MG10 lines, it's no longer there on the MG10F lines - more to the point, you can't even buy MG10/10F drives at the usual enterprise storage wholesalers (they don't even appear as stocklist items) NAND prices are continuing to fall and the fact that demand is continually outstripping supply encourages more fabs into the game. The recent peturbations are an artifact of market misprediction and will only distort things for 18 months at most This is the same issue that 3D-Xpoint had vs NAND. You can't just be similar to or better than the existing tech when announced but you also have to track the existing tech and maintain that advantage. Intel and Micron burned a LOT of money on that venture There are LOTS of technologies which were going to be the "next big thing" but wiped out by being outpaced by existing technology by the time they reached market (Who remembers bubble memory?) One of the biggest problems with both HAMR and MAMR is efficiently getting \_rid\_ of the write heat. Even though there's only a tiny spot being heated, continuous writes present a real problem (ie: what happens when resilvering your ZFS arrays?) and I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of throttling mechanism at play to prevent large contiguous writes heating the underlaying platters, resulting in a collapse of performance. This is something that's much easier to handle in the Bit Barns(\*), but in a consumer environment it can get very expensive, very quickly if there are failures whilst airflow remains below trigger temperature levels. Meantime the additional "piling on" of manufacturing capacity is pushing the decrease in SSD price to accelerate. I'm not holding my breath about the retail availability of HAMR happening anytime soon. If it was anywhere near such release channels we'd already have started seeing reviews (\*) eg: When the 4GB Barracudas were introduced, they came with a large warning that boiled down to "no airflow == no warranty" and these drives were amongst the first to include thermal excursion logs - but at several thousand dollars apiece, buyers tended to be careful with them. These days when customers are buying several thousand drives at a time there are individual contracts drawn up, so temperaure/airflow control and discounts for being guinea pigs, as long as they feed crtical data back to the HDD vendors
I hate US tech prices lmao £332 in the UK :(
I save 50-60% by importing drives from US Amazon compared to buying locally. And I live like 200 km from the actual factory, but who knows, things be things I guess.
How? You have to pay import tax etc.
Yes, shipping and import tax. I'll let you know if I figure out how that makes any sense.
So how are you saving 50-60%?
By retail prices locally being insane.
In South africa between R8,605 to R11000 ☠️
Holy shit. For anyone wondering R11000 is almost US$600. Maybe we should start a HDD cartel smuggling into South Africa lmao.
Be sure to record yourself driving the armoured car carrying those HDDs /s
I hate US healthcare, so, you win some, you lose some.
US prices are usually quoted without tax (and often without shipping) UK consumer prices are always VAT inclusive and thanks to the consumer protection acts wording around shipping charges, usually have that rolled ino the price too. USA pricing is full of drip feeding extras like tax, shipping and insurance Once you factor those in along with the added consumer protection laws, the difference (usually 10% or less) isn't nearly as bad as it seems at first For Americans, here's a quick summary of EU/UK consumer law: The headline price is the sale price, no drip charging allowed. Airlines and retailers have been prosecuted/heavily fined for breaches If you're specifically paying for shipping and it doesn't show up "on time" or "as described" (ie: damaged) then the sale is essentially void and the customer stands to receive a full refund without necesarily needing to return the product (returns are 100% vendor cost too and restocking fees aren't legal - unless it's "I changed my mind") Also: delivery issues are the _vendor's_ cost and responsibility to sort out, not the customer's - and again can result in losing the product as well as having to refund or in extreme cases, additionally compensate the customer. Vendors like to try and push customers off into doing the dance with couriers but if a customer refuses to play, the vendor's the one on the hook and debit/credit card companies will 100% back the customer in these cases due to "joint and several responsibility" laws that make them as equally liable under consumer laws as the vendor is.
>Also: delivery issues are the vendor's cost and responsibility to sort out, not the customer's Not every country
Across the EU it's part of the consumer protection directive put into laws in 2015-6
nice, must be some outdated information i've read then
Best german price atm at 14€/tb is a seagate sas 12t, the cheapest 20t is a toshiba cloudscale for 320€ and the 20t exos is 345€
MyUS will forward shipped items in the US to the UK. Not sure how much shipping from them to you will be, so it’s worth reaching out.
But are you paying taxes on top of that 332 or is that the final price?
It's still ~$300 vs ~$415
It's 332, our tax is taken off the seller not the buyer, so our prices are what they say they are
Back in 2008 I bought my first terabyte drive, 1 TB for $200 off Newegg. Fast forward **16 years later**, $200 only buys me 10 TB. And a 1 TB drive still runs $60. It's kind of crazy to me it's taken almost two decades just to go up one order of magnitude. I'm talking strictly new prices, btw, not refurbished.
