Disk Prices

155 pointsposted 4 months ago
by bookofjoe
(diskprices.com)

74 Comments

voxelizer

4 months ago

I've noticed refurbished HDD prices creeping up recently. I used to grab 10TB drives from goharddrive for around $80, but they’ve been out of stock for months. Now most other sellers are listing them closer to $150. Has anyone else seen this trend too?

epistasis

4 months ago

I've only been looking in the past month, but yes, at about that ratio too, when I come across posts on Reddit from last year.

This is especially painful for what I want to buy a ton of right now, RAM. I find all these year old posts with people talking about DDR4 at $0.70/GB, and it's twice that now.

I don't know why, but the obvious explanations are a combination of the dollar devaluation and tariffs. Both of these are ongoing, so strap in for even higher prices soon, I guess?

fragmede

4 months ago

Of actual uses of the Sherman antitrust act, starting in 2002, DRAM manufactures were investigated and then pleaded guilty to price fixing to the US. Eventually Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida all pled guilty.

Following that, a regional sales manager for Micron pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in 2003, and then in 2004, Infineon also pled guilty. Hynix Semiconductor took their turn in 2005 and plead guilty and paid a fine. 2005 Samsung pled guilty in connection with the cartel and paid a fine.

Next up in 2006, Sun Woo Lee, the Senior Manager of DRAM at Samsung Electronics, entered into a plea bargain for price fixing. This barely seems to have slowed down his career, however, as after 8 months in prison he was promoted to President of Samsung Germany in 2009, and then President of Samsung Europe in 2014.

Unfortunately for the DRAM cartel, in 2010 the EU joined the party and fined everyone for what they did in 2002. Micron snitched and did not get fined though.

In 2018, Samsung, Hynix, and Micron got new charges of price fixing levied at them. In Jan 2018, prices of DRAM were triple their 2016 low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

Yeah I have no idea why they could be high.

epistasis

4 months ago

That could explain Ram but how about drives at the same time? Just a shortage?

tkfoss

4 months ago

> Ram but how about drives at the same time

whats the difference? You see industry leaders getting away with it, so you do it as well.

LargoLasskhyfv

4 months ago

Not only that, but also 'greedflation' by traders anticipating more demand than supply.

Actually slowly rising since about 2011, induced by shortages (of critical components) due to flooding in Thailand (Seagate/WD), some supplier of so called 'sliders', motors (Nidec) restructuring/mergers of corporations like Showa Denko/Resonac, leading to fears that the supply of thin films for the platters goes bust, some other supplier of platters itself goes bust, and on and on. Not to forget sarscovidious² hick-ups of all sorts of supply-chains. Then came AI, and the datacenter boom. Endless 'opportunities' loom...

orionblastar

4 months ago

Everyone is going to SSDs now for faster access. Having a SATA drive as a secondary drive to store downloads on. https://www.mamedev.org/ The MAME emulator, for example, takes up at least 10TB for all of the ROMs, Software disk images, Compressed Hard Drives, and ect.

xmprt

4 months ago

What I've heard is that there's been an undersupply of HDDs in the market for the last few years.

WarOnPrivacy

4 months ago

> I used to grab 10TB drives from goharddrive for around $80, but they’ve been out of stock for months.

Same. Bought 6 hgst 10TB @ $84/ea in mid Dec. By New Year's they were $110 and in short supply.

abeindoria

4 months ago

March 2024 price for 12 TB refurb : $76.

The one I bought literally this month : $169.

Same WD drive from gHD.

saulpw

4 months ago

Inflation? Tariffs?

epistasis

4 months ago

Yes and devaluation of the dollar:

https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...

People had better get used to the economic reality of no longer being the economic superpower of the world.

ffsm8

4 months ago

Isn't a devaluation the same as inflation, just measured against other currencies?

Basically inflation measures against itself at an earlier time, devaluation measures against other currencies at the same moment. So it both describes the fact that the currency in question is using purchasing power, measured from different points of view.

But I'm not knowledgeable on the topic, I just mentally stumbled a little when reading this thread which seemingly (to my interpretation of what was written) made them sound like different concepts entirely.

epistasis

4 months ago

It's inflation fornouschains foreign products, but also makes us products cheaper to the rest of the world which means it's an incentive for exports.

Might have had some interesting effects on the economy if we didn't simultaneously have tariffs making it so that 1) it's hard to buy the machinery to increase US industrial capacity, and 2) nobody wants to invest in the US economy because tariffs cause economic slowdowns.

Dylan16807

4 months ago

That doesn't add up to a doubling in price.

epistasis

4 months ago

The price response in secondary markets (refurbished drives here) can be much bigger than the direct effects caused by increases in price for newly produced goods, I think? If the price goes up for new drives, purchasers of new drives hold on to current product for longer, and they are the suppliers to the secondary market. Also, more people might buy from the secondary market than from the primary market due to the price increase, creating a greater supply pressure and price response than is seen in the primary market. I guess it all depends on the shape of the demand curve.

abeindoria

4 months ago

I am not sure if Inflation and Tariffs even both together make the price >2x in ~1 year

20after4

4 months ago

The tarrifs are pretty big, depending on the country (for china, they are huge) and inflation is also pretty high. Things are only going to get worse with the current administration intent on tanking anything that remains of our economy. We are in big trouble in the US.

discordance

4 months ago

I don’t need disks, but the design of this site has always been a huge inspiration for me.

