Hard drives are expected to reach $0.01 per gigabyte by mid-2025

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Forward-looking: As a company mostly dealing in cloud storage and data backup, Backblaze has managed a lot of hard disks over the years. After crunching some numbers, a clear figure comes to light: the cost per gigabyte is steadily going down, and it will soon reach an unprecedented milestone.

Backblaze has kept records for most of the hard drives used in its cloud storage business. Since 2009, the San Mateo-based corporation purchased 265,332 HDDs and kept meticulous records of each one.

As recently revealed by Andy Klein on the company's official blog, in 2009 the average cost per gigabyte was $0.11. In 2017 during the first review of the cost of hard disks, Backblaze was spending just $0.03 per gigabyte. Today, when they are mostly getting 16TB HDD units, the storage cost has gone down to $0.014 per gigabyte.

NAND flash-based SSD units may have become the driving force for consumer spending and performance improvements, but the trusty magnetic disks have yet to go out of fashion. HDDs are still very popular in data centers and enterprise environments as magnetic storage technology is still evolving and the numbers provided by Backblaze show how much more convenient HDDs are (and will likely continue to be) compared to the largest SSD models on the market.

From 2009 to November 2022, magnetic storage cost experienced an 87.4 percent decrease per terabyte. The largest reduction has been recorded in the last five years, with a 56.36 percent decrease in the cost per gigabyte for all the drives. That's equal to a 0.52 percent decrease per month since January 2009.

Manufacturers are finding new ways to cram more platters in the same standard 3,5" form factor, figuring out how to increase the storage density while improving on energy consumption and production costs.

When will the race to the bottom of HDD costs end? For the time being, Backblaze is providing what the company thinks will be the next milestone in said bottomless race: in mid-2025, 22TB and 24TB drives are expected to have an average cost of $0.01 per gigabyte. And that's a stable street price not a sale price, the company said.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/96972-hard-drives-expected-reach-penny-gigabyte-mid-2025.html

 

[VitalyT]

I'm all done with hard drives. For my last PC's media storage, I bought an 8TB Samsung 870 QVO, and glad that I did. It was a little expensive, granted, but such products only keep getting cheaper.

There are now 16TB SSD-s priced at much less than what I paid for 8TB SSD. Check them out on Amazon

 

[Nobina]

As for the rest of the hardware it's also getting cheaper but in reverse.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

I don't recall what I spent on my 8TB RED drive from WD.....maybe around $200 or slightly more, a couple of years ago.

By 2025 we could expect the cost of these drives to be down to $0.01 per GB? $80 for an 8TB drive? Yeah right. I'll believe it when I see it because we all know that "floods" and "fires" and "earthquakes" will happen at inconvenient times and keep prices artificially inflated.

 

[kiwigraeme]

I don't recall what I spent on my 8TB RED drive from WD.....maybe around $200 or slightly more, a couple of years ago.

By 2025 we could expect the cost of these drives to be down to $0.01 per GB? $80 for an 8TB drive? Yeah right. I'll believe it when I see it because we all know that "floods" and "fires" and "earthquakes" will happen at inconvenient times and keep prices artificially inflated.

There is a fixed overhead - container , controllers etc - but these really should be $100 right about now or near enough

 

[NikoBB]

A 2TB WD Green with a 5 year warranty cost $65 in August 2011 or $0.035 per gigabyte. The HDD market is in complete stagnation. All decent models with helium and noisy at 16TB and above. The price fell only 3 times in 11 years, until 2012 everything was much faster - the capacity doubled at the same price within 2.5 years ...

 

[smug69]

1TB Hdd (WD blue) costs a little over a third of the monthly salary.

 

[ColdSoup]

There are now 16TB SSD-s priced at much less than what I paid for 8TB SSD. Check them out on Amazon

Cut out the middleman and just buy (or rather ignore for those who don't get the joke) them on Alibaba.

For those curious, real 8TB SSDs are around $1000 on Amazon now. Those will certainly continue to fall in price.

 

[VitalyT]

For those curious, real 8TB SSDs are around $1000 on Amazon now. Those will certainly continue to fall in price.

What do you mean by "real SSDs"? The one I bought - 8TB Samsung 870 QVO is on Amazon for $655 at the moment. What's not real?

 

[redgarl]

I just bough 4 HDD of 16TB for my HTPC. I was able to get them for around 210$ each, all fees included.

HDD are still there to stay until there is a cheaper way to store data. They are not going away anytime soon as long as datacenter needs them.

SSDs are great and all, but they are not made for storing data.

 

[ColdSoup]

What do you mean by "real SSDs"? The one I bought - 8TB Samsung 870 QVO is on Amazon for $655 at the moment. What's not real?