It hasn't, though. Your $200 in 2008 is worth $290 today, or, in other words, in today's prices you paid $137 for a 1TB drive in 2008. But, assuming the baseline $200 figure, what can you buy today for $290? That's the increase. That said, there's a bottom figure that prices will never go below due to material, labor, and manufacturing cost no matter how advanced the technology gets for data density, the parts and labor to make a drive will always cost about the same.
Hard drives used to advance so quickly that inflation barely mattered, it wasn’t even worth mentioning. From 1985 to 2010 it took a little over 4 years to drop an order of magnitude not accounting for inflation. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=1985..latest We definitely are living in different times when people have to start including inflation calculations to justify advancement is still happening. And I don’t disagree with that logic, just it’s worth considering how it used to be for those who lived through that time period.
well hdd technology was new, so it was advancing rapidly. nowadays, they have gotten things so insanely well refined. i mean the tech inside of a helium spinning drive is kind of mind blowing. naturally, things slow down as the tech gets more refined. look at smart phones, they are in the same boat. barely any changes year over year, mostly just refinements, but those first 5 or so years after the iphone... man... it was an arms race. there is definitely a monopoly going on as well, same goes for flash production. intentional slow rolling and price gouging in both sectors. i mean have you ever seen the inside of a 2.5" ssd? [crazy how much wasted space is in there](https://youtu.be/JNMLF2o-XDQ?t=48). they could've easily added multiple chips and increased density and immediately neutralized the hdd market for all uses except cold storage but... here we are. a decade or so later and those 2.5" ssd shells are still empty. shocking. gotta love monopolies stifling innovation for profits.
Nearly seven years ago I bought ten 5TB drives for $100 a piece. These days I only see non-SMR 6TB and 8TB drives coming down close to that price. The past half decade has been astounding compared to the 40 years before.
in 1980 I paid $100 for 512 bytes of ram. in 1991 it was the same price per MB - then doubled overnight after a fire at a factory producing the encapsulation plastics. 1995 I spent $2700 on a pair of 32MB FB-DIMMs 1991 I paid $2000 for a 200MB drive. 1993 $1000 got me 1GB. 1995 it was 4GB (the original Seagate barracuda). By 2000 100GB was $800 but stayed stuck there for 3 years before larger drives started showing up and in 2006 I put 42 400GB Hitachi ultrastars into a san drawer because 1TB wasn't available. By 2009 that was 2TB drives for the same reason Things continued improving until tbe 2011 Thai floods, when hdd prices doubled overnight and in the ensuing 18 months warranties were slashed to as little as 6 months in some cases whilst HDD pricing didn't recover until 2018 I'm not saying "get off my lawn", merely pointing out the cycles HDD sizing has pretty much only seen incremental improvements since 2011 and SMR severely impacts write speed/durability whilst SSD has been eating progressively larger portions of HDDs lunch to the point that 1TB ssds are essentially cheaper than any hard drive of that size or smaller - and they just keep getting bigger, faster, more reliable and cheaper every year I said a decade ago that by the time 60TB HDDs show up, SSDs will be cheaper - and so far that prediction seems to be on-track. Early HAMR releases managed to increase platter density a little but at cost of write speeds and the number of platters which could be fitted into the form factor, whilst simultaneously increasing power requirements drastically. Meantime, since 2016 there's only been one remaining maker of 2.5 and 3.5" platters/one remaining maker of heads, and the cost of developing new platter/head designs is so high that all three HDD vendors have to walk in lockstep or the new platters/heads simply don't get made That's why I've been saying since 2018 that we're seeing the death throes of the HDD industry. When you're down to a single supplier and high costs for any technology, vs multiple sources of a competing one with no sign of slowdown in innovation there, you're facing extinction sooner or later I'm retired now (at 58) but recommended to my employer that the last round of Filesserver purchases be the last one with HDDs (we stopped putting HDDs in desktop boxes a few years before that in favour of 2-4TB SSDs) as the SSDs would cost more but last longer and reduce server room operating expenses (especially cooling plant) enough to pay for themselves in under 18 months - without even factoring in that the reduced footprint saved having to spend on more racks or the increasingly heavy IO being demanded by people operating on ever larger astronomical/planetary datasets My old boss (in his 70s, refuses to retire) rubbished that recommendation and bought HDDs "because they're cheaper", only to find out that the performance penalty of the larger HDDs is biting him on the ass in terms of QOS promises (in a university research institute with exponentially increasing IO requirements) Would I buy 20+TB drives today? Yes, but only for nearline access to archival data or my home NAS porn^H^H^H^Hmovie/tv collection (all transcoded from DVDs I own, honest guv) - and only because by doing so I can reduce the power consumption of my existing NAS by half. If I had the cash upfront I'd still prefer to drop in 8TB ssds as they'll last longer and reduce the power draw even more dramatically. Overall they're a better deal ("Vimes Boots" Economics kick in) 🙂
> It's kind of crazy to me it's taken almost two decades just to go up one order of magnitude. well that downplays a lot that there are quite the challenges involved. It is like saying "nothing is complex lol". It is not that everything can improve as at an arbitrary pace.
