Disk Prices

125 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by bookofjoe
(diskprices.com)

59 Comments

voxelizer

11 hours 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

8 hours 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

8 hours 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

7 hours ago

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

tkfoss

4 hours 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

2 hours 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...

xmprt

10 hours ago

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

WarOnPrivacy

8 hours 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

10 hours ago

March 2024 price for 12 TB refurb : $76.

The one I bought literally this month : $169.

Same WD drive from gHD.

saulpw

9 hours ago

Inflation? Tariffs?

epistasis

8 hours 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

8 hours 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

7 hours 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

7 hours ago

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

abeindoria

5 hours ago

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

orionblastar

11 hours 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.

kstrauser

9 hours 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

9 hours 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

9 hours ago

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

creshal

7 hours 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.

discordance

11 hours 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

11 hours 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

6 hours 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.

kilna

11 hours ago

This makes me miss pricewatch.com

xtiansimon

2 hours ago

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

dreamcompiler

10 hours ago

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

photios

6 hours 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.

NoboruWataya

5 hours ago

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

leipert

5 hours 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.

dvfjsdhgfv

5 hours 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 hours 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

3 hours 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

2 hours 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 hours 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.

hiAndrewQuinn

10 hours 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

6 hours 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

10 hours 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

7 hours 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.

woctordho

9 hours ago

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

ViscountPenguin

9 hours ago

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

bhaney

8 hours ago

Too bad they're increasing

creshal

7 hours 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

7 hours 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.

WatchDog

10 hours 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

9 hours ago

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

kube-system

10 hours ago

u.2/3 looks really expensive here

mixologic

10 hours ago

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

hshdhdhehd

10 hours ago

Does it exclude fake capacity reporting disks?

edgineer

10 hours 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

10 hours ago

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

bugbuddy

10 hours ago

Disk drives are under the monopolistic control of Thailand. Don’t piss off Thailand or your disk drive supply will be cut off. Thailand is glorious. Bask in the shadow of Thailand.