I minced some context there. There are both 8TB and 16TB chinesium drives for around $100 there have zero chance of being real SSDs.
I wasn't intending to compare SATA to NVMe or anything of that sort although I was looking at PCIe 4.0 drives at around $1000. Yes, SATA SSDs are still real SSDs.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

My first HD was bought in mid 80s. 10MB (not GB) Seagate - I think it cost me about $300 (pre-inflation dollars).

 

[rmcrys]

I'm all done with hard drives. For my last PC's media storage, I bought an 8TB Samsung 870 QVO, and glad that I did. It was a little expensive

Your "little" expensive is an absurd price for 99% of the population. There is little need (private home use) for more than 2 TB SSD (OS, apps and demanding games) + huge HDD (or NAS) for long term storage.

Or even better:
- fast small SSD NVMe for the OS + apps
- huge SATA SSD for games (450 MBps should be more than enough)
- NAS for storage.

I only have laptops / hybrids so I have a
- fast NVMe SSD as the main drive for 90% of my things
- a USB-C 10 Gbps external NVMe for games and video big files and a TB3 eGPU (I plug in on those occasions, as gaming or editing)
- NAS with two high capacity 2.5" HDDs which provide very cheap storage and are much faster than the Ethernet connection can provide.

Could I buy an 8 TB SSD? Yes but... for what?! Music, video (jpg), documents, photos need great amounts of storage but slow transfers, so if I have 5 TB of that data, I'll have the same result using cheap hdd € / TB than on an expensive SSD € / TB. If you use RAW video editing or you are professional gamer.... than yes, SSD is important

 

[BSim500]

What do you mean by "real SSDs"? The one I bought - 8TB Samsung 870 QVO is on Amazon for $655 at the moment. What's not real?

Ignoring the fact no-one ever does "like for like comparisons", ie, for the same price as 1x 8TB QLC SSD, you could buy 4x 8TB NAS drives and enjoy 16TB of mirrored storage (or 8TB mirrored at half the price) with better redundancy vs any single random drive failure (which even SSD's can experience). QLC SSD's are the worst possible choice for cold storage backups / external drives that go unpowered for long periods (I'd certainly trust a spinner more with "put data on drive, unplug for a year then plug back in and re-read" than any QLC flash).

^ And that's ignoring the fact that the Samsung 870 series is absolutely plagued with problems that Samsung refuse to properly acknowledge, so if you are using one you might want to read through this thread and double check your SMART stats, as the problem is still ongoing:-

Samsung 870 EVO - Beware, certain batches prone to failure!
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...ware-certain-batches-prone-to-failure.291504/

 

[penn919]

I don't recall what I spent on my 8TB RED drive from WD.....maybe around $200 or slightly more, a couple of years ago.

By 2025 we could expect the cost of these drives to be down to $0.01 per GB? $80 for an 8TB drive? Yeah right. I'll believe it when I see it because we all know that "floods" and "fires" and "earthquakes" will happen at inconvenient times and keep prices artificially inflated.

Honestly, that's how much they should cost. Mass storage is really the only use for HDD tech. Everything under 8TB should be phased out and replaced with SSD products imo.

Lately, I've been on the warpath against HDDs. I've been swapping them out for 2.5" SSDs every single time a friend or family member asks me to "fix" their budget laptop because it's "too slow". I don't even bother giving them options. I just quote them the cost for a replacement SSD with the same capacity. Presto! Complaints gone.

 

[ZedRM]

There are now 16TB SSD-s priced at much less than what I paid for 8TB SSD. Check them out on Amazon

Post a link or it didn't happen. 8TB SSD's are crazy expensive compared to hard drives, to say nothing of 16TB SSD's. I wouldn't touch them. You must have money burning holes in your pockets. For the rest of us hard drives are great!

What do you mean by "real SSDs"? The one I bought - 8TB Samsung 870 QVO is on Amazon for $655 at the moment. What's not real?

QVO? Hell no. QLC is trash. And you think that's affordable for most people? Right now 8TB hard drives are $140 on Newegg and 16TB are $280. 16TB SSD? Only available in enterprise models for cool $2999. Not exactly affordable there pal.

I'll take inexpensive huge hard drives over extremely expensive huge SSD's, all day, every day, thank you very much!

 

[Wasteland]

Ignoring the fact no-one ever does "like for like comparisons", ie, for the same price as 1x 8TB QLC SSD, you could buy 4x 8TB NAS drives and enjoy 16TB of mirrored storage (or 8TB mirrored at half the price) with better redundancy vs any single random drive failure (which even SSD's can experience). QLC SSD's are the worst possible choice for cold storage backups / external drives that go unpowered for long periods (I'd certainly trust a spinner more with "put data on drive, unplug for a year then plug back in and re-read" than any QLC flash).

