this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

If you consider inflation, they have come down kinda? lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

This is a bit of a cherry pick.

Sure the drives are dropping slower but at the end of the day, I have a mental 'limit' on hard drive prices.

I paid $250 AUD for 3TB once.

Then I paid $250 AUD for 5TB

Then 8 and finally, 16.

It's taken some time but it continues to evolve. It's going to take a very long time before an SSD which lasts in excess of 5 to 10 years, matches HDD speeds (you heard me) and costs less than $250 AUD for 16TB.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

HDDs are getting cheaper at the high end.

SSDs are still new enough that they are still figuring out how to get economic viability where HDDs were a decade ago.

1TB for $100 is new in NVMEs for example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

*stares at 20TB for $280 Seagate Exos*

Does it really need to?

Already asking for alot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Cost per TB on hdd's is what I look at and it doesn't move down much if at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

The good news is HAMR drops next year, and that will substantially lower prices.

WD has all but said they will not be able to answer HAMR next year, and will have to compete on cost with smaller drives.

And Toshiba and HGST have been silent.

All that adds up to Seagate getting to 32-40TB next year, and the rest of the players having to slash prices so buyers can get two drives and save a lot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (6 children)

It's cute how OP is comparing enterprise-grade HDDs with 5y warranty, with the trashiest consumer-grade SSDs with 2y warranty, some of which are QLC garbage that cannot be reliably used for long-term storage.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

You shouldn’t use such an old X16 12TB for analysis. It’s price will increase since they’re getting sparse.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

And a Toshiba N300 is the lowest quality drive out there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

it's crazy that exactly one year ago i paid almost double the price for the same drive i bought last week

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

What’ll be extremely nice is when the price per TB is less on an SSD than a hard drive.

Might be a while, but I would gladly take SATA speeds if that’s what it meant to get to that price.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I just assumed since spinning rust can outlast flash it will always cost more. I can't think of anyone using flash for long term storage or backups.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

But large SSDs still seem to be really high priced.

Like I have 300TB on HDDs. The largest reasonably priced SSD seems to be the Samsung 870 QVO at like $300.

But I really don’t want to have to connect and manage 38 disks…

And at $300 per, that’s over $11,000

Meanwhile I could get 17 18TB HDDs for $3000.

Over $8000 cheaper which is a lot IMO, and 17 disks isn’t so hard to manage compared to 38 IMO.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

in my country 1 tb nvme ssd are cheaper than 2.5 inch sata HDD of same size, and it sucks because my server is 10 year old and has only sata ports

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The timescale is rather short in the grand scheme of things and SSDs have been massively oversupplied in the last little over a year. We'll have to wait and see how this develops, SSD prices could start to rise if the correct for the oversupply.

3 years ago I paid $280 for an 18TB Easystore this year I paid $200, both were the best deals of the year so I'd say prices are still coming down just more slowly than we'd maybe like.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Not only a short timescale, but one that starts in the middle of the very outlier economic conditions brought about by COVID and the responses to it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I'd assume there really isn't much room for HDD prices to come down in contrast to SSDs since the latter always fetched a premium until the technology started becoming more commonplace.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

they've barely moved in 4+ years though

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've bought a used Crucial MX500 250GB for 30€ in 2019.

Last week I got a Crucial MX500 1TB for 45€.

I can get a 2TB for below double-price but I only need 1 TB and I read that it has a different build with lower speed (lower TLC, smaller DRAM or something, I don't know).

Exactly 4 years and certainly not barely moved.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Spinning rust storage prices are hold in place by the WD/Seagate cartel.

They can't do the same shit with Samsung, Micron, intel, etc. in the game.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

That has been the case since the hard drive crisis from the end of 2011. Well, SSDs stagnated or even went a little up over a 1-2 years period a few years back but now they're back in full swing. If this continues (which isn't a given, I'd say it's 50/50 chances) it'll be hard to justify spinning rust (all the "but but but unpowered SSDs can lose data in as little as X time" aside).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

For what it's worth, we're coming off of the bottom of a bust cycle in the NAND flash space.

The OP's graphs basically capture the NAND market from the previous boom through the current bust. So from that specific perspective, SSD prices have been dropping like a rock. The only catch with that window is that it fails to capture the cyclical nature of the market - and thus fails to illustrate how SSD prices go back up.

In practice, SSD prices have hit their lowest point. They are going to rebound here until the next bust in 2-3 years.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If they ever stop producing hard drives, I'll have to start burning archival discs or something.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yea, good luck with that, the formerly japanese Verbatim is now just a label for some Taiwanese/Hong Kong generic manufacturer, and if before there were some discussions about the BD M-Discs not being worth it and being mostly the same process now they don't even bother to use the MILLEN metadata, the difference being only on the box label (and price). What's worse some people reported some really bad quality issues (like 50% failures). So nope, you'll need to stick with the mainstream.