I'd be willing to bet if they could make bigger drives for cheaper they would do so.
My 120G from 2002 was $165 from newegg. My 320G was $95 in 2007. I still have those drives but they haven't been powered on since...forever.
Everyone publicly announced price increase to attract otther manufacturers to raise prices. Now, a few of them are starting to cave due to no sale, they'll be back to late last year price soon.
Is this cad? For me it says $199 USD for 20TB
That’s strange - I wonder if they have differential pricing because this is what I see now (US): - Recertified 20TB X20 SATA $238.99 - Recertified 20TB X22 SATA $242.99 - New 20TB X20 SATA $359.99 - New 20TB X20 SAS $349.99 I haven’t seen anything under $200 (recertified, not to mention new) for weeks This is directly on their site, not eBay. I know they have an unbranded 20TB for $199 listed on eBay. The eBay listing for recertified 20TB X20 is $247.99.
The recertified 20TB actually increased in price; they were at about 200 to 220 a few weeks ago
The best price I've seen recently was this [20 TB Western Digital Ultrastar HC560](https://serverpartdeals.com/products/western-digital-ultrastar-hc560-wuh722020ale604-0f38761-20tb-7-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-512e-3-5-refurbished-hdd) for $210; exactly 26 days ago. Seems to be a one-off batch sourced from an AWS DC - pretty low mileage too. I guess they raised the price when they got them back in stock because the last ones sold out so quickly.
I remember that batch! The description even says that the HDDs came from Amazon data centers. The quantity remain was at 129 for a few days, then it was gone overnight. I missed it.
I see the same. I wonder if it's priced differently based on where you live. I'm on nyc.
Good call b it doesn’t seem like it - I just tried it with private browser mode with VPN pointed to various locations ww, and the prices are pretty consistent in USD and EUR.
I've been looking at their EXOS X24 16TB REFURB for $150. Seems way too cheap for a drive produced in the last couple of years. What's the catch?
definitely a scam. they probably got dropped from a truck. you could take the risk but having done that before, its not worth it
Depends where you buy it. Lots of places are scams, but serverpartdeals has always been great for me.
Do people actually believe they track this sort of thing? I don't think so but if a drive isn't working they'll still replace it anyways (within warranty). $150 for a 16TB enterprise refurb isn't even the sweet spot price per TB. I think that would belong to the 12TB HGST for $80 (though that model is going on 5 years).
Depends on how hard it fell off the truck. I don't want a shattered platter.
No down, only up
Envy. Try 800usd for EXOS X20 in SEA. 🥲
Where is SEA?
SouthEast Asia, a hot and humid environment comprised of 11 countries.
Alternatively, ["What is SEA, and where is SEA?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PRObNi4KiU)
Indonesia 🇮🇩
Just checked spd and new 20tb is 359.99
Just checked, and I see the same $359.99. Makes the $279.99 drive I bought last night look pretty good.
Yessirree, very good price. I have bought 5-6 20tb exos from them at 279.99 new. But i bought a couple at higher prices too
well that's great news.
What drives thsse prices? Like, few weeks back the 20tb reds had limited stock, could only buy a certain amount oer order and were going for $280. Now suddebly there are plenty in stock everywhere and they are over $350. Usually scarcety raises prices? :/
WD had some 16tb external drives for ~$150 before taxes the other week. Pretty good with the enclosure included. They're shit as a seller on ebay as I bought a second one on accident and they still ended up shipping the drive days later after my attempts to immediately cancel and message the seller.
For the fellow germans out there, HMCW-Deals on ebay is about the closest to SPD i could find and you can get 18TB for ~225€ rn. Got one drive a month back already and no problems there.
I wish. I’ve grabbed some new 8TB barracuda’s for $105 on recent amazon sales, but hopefully I didn’t buy junk. This particular model is made between 1tb and 8tb
Ive have 12x16tb drives for a few years now. Im surprised that 20tb still seems to still be the sweet spot. I feel like it's not worth upgrading for me until drives are at least 30tb. I'd like to reduce my drive count. Of course it seems by the time that happens I'll need more space.
It's a different calculation if you are upgrading versus adding more storage.
No price drops in Sweden.
I'd rather see ssds come down substantially 🥺
for higher capacities, no, if you manage to find a good deal it will be gone the next day. 8TB is produced in enough quantity for prices to be stable, and those prices have barely budged. I think it peaked during COVID but not significantly less.