HDD prices high....?

[neatfeatguy]

I don't buy storage drives very often and the last time I picked up a HDD was at the end of 2021, 11/21/21 to be exact. Lots of issues around then such as lock downs and you couldn't find a GPU priced well to save your life, but the cost of a 2TB WD Black 7200 drive was only $69.99.

I was hoping to pick one up so I can get all my physical PC games made into .iso and stored on a drive for easier access. However, when I went to see what the same HDD is going for is now upwards of $105-120 from a few places I looked.

Is it just "inflation" or did I miss something that's caused standard HDD prices to jump so much in the past 1.5 years?

 

[Ferrum Master]

Not sure if price per "gig" has risen. I may be wrong. I haven't bought spinners in a while.

 

[Shihab]

Not sure about Blacks, but US Amazon shows plenty of 2TB drives at the US$50~60 mark. Checked some Egyptian sites (closest market to me), they seem to retail at equivalent prices.

 

[nomdeplume]

11/21/21 to be exact. Lots of issues around then such as lock downs and you couldn't find a GPU priced well to save your life, but the cost of a 2TB WD Black 7200 drive was only $69.99.

If you could be convinced, where did you buy this from and was it new in retail packaging? Would also be helpful if we knew a model number or other signifier since WD sell more than one variety of Black.

PC Parts Picker shows prices for one 2TB Black with the lowest being $77.

 

[bobbybluz]

Newegg had 8TB Seagate spinning rust drives for $89 on Shell Shocker about a week ago. I've seen them for $99 regularly.

 

[dragontamer5788]

I don't buy storage drives very often and the last time I picked up a HDD was at the end of 2021, 11/21/21 to be exact. Lots of issues around then such as lock downs and you couldn't find a GPU priced well to save your life, but the cost of a 2TB WD Black 7200 drive was only $69.99.

I was hoping to pick one up so I can get all my physical PC games made into .iso and stored on a drive for easier access. However, when I went to see what the same HDD is going for is now upwards of $105-120 from a few places I looked.

Is it just "inflation" or did I miss something that's caused standard HDD prices to jump so much in the past 1.5 years?

Individual HDDs rarely get cheaper.

What actually gets cheaper is "price per TB". You can buy an 8TB these days for $150.

Newegg had 8TB Seagate spinning rust drives for $89 on Shell Shocker about a week ago. I've seen them for $99 regularly.

Or less... lol.

Economically: the platters get denser and cheaper. But the actuator (the arms, the magnetics, etc. etc.) cannot get cheaper. Once an HDD hits ~$50 mark or so, its impossible for the price to drop. It just has physically, magnets and arms and steel inside that costs $50ish+.

But the "bits on the platter" get denser, so 8TB becomes affordable, or 10TB, or 15TB, etc. etc.

 

[R-T-B]

Economically: the platters get denser and cheaper. But the actuator (the arms, the magnetics, etc. etc.) cannot get cheaper. Once an HDD hits ~$50 mark or so, its impossible for the price to drop. It just has physically, magnets and arms and steel inside that costs $50ish+.

But the "bits on the platter" get denser, so 8TB becomes affordable, or 10TB, or 15TB, etc. etc.

This is what you are seeing in a nutshell.

If anything, price per drive has gone up due to inflation, maybe even some related material costs have risen, I dunno. But price per TB has overall dropped.

 

[neatfeatguy]

If you could be convinced, where did you buy this from and was it new in retail packaging? Would also be helpful if we knew a model number or other signifier since WD sell more than one variety of Black.

PC Parts Picker shows prices for one 2TB Black with the lowest being $77.

Micro Center, was NIB. Not an OEM drive - I've purchased those from Micro Center before in the past, but that was many years ago (when 500GB was closer to the top end capacity). I'm actually still using that particular drive, but it's mostly used for one of my several drives for holding pictures and phone videos from over the years.

I'm not a fan of buying HDDs online. Amazon doesn't give a shit how they ship out, they toss them in a plastic envelope or loose in a box 3x the size of the hard drive and it just bounces around during the trip. Newegg did the same, but after I complained about it they got it correct the third time and they boxed one up correctly to ship it out to me. I'd rather not purchase a HDD online and pick it up in person from Micro Center.

