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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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")
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
That could explain Ram but how about drives at the same time? Just a shortage?
> 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.
What I've heard is that there's been an undersupply of HDDs in the market for the last few years.
March 2024 price for 12 TB refurb : $76.
The one I bought literally this month : $169.
Same WD drive from gHD.
Inflation? Tariffs?
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.
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.
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.
That doesn't add up to a doubling in price.
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.
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.
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.
Those tapes are actually 18 TB so you need more to break even. Also 24 TB drives have been on sale for ~$250 occasionally.
True that, but also those 28TB disks are actually 25TB. So the break even point moves back.
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).
[delayed]
Related:
Diskprices.com makes $5k/month with affiliate marketing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066480 - Jan 2024 (118 comments)
Disk Prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377826 - Oct 2022 (65 comments)
Disk Prices on Amazon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156292 - Jan 2020 (222 comments)
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
This bit from the FAQ stuck out to me:
There also was a site like this with images and a GUI.
Does anybody remember the name?
Found it, it is:
https://www.productchart.com/ssd_drives/
This makes me miss pricewatch.com
It would be nicer if they had a way to exclude SMR drives.
As long as disk prices decay faster than 1/time, we can store data forever with a finite cost.
Check out https://economicmodel.dshr.org/
Too bad they're increasing
That would only be true if electricity prices also decay faster than 1/(time)^(1+epsilon).
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-...
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
https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new,used&capacit...
Pretty expensive for anything semi-recent (as in, past 6 years, 20TB+). what happened?
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.
I'd like this chart but for the past 50 years.
I built a similar tool but for protein powder/bar prices.
https://www.proteinmath.app/
u.2/3 looks really expensive here
Sigh. I literally bought an HDD last week. This would have been super handy.
[dead]
Does it exclude fake capacity reporting disks?
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.
If it didn't, they'd be at the top of the list, right?
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.