Pray that we at least keep this perk where the discrete storage is something common and cheap, and not some oddity like any of the dead formats or something reserved for Enterprise use with crazy prices (think tape). Already most people are using just what they get in their devices and that is morphing into stuff soldered into motherboards or even included into SoC (think CPU, but with more functions, but only one chip). And very often it's even encrypted and you can't get access to it ...

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I believe that is just the nature of the beast. SSDs are much simpler from a manufacturing standpoint and benefit from general advances in chip production that keep driving the costs down.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

NANDs are still produced in 14-15nm afaik. The only reason they got more capacity is 3d stacking but that has an obvious cost wall.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

https://www.gamestop.com/gaming-accessories/memory/xbox-one/products/microsoft-external-hard-drive-2tb-styles-may-vary/168046.html

$16.99 ...what are your thoughts on it? For the price I'm thinking of trying a few out, but I'm learning about datahoarding first.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

In the $300 range…

Even if they’re “only” SATA speeds, that would be such a game changer for a NAS

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

One day I shall have a full nvme NAS with 12x 8TD nvme disks? :D

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Again, cherry picking by only using mid sized HDDs against low capacity SSDs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

12tb is mid size now? shame that this hobby got expensive so quick with larger drives costing way more than the usual midpoint

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Ignoring this graph.

The 2tb HDD I have in my build list cost about the same as the 1tb Samsung m2.

At that point I might as well go for a 2tb ssd honestly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

this is actually bad news, because el cheapo ssds are not good for "unpowered" long time storage

expensive 1 bit per cell ssds maybe, but not multiple bits per cell (and those are the cheap types of ssds)

so for long time hoarders nothing really changes until hdd supply lasts, let's hope hdd supply will last for long years

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

The main cause is that when it comes to 12TB HDDs and higher , there are only a few manufacturers like WD, Seagate, and Toshiba. However, in the case of SSDs, everyone seems to be making one—MSI, Gigabyte, Samsung, Asus, and more. With HDDs, there's no real competition based on cost or price anymore; it's more about who can reach 40 or 50TB first. who can reach 40 or 50TB first.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Both are dropping. SSDs used to cost a fucking fuck load!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Both are dropping, but SSDs are dropping more quickly

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Supply and demand.

SSD/NVMe prices have fallen dramatically and offer big performance, space and power efficiency benefits to most users. Many computer enclosures don't even have bays to install 3.5" HDD's anymore. If you're building a PC for a user desktop or buying a laptop, most users will be more than satisfied with one or two NVMe sticks on the motherboard. There's many more desktops and laptops than servers, so demand is higher and storage manufacturers have accommodated by shifting their production capacity to that product line.

So storage manufacturers have devoted more effort into maximizing materials and manufacturing efficiency/capacity to SSD/NVMe's than HDD's to accommodate consumer demand. HDD's are now being considered more of a lower-volume niche/enterprise product, where capacity is more of a driver than price.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

SSD/NVMe prices have fallen dramatically

depends on the country

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

can someone help me figure out why they arent going down?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

OP cherry picked info to say what they wanted to

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

We make a product containing a 1TB 2.5" HDD.

Our cost price of a 1TB 2.5" HDDs have gone up over the last few years.

It is now significantly cheaper to buy a 1TB 2.5" SSD retail from Amazon than it is for us to by a 1TB 2.5" HDD wholesale.

However cheap 2.5" SSDs are often slower than 2.5" HDDs in some important use cases. A simple test of writing the entire SSD is often slower than writing the entire HDD (which is already not exactly fast when we are talking about 2.5" drives). More importantly cheap SSDs can randomly pause for a period of time... typically only a few seconds but sometimes more than 10 seconds while they do things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Which is more susceptible to an EMP, an SSD or an HDD?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Well, it is still not comparable to the $/tb ratio offered by HDDs and I don't really think it will be close to it in the future. Also, they are used for different use cases, so I do not see any reason to compare it now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They are getting cheaper, but because it is such mature tech, it doesn't happen nearly as quickly.

A few years ago I bought 12tb drives for 199, and now 199 gets you 18tb. So for the same price you get 50% more storage.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

First of all, on all your HDD price graphs there is a clear downward trend.

Secondly the way you are making the comparison doesn't make sense. On a device SKU level, a particular model of HDD is of course going to remain stable for the life cycle of that model because it's a complete monolithic design, a HDD factory kitted out for a particular model does just that and nothing else.

A SSD drive on the other hand is just a repackaging of flash chips, if Crucial manages to buy cheaper chips that fit you bet they are going to use them. And the chip fab can make many different chips, not just one model so it's not comparable economics at all.

What you need to do is compare price/TB on the current market, not of 3 year old devices.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

They have gotten low enough im considering flash arrays for homelab.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Graph a 2TB and 4TB HDD

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Can we have ban for these "SSD soon cheaper than HDD" postings?

Please? Pleeeze! I implore you, I can't stand those people anymore... nargh!

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