I would love to hear if anyone has any similar purely functional and utilitarian site suggestions

nullhole

4 months ago

This bit from the FAQ stuck out to me:

  Can you add complex filters and sorting?

  The intent of this site is to be a simple reference rather than a comprehensive search index. If you would like to do more complex analysis, try entering the following into Google Sheets: =IMPORTHTML("https://diskprices.com/", "table")

ycombinete

4 months ago

The MTG Top 8 interface for comparing decks has always impressed me: https://mtgtop8.com/

Like Disk Prices at first glance it's a bit overwhelming but after a while it becomes super crisp to deal with.

kstrauser

4 months ago

Wow, this reminded me that tape drives exist.

The best value HD on that list, among ones I'd want to buy for NAS use, is a Seagate 28TB for $480. An LTO-9 tape is 45TB for $90. I found a USB-C (because why not) LTO-9 drive for $6,499.

The crossover price is at 448TB, where the total cost of 16 HD drives is $7,680, but tape drive + 10 tapes is "only" $7,399.

Huh. That's a lot lower than I would've expected. That's a very manageable price for the kind of business that wants someone to take a backup offsite nightly, and is probably a whole awful lot more robust for that kind of regular transportation.

wmf

4 months ago

Those tapes are actually 18 TB so you need more to break even. Also 24 TB drives have been on sale for ~$250 occasionally.

bestouff

4 months ago

True that, but also those 28TB disks are actually 25TB. So the break even point moves back.

creshal

4 months ago

Yeah, tape is alive and kicking for business use.

Automated tape libraries add a few grand to the total, but you get the added benefit of not having to change tapes daily.

My only concern is that tape speeds are stagnating around a terabyte per hour, while you can somewhat parallelize jobs with multi-drive libraries, it increases cost and complexity significantly.

dreamcompiler

4 months ago

It would be nicer if they had a way to exclude SMR drives.

kilna

4 months ago

This makes me miss pricewatch.com

alsetmusic

4 months ago

This is very cool. It's immediately going in the stash of links I label as tools. I'll share with a couple of other people who I know will appreciate it as well. Thanks for building and sharing!

It would be nice to have an export to csv option for the results of a given search. I saw that the HTML includes all models of devices rather than just what's being displayed. Automating the output to a file would be a nice-to-have feature.

However, I discovered that the table was formatted well enough that I was able to copy the results directly into a spreadsheet. The "Price per TB" header and the "Price" header were flipped, so I corrected them. But this means that I don't trust the spreadsheet to be without other errors (especially as some cells in the web page were blank or empty). If I see something in spreadsheet that grabs my interest, I'm going to assume that it's wrong until I confirm that it's right, but that's not a big deal if errors are few. Time will tell.

Thanks again! This is awesome, plus so minimal and lightweight. I love it.

photios

4 months ago

Wow, those US vs EU prices...

I picked a random Seagate 8TB drive that the site lists as costing $103. It's GBP 145 in the UK (~EUR 166) and as much as EUR 200 in my Eastern Europe country!

I'm blaming tariffs and VAT. The EU sucks.

dvfjsdhgfv

4 months ago

> The EU sucks.

I, on the other hand, I love the EU. In spite of the fact that many products are sold for a lower price in the American market (not just electronics, also cars and others). I imagine it's even worse in the Australian market.

But, in the grand scheme of things, I can live with that, with free education and healthcare, among others.

vladvasiliu

4 months ago

Sure, I'm all for paying taxes if you get good services in return.

But what kills me is when buying stuff from the US and paying whatever import taxes are required on top of shipping, and VAT on top of all that, you still end up cheaper.

Taking GP's example, shipping, taxes on the product + shipping won't end up more than doubling the initial price.

Hell, things are so ridiculous that a while ago I bought an Italian-made[0] tripod and gear head from BH in NY. Had it shipped by UPS (large and heavy parcel, so not cheap), paid taxes on the complete price, and it was still way cheaper than buying locally from France.

--

[0] It pretends to be actually made in Italy, not only an Italian brand off-shoring production to Asia.

MagnumOpus

4 months ago

That’s not the EU’s fault, is it? At best the import taxes (if any) are on the EU. VAT is added by your country, and if something is more expensive after everything than importing it yourself, that’s on a lack of competition in your marketplace…

vladvasiliu

4 months ago

This looks like a classic EU vs constituent countries debate.

Your points are correct, but that's a general rebuff against photios' points: nothing is imposed by the EU itself; everything comes from the countries themselves, even if they all do the same thing.

However, I think photios' point was rather that EU countries tend to tax things to hell and back, even if the countries arrived at the same situation by their own means, rather than it being a general EU directive. dvfjsdhgfv's comment is the same: all the positive things in that comment come from the countries themselves; they're not EU directives, either.

