Business, Economics, Technology and Society

Hard Drive Prices

33 Comments

Seeing three terabytes for a hundred bucks at Newegg.

My problem is, I don’t know what I’d do with that much storage. I don’t need bigger drives; I’d like cheaper ones. But as with restaurants and food, the marginal cost of adding capacity is low, but the basic overhead of manufacturing a drive seems to set a lower limit on the price.

33 thoughts on “Hard Drive Prices”

      1. Sounds good. I’ve got an acronym and a slogan: “Let’s make things WIRSE”. We can figure out the W and E initials later.

        2. Wideband Internal Revenue Service Email Resource. Let’s make things WIRSER. Hey, if I’m gonna misspell it anyhow, may as well muck up the grammar too.

  2. The lowest price hard drives are the ones with a single platter. The most cost effective hard drives in $/GB are the two platter devices. It has been like this since I can remember.

    Only way to make them cheaper is to use less parts and/or mass manufacture more. If you want something cheaper with less capacity, even if it costs more $/GB, your best bet is something based on NAND Flash since that has no moving parts or anything.

    2. OK, question. Are NAND flash drives faster and more reliable than mechanical ones? I’ve actually thought about getting one just for my OS.

      1. SSDs are much faster for booting and starting programs; I found it cuts Linux boot time by 50-75%. Obviously it won’t make any difference if the files have been in RAM the second time you start the program.

        As for reliability, most SSD failures I’ve come across are due to firmware bugs. But I have six machines now with SSDs for boot drives, one about four years old, and I’ve had no problems with them so far. I think that’s five Intel drives and one Samsung.

        They do eventually wear out just from being written to, but the SMART report on the oldest drive claims it’s only 2% used.

      2. NAND Flash devices are faster than a hard disk drive. Both in bandwidth and latency. How much more bandwidth? Depends on the controller chip and the NAND Flash topology, etc.

        As for reliability NAND Flash cells have a limited number of write/erase cycles. Typically worse with increasing chip density. The controller chips do load leveling to decrease this problem. Still do not expect NAND Flash to outlast a hard disk drive. I would not use it for backup purposes or anything like that. Because of this it is not a good idea to use it for swap either. It is excellent for storing the OS and programs or games. You can cut application startup and OS boot times significantly using an SSD.

          1. I would certainly put an SSD in any machine I planned to boot up a lot. Not so much of a benefit in a server which only gets rebooted every few months, unless you’re doing something that requires high disk performance, like running a substantial database.

      3. SSD Drives are the biggest advance in Personal Computing in over 10 years.

        They are beyond awesome. I built a new machine in January with an SSD. I will never go back.

  3. Uses? Putting your entire Blueray/DVD video collection on a single hard drive so you can call it up at
    will is the next big consumer thing. All that’s standing in the way of that now is the ripping software and the media companies.

  4. My problem is, I don’t know what I’d do with that much storage.

    Buy a new camera.

    Panasonic just announced a 4K video camera for under $900. That will take care of those extra terabytes in no time.

  5. I’m waiting for SSD cost curve to bend more at the 256GB mark. It’s almost there, but want it completely there.

  6. Are these the type of hard drives that fail when subpoenaed?

    Email is text, so I wonder how much email you could store on one of these, especially with compression (Text compresses by a lot).

    Okay, a quick and dirty test… I compressed a text file, one page (most e-mails are far shorter), and it’s 6k. So let’s say 10k.

    3 terabytes is 3.221e+9 K, divided by 10k is 322,122,547 e-mails. 322 million. So, how much e-mailing does the IRS do in a year? A billion e-mails? That’s $300 bucks worth of backup storage for the entire IRS for a year’s worth of e-mails.

    1. The IRS IT budget is only about $1.1 billion a year. Surely you can’t expect them to afford that kind of expense to preserve emails. And yes, I’ll stop calling you Shirley.

    2. Actually, most SSDs do have a ‘secure wipe’ feature which could ‘accidentally’ go wrong when the IRS are using them. The drive is encrypted internally with a key that’s stored on the device, and ‘secure wipe’ generates a new key so the drive becomes unreadable.

    3. CJ . Most of that 6k in your test is compression tables stored with the file. The more text you store the lower the percentage used for those files so you could store much more than you estimated.

  7. I got a 2nd generation Drobo “RAID” array for $300 in mid 2009. That has 4 slots for 3.5″ SATA hard disks, combines them together to make one large virtual disk, protects you against single disk failures, and lets you hot-swap any one disk at a time for a non-failed or just bigger one. It has USB2 and FireWire800 interfaces.

    I currently have 2 x 3TB and 2 x 1.5 TB disks in it. And all my CDs and DVDs, both as disk images and compressed to AAC or MP4 as appropriate. And lots of TV series.

    A program called “ServeToMe” running on my main PC lets me access all that (transcoding on the fly from different file formats and to suit the bandwidth available) from an iPhone/iPad app from anywhere in the house, or indeed anywhere on the internet (including via 3G mobile). And if there is an AppleTV box (or Google ChromeCast) where I happen to be, wirelessly stream it onto the attached big TV.

    All this has been working for a few year now.

  8. As for disks, I remember when for quite a long time 30 MB/s was considered a good speed for a hard disk, and 100 MB/s was a really good one.

    Current consumer hard disks (e.g. Seagate Barracuda) are still today around 200 MB/s sequential read/write speed, and 8 – 10 mS access time (a figure that hasn’t changed much in decades).

    A Samsung 840 Pro SSD (which is what I use in both my MacBookPro and my desktop machine) does sequential transfers at over 500 MB/s. But the big thing is that it has random access times of around 0.1 mS, roughly 100 times less than a mechanical hard disk.

    A 128 GB Samsung SSD currently costs the same as a 3 TB Western Digital or Seagate hard disk. So it’s about 25 times the cost per GB. But 128 GB is generally enough for almost any work or personal use that doesn’t involve a vast library of multimedia files.

    1. Unfortunately we’re seeing an increasing number of games that need 30-50GB of disk space. I have a 120GB SSD for the boot drive in my gaming machine, and a 3TB HDD for most of the games; only the ones I run the most go on the SSD.

    2. 128 GB is generally enough for almost any work or personal use that doesn’t involve a vast library of multimedia files.

      Exactly. Which is something for which I have pretty close to zero use, but the manufacturers imagine is the only market for drives.

      2. “…but the manufacturers imagine is the only market for drives.”

        See also: the “megapixel wars” in compact and DSLR cameras.

        For those of us who care about quality over marketing hype, the cost for quality rarely changes, but it occasionally does. For spendthrifts (which I count myself among), the biggest tradeoff seems to come at the expense of being “a generation behind” the cutting edge.

        And, well, I’m perfectly okay with that.

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