Micro Center, that's where I buy most of my stuff, aside from GPUs. I like the convenience of driving there, getting what I need and knowing I can return it should there be a problem and not be stuck playing the waiting game for something to ship out and ship back.

I'm just surprised the price is a 50% markup of what it was 1.5 years ago. Maybe the pricing issue is just a WD problem....? Seagate still seems reasonable in comparison.



I've always had really good luck with WD drives - even got a drive that's slightly older than the 500GB Black I posted about at the start of this post, it's 250GB Blue Caviar, still kicking. I'm thinking I'll look to picking up a Seagate drive since it's half the price. I just want a drive big enough to hold .iso of all my physical PC games, from what I can tell I need around 1.2TB of space.

 

[evernessince]

2TB is outmodded. You can typically find 4TB HDDs for $36 refurb and at that price you can afford to buy two and use one of them as a backup. 6TB drives can be had for $58 refurb as well.

 

[natr0n]

Look on ebay perhaps bargains galore.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

So...pricing is higher because brick and mortar is difficult. HDDs are functionally a metal and silicon brick...so pricey to ship. Add in the fact that local volumes of sales are inconsistent...and at this point a 2TB SSD is about as cheap but magnitudes of order faster, there's not a lot of profitability in selling a spinner with so low of a capacity.


That said, in 2010 you could find low end 4 TB drives for $100 on sale. Yeah, it'd be 5400rpm... But right now I can get a12 TB for $200. HDDs are largely viable now primarily by lower cost per unit of storage rather than low volume storage...that SSDs compete with favorably.

 

[Klemc]

Yes, come to France if you want not eat until next month

LINK (AmazonFR)

 

[Dr. Dro]

Have you taken a look at pricing on external USB HDDs? You can often find them for generally the same price as the drive standalone. Recently got a 8 TB Seagate hub for my mom at about the same price as the 8 TB drive costs by itself. Might have to shop around a bit for that, but you may just be able to find one.

I pitch it since you don't have to deal with the issues having that disgusting spinning rust installed on your computer will cause (such as slow boot times, Windows being stuck on a busy wait loop because it's trying to access something on the pretty much always unresponsive drive, etc.), you can easily move it between your computers and since you're buying for capacity, not speed... not that it matters, USB 3.0/5Gbps is more than capable of sustaining pretty much any HDD at its full performance, I see little reason to buy internal mechanical HDDs anymore. Modern PCs and slow internal mechanical HDDs don't belong together.

 

[Klemc]

I have this but paid 130 euro two years ago, it's for my entire games backup, windows...

6TO

 

[cvaldes]

Makes zero sense. I'm seeing a 16 TB HDD spinner for $260 in stock at a nearby bricks-and-mortar store, thus $16.25 per terabyte. That's a mom-and-pop store so not even the cheapest, rock bottom price available to me.

Hell, you can get cheap 2 TB NVME PCIe 3.0 m.2 sticks for $75 right now. Not sure why anyone would want a spinner at that price range which would run around 7x slower than the NVME m.2 SSD.

 

[demirael]

First, why 7200RPM if you're basically just storing backups? Second, why 2TB?

Have you taken a look at pricing on external USB HDDs? You can often find them for generally the same price as the drive standalone. Recently got a 8 TB Seagate hub for my mom at about the same price as the 8 TB drive costs by itself. Might have to shop around a bit for that, but you may just be able to find one.

I pitch it since you don't have to deal with the issues having that disgusting spinning rust installed on your computer will cause (such as slow boot times, Windows being stuck on a busy wait loop because it's trying to access something on the pretty much always unresponsive drive, etc.), you can easily move it between your computers and since you're buying for capacity, not speed... not that it matters, USB 3.0/5Gbps is more than capable of sustaining pretty much any HDD at its full performance, I see little reason to buy internal mechanical HDDs anymore. Modern PCs and slow internal mechanical HDDs don't belong together.

You're doing things wrong if you're having that kind of issues. First, the boot issue is relevant only if you have a lot of stuff installed on mechanical drives and have shortcuts for those on the desktop. You can: 1) just launch directly from launchers, or 2) get caching software. Windows will not care where stuff is installed if it's not being accessed. Sure, mechanical drives have their issues, but they aren't as bad as you think. I have 20TB of spinning rust in two raid0s (games, I can dl that again if drives fail), and Primocache in front of those (memory + SSD caching setup). 20TB of SSD is expensive. It's absolutely not an option.