^ And that's ignoring the fact that the Samsung 870 series is absolutely plagued with problems that Samsung refuse to properly acknowledge, so if you are using one you might want to read through this thread and double check your SMART stats, as the problem is still ongoing:-

Samsung 870 EVO - Beware, certain batches prone to failure!
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...ware-certain-batches-prone-to-failure.291504/

Yeah, the other thing that can be disturbing about SSDs is that they tend to fail suddenly and without warning, whereas HDDs tend to fail more gradually. As long as you've set up regular smart tests and reporting, there's a decent chance you can catch an HDD before it becomes unusable.

Just recently I had a Samsung 860 EVO fail on me without warning. It wasn't a big deal; I was only using the drive for games storage, but as someone who's OCD about drive monitoring, the SSD failure spooked me a little.

I don't know that HDDs will ever be phased out completely. I'm running almost exactly the setup you described, btw--four 6 TB hard drives (WD Red Plus) in a mirrored ZFS pool on my file server, with two 6 TB hard drives in a BTRFs pool on a different machine as backup (and then another external hard drive for "offline" backups). The total cost of this monstrous-overkill storage scheme was competitive with the cost of the aforementioned 8 TB SSD.

That isn't to say that he's wrong for buying it, or that large capacity SSDs shouldn't exist, but I question the impulse to reply to an HDD article with "I don't use HDDs anymore." Well, that's great, but HDDs do still have significant advantages.

In any case, no matter what kind of storage you use, always arrange regular backups.

To address the article itself: it sounds like pie-in-the-sky nonsense. As noted upthread, HDD prices have been stagnant for about a decade, with no obvious sign of imminent improvement. In fact, the prices appear to be slighly higher now than they were a year or two ago. I hope the article proves correct, but I won't hold my breath.

 

[AdamNovagen]

What do you mean by "real SSDs"? The one I bought - 8TB Samsung 870 QVO is on Amazon for $655 at the moment. What's not real?

Or, consider: I bought 24TB of storage in WD reds for the price you paid for that 8TB SSD. Being simple media storage, not used for gaming, video editing or high-resolution photo editing (and being in a NAS limited by a 1GbE connection anyway), there is no reason on earth I would need SSD speeds for it at those prices.

 

[Greggs]

I don't recall what I spent on my 8TB RED drive from WD.....maybe around $200 or slightly more, a couple of years ago.

By 2025 we could expect the cost of these drives to be down to $0.01 per GB? $80 for an 8TB drive? Yeah right. I'll believe it when I see it because we all know that "floods" and "fires" and "earthquakes" will happen at inconvenient times and keep prices artificially inflated.

Bought two external WD external drives and shucked them, $100 each.

 

[mcnabney]

The price is getting there. A quick trip to Newegg found the best value for a new spinning rust drive at 1.186 cents per gig (for reference it was a 14TB Exynos X16).
I would also note that the least cost efficient 'large' drives were 2TB and 22TB. Not really a shocker there.

 

[dalpilot]

A 2TB WD Green with a 5 year warranty cost $65 in August 2011 or $0.035 per gigabyte. The HDD market is in complete stagnation. All decent models with helium and noisy at 16TB and above. The price fell only 3 times in 11 years, until 2012 everything was much faster - the capacity doubled at the same price within 2.5 years ...

I bought a WD Red Pro 12 TB for $189 on sale and that works out to $0.015/GB. It's exceptionally fast and quiet in my QNAP NAS and many of the sale prices during the current holiday season have been at similar prices. You still can't be spinning disks for large video libraries (I currently have 8 TB of videos from the last 15 years). They are properly backed up on and offsite and SSDs will NEVER replace spinning media for video storage and replay.

 

[Q Wales]

Been buying external 6tb and 8tb WD and Seagate drives for under 1.5p per GB for years, so not a massive change then

 

[NikoBB]

Modern HDDs have become very fragile and unreliable. The read / write resource for conventional models is no more than 180TB per year and one erroneous bit for every 10 ^ 14 bits of reading or writing. Servers have no more than 550TB per year and one erroneous bit for every 10^15.

And helium gradually flows out. These disks won't last 15-20 years like my old disks even on glass plates like IBM 180Gb...

 

[NikoBB]

I bought a WD Red Pro 12 TB for $189 on sale and that works out to $0.015/GB. It's exceptionally fast and quiet in my QNAP NAS and many of the sale prices during the current holiday season have been at similar prices. You still can't be spinning disks for large video libraries (I currently have 8 TB of videos from the last 15 years). They are properly backed up on and offsite and SSDs will NEVER replace spinning media for video storage and replay.

Did I argue that SSDs are also much more expensive?
The problem is that HDDs have also become very unreliable, especially those with helium.

 

[HyperPete]

(3) Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB NAS Internal Hard Drives, Raid 3, in Synology NAS enclosure on a battery backup. I mirror my wife's and my multiple PCs and devices, so no more Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.
These drives drop to 215 on sale.
I'll pay off the NAS in 2.5 years based upon the Google Drive subscription I cancelled.