I’d assume there really isn’t much room for HDD prices to come down in contrast to SSDs since the latter always fetched a premium until the technology started becoming more commonplace.
I’ve got a Samsung 970 evo 1tb for 99 EUR in 2020. Last week (2023) I’ve a Kingston KC 3000 2TB for the same price.
This is not what I call “barely moved”.
I’ve bought a used Crucial MX500 250GB for 30€ in 2019.
Last week I got a Crucial MX500 1TB for 45€.
I can get a 2TB for below double-price but I only need 1 TB and I read that it has a different build with lower speed (lower TLC, smaller DRAM or something, I don’t know).
Exactly 4 years and certainly not barely moved.
That has been the case since the hard drive crisis from the end of 2011. Well, SSDs stagnated or even went a little up over a 1-2 years period a few years back but now they’re back in full swing. If this continues (which isn’t a given, I’d say it’s 50/50 chances) it’ll be hard to justify spinning rust (all the “but but but unpowered SSDs can lose data in as little as X time” aside).
For what it’s worth, we’re coming off of the bottom of a bust cycle in the NAND flash space.
The OP’s graphs basically capture the NAND market from the previous boom through the current bust. So from that specific perspective, SSD prices have been dropping like a rock. The only catch with that window is that it fails to capture the cyclical nature of the market - and thus fails to illustrate how SSD prices go back up.
In practice, SSD prices have hit their lowest point. They are going to rebound here until the next bust in 2-3 years.
If they ever stop producing hard drives, I’ll have to start burning archival discs or something.
Yea, good luck with that, the formerly japanese Verbatim is now just a label for some Taiwanese/Hong Kong generic manufacturer, and if before there were some discussions about the BD M-Discs not being worth it and being mostly the same process now they don’t even bother to use the MILLEN metadata, the difference being only on the box label (and price). What’s worse some people reported some really bad quality issues (like 50% failures). So nope, you’ll need to stick with the mainstream.
Pray that we at least keep this perk where the discrete storage is something common and cheap, and not some oddity like any of the dead formats or something reserved for Enterprise use with crazy prices (think tape). Already most people are using just what they get in their devices and that is morphing into stuff soldered into motherboards or even included into SoC (think CPU, but with more functions, but only one chip). And very often it’s even encrypted and you can’t get access to it …
in my country 1 tb nvme ssd are cheaper than 2.5 inch sata HDD of same size, and it sucks because my server is 10 year old and has only sata ports
If you consider inflation, they have come down kinda? lol
I believe that is just the nature of the beast. SSDs are much simpler from a manufacturing standpoint and benefit from general advances in chip production that keep driving the costs down.