And oh BTW, when's the last time you defragmented a mechanical drive? Regular defrag helps a lot unless programs are stupidly loading tons of small files. Sequentially a typical mechanical drive does 200+ MB/s these days.

 

[neatfeatguy]

First, why 7200RPM if you're basically just storing backups? Second, why 2TB?

I find 5400 painfully slow. Only 5400s I have are the 4TB+ ones in my plex server. Usually no more than 2 people accessing it at any given time so they work just fine. I just want something snappy enough for copying data too/from without spending too much.

As for 2TB, it should be more than enough for my 120ish physical copies of PC games I'd like to get copies done so they're easily accessible. I've got 23 games (older ones in my collection that don't take up as much space) I've made .iso for so far and they're taking about around 79GB. I figure around 1.2TB +/- for all of them.

 

[Dr. Dro]

You're doing things wrong if you're having that kind of issues. First, the boot issue is relevant only if you have a lot of stuff installed on mechanical drives and have shortcuts for those on the desktop. You can: 1) just launch directly from launchers, or 2) get caching software. Windows will not care where stuff is installed if it's not being accessed. Sure, mechanical drives have their issues, but they aren't as bad as you think. I have 20TB of spinning rust in two raid0s (games, I can dl that again if drives fail), and Primocache in front of those (memory + SSD caching setup). 20TB of SSD is expensive. It's absolutely not an option.

And oh BTW, when's the last time you defragmented a mechanical drive? Regular defrag helps a lot unless programs are stupidly loading tons of small files. Sequentially a typical mechanical drive does 200+ MB/s these days.

I got rid of spinning rust years ago and haven't looked back. System runs entirely on PCIe NVMe storage, and I'm hardly bragging, the 480GB drives I have here right now are by far the cheapest things you can buy on the market today.

Instead I installed a traditional HDD on my Fedora Linux server and just use a Samba share to drop things to and fro. Secure, fast enough I can play Blu-ray rips directly through it with no skipping, can chuck in as much capacity as I want in there, accessible through my entire network, including through Wi-Fi, this last point alone outweighs practically any single benefit or hassle i'd have by having any ancient, slow mass storage plugged in on my PC, installing cache filter drivers/software like Primocache, etc.

Honestly, I'm not changing anyone's mind, so I won't be fighting, but I made my case, external or network-attached is definitely the way to go

 

[chrcoluk]

My last purchases were my two 8TB Ironwolf drives, but they were purchased before the current cost of living crisis, the pricing was pretty good I felt.

I just checked the same drives now, they about 16% cheaper..

Paid £201 for each one in 2021, they now £167 (for same exact SKU) each from same retailer (amazon).

-- edited fixed error.

Problem with spindles, is there is certain sweet spots. Price per TB isnt consistent across the capacities.

8TB is £167, 10tb unavailable, 12TB a whopping £285. 6TB £154, 4TB £82.90

So for this particular SKU 4TB and 8TB are the sweet spots. So compare all capacities.

 

[nomdeplume]

Both screenshots from Microcenter.

 

[eidairaman1]

I don't buy storage drives very often and the last time I picked up a HDD was at the end of 2021, 11/21/21 to be exact. Lots of issues around then such as lock downs and you couldn't find a GPU priced well to save your life, but the cost of a 2TB WD Black 7200 drive was only $69.99.

I was hoping to pick one up so I can get all my physical PC games made into .iso and stored on a drive for easier access. However, when I went to see what the same HDD is going for is now upwards of $105-120 from a few places I looked.

Is it just "inflation" or did I miss something that's caused standard HDD prices to jump so much in the past 1.5 years?

NWO forced

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Not sure if price per "gig" has risen. I may be wrong. I haven't bought spinners in a while.

The last time I saw that, was in the early-2010s, with the 2011 and 2012 HDD supply crisis! (The flooding in Thailand) (IIRC)

And oh BTW, when's the last time you defragmented a mechanical drive? Regular defrag helps a lot unless programs are stupidly loading tons of small files. Sequentially a typical mechanical drive does 200+ MB/s these days.

Best to defrag, where you place at least most of the used files to the beginning! Or file performance will be poop!