Hard Drive Prices Have Surged By an Average of 46% Since September (tomshardware.com)
- Reference: 0180599010
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/01/16/1332213/hard-drive-prices-have-surged-by-an-average-of-46-since-september
- Source link: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/hard-drive-prices-have-surged-by-an-average-of-46-percent-since-september-iconic-24tb-seagate-barracuda-now-usd500-as-ai-claims-another-victim
> Extensive research into the pricing of some of the best hard drives on the market for large capacity, economical storage indicates that [1]prices are beginning to increase sharply , with some of the most popular models on the market seeing increases upwards of 60%. According to research from ComputerBase, pricing analysis on 12 of the most popular mainstream drives on the market indicates an average price increase of 46% over the last 4 months.
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> While the research and price checks on these drives track movement based on European prices (ComputerBase is a German outlet), Tom's Hardware checks on similar or identical SKUs in the U.S. indicate that the trends are indeed replicated, or perhaps worse, on the other side of the pond. CB reports that various drives like Seagate's IronWolf NAS line, Toshiba's Cloud Scale Capacity Drives, Western Digital's WD Red, and Seagate's BarraCuda lines are all showing price increases of between 23% and 66%. As noted, the average price increases clock in at 46% since September 2025.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/hard-drive-prices-have-surged-by-an-average-of-46-percent-since-september-iconic-24tb-seagate-barracuda-now-usd500-as-ai-claims-another-victim
Fake AI bubble is affecting the economy (Score:2)
Welcome to the bubble effect. It will get worse before it gets worse. This is what happens when you deregulate and allow corporatism to run capitalism and governments.
Let me guess (Score:2)
Something dramatic happened and it is not the fact that the SSDs are becoming unreasonably expensive and they know people would buy HDDs instead.
Rust Is Expensive (Score:2)
Sure, memory chip demand may be impaction SSDs. But, you've got to understand that rust is an expensive commodity in these trying times. It's only natural that hard drive prices increase dramatically.
Expect it to get worse, before it corrects and gets better.
Surprised the market is still as large as it is (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to work for an enterprise storage company making secondary storage devices (that is, destinations for backups). High capacity and low cost were the selling points (and write performance and reliability, but those don't figure in here).
For the last 15 years, the shift in the enterprise storage industry has been to SSDs for everything, just like for home use. Around the coffee machine, we talked about how secondary storage was the last industry segment which still used spinning rust. Last I checked, even that division was selling purely SDD based systems.
I checked some HDD market stats. Apparently something like 150 million units shipped last year, compared to a peak of around 600 million in 2010. I'm surprised there's even that much of a market for HDDs left.
Re: (Score:2)
SSDs are currently around 8x more expensive per TB when you scale up in capacity. The gap closed quickly but it seems like it's settling into a plateau...
At low enough demand, you are on the floor where you might as well do SSD, and in many applications the SSD performance is worth it, but if you need capacity and not too picky about performance, then HDD still wins in cost effectiveness by a wide margin.
Re: (Score:2)
You either want fast storage or you want slow. And honestly, hard drives are too fast and too expensive to be slow storage.
Re:Surprised the market is still as large as it is (Score:4, Insightful)
HDDs are still the most cost effective solution for large storage arrays that don't need particularly fast random data access, although putting an SSD in front of the drive array to act as a cache can make even some of those workloads viable. I think the issue has been more that the size of the array where that becomes a significant enough cost difference to offset the "screw it, let's just go all-in on SSD" has been increasing rapidly.
For instance, it used to be that media creatives would have a SSD for their go-to / work drive and a high-TB HDD or RAID to store the bulk media data, but - at least until AI blew the market apart - unless you were either seriously budget-limited or producing a vast amount of raw content, then a lower-spec high capacity multi-TB SSD or two was a potentially affordable option. In high-end server land, it was similar; you were spending so much on things like per-core software subscription licenses and however many chassis full of CPUs/RAM, that the storage uplift from HDD to SSD on the drive arrays (excluding the stuff that really needs to be SSD, like VM image storage) is largely a rounding error for PO approval until you get up into the 100s of TB or even PB range. But again, then along came AI...
I suspect a lot of people with upcoming hardware refreshes and large SSD drive arrays are going to be taking a good hard look at how much of that data *really* needs to be on SSDs until the AI bubble pops. It might be a bit of a last hurrah for the tech, but the next few years could be very good for distributors and other bulk suppliers of HDDs if those reviews go the way I expect.
Re: (Score:2)
That is exactly what I've done. In one situation I have like 50TB of storage on spinning rust, then have a SSD cache sitting in front of it. If it's done correctly for your use case, it has seemed to work out pretty well. Would it be better if it was all SSD? Sure, but it would cost 10x as much. If the HDD costs are skyrocketing through the stratosphere, it's going to cause some big problems for some models. And there doesn't seem to be any reason that HDD prices should be skyrocketing.
Market for the pros (Score:2)
What most people buy have a SSD inside (or the NVMe derivative). Who buys HDs? Professionals (backups, archives... *and* AI...). Thus the price.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah... once you get used to the response time and data transfer rates of an SSD, there is no going back to hard drives.
Maybe I would use them for some sort of overnight archive backup, but I wouldn't have the patience to use them for anything else.
Re: (Score:3)
NAS backup at home on HDDs works well
Re: (Score:2)
Tell me you read /. and you're not a pro...
Re: (Score:2)
4x16TBs in a NAS here ....
User frustration surges 146% (Score:1)
or more.
Yet another "tax" on us proles (Score:2)
All part ot the cost of building our new AI gods.
Affordability (Score:2)
I'm sure glad we have a president that is laser focused on the economy, otherwise official inflation numbers would be through the roof.
counter for why production hasn't increased (Score:3)
A great counter for why production hasn't increased (spoiler: because the manufactures got burnt before).
[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone... [msn.com]
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/ai-is-causing-a-memory-shortage-why-producers-aren-t-rushing-to-make-a-lot-more/ar-AA1TZhba
Re: (Score:3)
> A great counter for why production hasn't increased (spoiler: because the manufactures got burnt before).
No doubt. Back in the day, the HDD market was notorious for booms, busts, and profit margins thinner than the oxide layer on the platters.
Supply has also got to be tight. Manufacturers are going to tightly plan production to keep costs in line, thus making it hard to rapidly ramp up production. In those circumstances, even a small shift in demand can lead to large jumps in price.