FirmwareBurner

4 months ago

That doesn't explain why UK prices are lower than EU. In fact it should be the opposite as the EU is a bigger economic region than UK.

Either the EU is doing something wrong or the UK is doing something right or both.

port11

4 months ago

Depending on where you live, Amazon might be one of the more expensive options. I've bought disks from a smaller Dutch website for our home server, for about 3€ cheaper per TB than Amazon's best offer. There's much better places to get IT stuff in Europe.

leipert

4 months ago

US prices are without sales tax, depending on state/location this could add 10%. But given the value of the USD, still a crazy difference.

NoboruWataya

4 months ago

Yes, the difference is crazy. I'm trying to buy 4x6TB or 4x8TB at the moment and the prices are just painful.

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

hiAndrewQuinn

4 months ago

I wish I had known about this site when I was writing [1]. If we use warranties as our expected lifecycle, this lets me drop down from $5 per TB-year of storage down to almost $2 per TB-year. What immense savings compared to the cloud!

[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-...

MathiasPius

4 months ago

Doing a self-audit like this is actually an amazing idea. I consider and re-consider my choices every once in a while, but sitting down and doing an end-to-end write-up would put me a lot more at ease.

Like you, I also considered the implications of mixing TOTP into KeePass, but eventually landed on going all-in on the one database. It does mean raising the bar for keeping it secure, but it was already very high to begin with.

One thing I have considered is combining this all-in-one approach with an additional keyfile, which I could then share OOB to devices, effectively adding a second factor. I like the idea of using Yubikey or similar, but the fear of locking myself out is too great.

bcoates

4 months ago

I don't get it -- AWS deep archive is $12/TB/yr and provides actual durability and connectivity, not just drive-in-a-shoebox. That seems pretty hard to beat by buying raw storage at retail

Dylan16807

4 months ago

AWS connectivity is stupidly expensive in the outgoing direction, so that connectivity may or may not be worth much of anything. Connectivity is also a risk.

Overall glacier is only really suited for backups, and I don't need that much durability for a single backup. And even if durability is a big deal, I can get there cheaper. Especially using a realistic expected life cycle and not the warranty period.

WatchDog

4 months ago

I would like to see a chart that compares the disk price costs, versus cloud storage costs over the last 10 years.

It seems like they haven’t really kept pace at all. Obviously cloud providers have many costs other than disks, but I’m a bit disappointed by how much more expensive it is.

saulpw

4 months ago

I'd like this chart but for the past 50 years.

IAmBroom

4 months ago

I have one for the past 5,000 years.

OK, it's just an "L" layed on it's side...

saulpw

4 months ago

Needs to be a semi-log graph then :)

woctordho

4 months ago

As long as disk prices decay faster than 1/time, we can store data forever with a finite cost.

ViscountPenguin

4 months ago

That would only be true if electricity prices also decay faster than 1/(time)^(1+epsilon).

bhaney

4 months ago

Too bad they're increasing

creshal

4 months ago

And if you want the same disk from Dell (without any warranty or support), you take the highest price you can find and multiply it by five (after VAR discounts, ten without discounts).

gorgoiler

4 months ago

Then return it and buy a refurbished one! Dell refurbished is the second best value drive on the list and one of only a handful below 1c/GB.

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

kwar13

4 months ago

I built a similar tool but for protein powder/bar prices.

https://www.proteinmath.app/

b0dhimind

4 months ago

This is awesome! Will use this next time I run out of my bulk powder. One of which I didn't see on there. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000MAK59O

kwar13

4 months ago

Thanks! Included yours and it's coming in at #3 for $0.032 per gram of protein. Pretty good! Since I made this tool I've realized how much the prices actually swing. Very common to see price changes of 20-30% per daily update for a few products.

xtiansimon

4 months ago

Curious. Is “refurbished” exclusively the result of a manufacturer work or are there independent firms who can get their hands on parts?

eaf7e281

4 months ago

What is the optimal disk size in terms of price per TB? The last time I checked, it was 16 TB disks, I believe.

b0dhimind

4 months ago

I need 2 reliable 12TB to put in my WD enclosure with two dead drives... what should I buy?

rsync

4 months ago

This site only sources data from various Amazon locales.

As described in this post:

https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/

... it is distressingly common for Amazon sellers to resell used and/or refurbished drives as brand new.

We generally source drives in much larger quantities from specific suppliers we have relationships with.

However, once in a while we are forced to look at what can be quickly or easily sourced from Amazon and it is only with the utmost caution that we do so.

As can be seen in the link above, sometimes our proofing process reveals bad actors.

kube-system

4 months ago

u.2/3 looks really expensive here

mixologic

4 months ago

Sigh. I literally bought an HDD last week. This would have been super handy.

hshdhdhehd

4 months ago

Does it exclude fake capacity reporting disks?

edgineer

4 months ago

I've seen one or two fake capacity disks show up. I check this site every couple weeks, for a couple years now. The more common listing issues are hybrid drives showing up as SSD, or disk bundles showing as a single larger disk, that type of thing. Issues are rare and barely mar how great a site it is.

kube-system

4 months ago

If it didn't, they'd be at the top of the list, right?