Hard drive prices (and innovation) decline
Summary: The price hikes from the Thailand flooding in late 2011 are fading fast. So are increases in drive areal density. Is stagnation the new normal?
Hard drive price watching firm PriceG2 — through Storage Newsletter — reported that hard drive prices declined 5 percent in the first quarter of 2013. While good news for consumers, expect to see even steeper declines this quarter.
Why? Because an accelerating sales decline in PCs is meeting a rising tide of disk drive production.
The bad news? Vendors can afford to do this because they're cutting back on hard drive innovation.
There are two reasons for this. First, hard drives capacities have outstripped the needs of most consumers and system builders. Second, vendors have decided it isn't worth investing heavily in the technology required for areal density increases.
Yes, hard drives will continue to get cheaper, but at a slower rate. Say goodbye to the 40 percent annual increases in areal density and drive capacity that we got used to in the first decade of the 21st century.
The Storage Bits take
As I noted last fall,"... with PC sales declining and the threat of SSDs, drive vendors can't afford to get greedy on pricing". They got a welcome burst of profitability thanks to the floods, but that was a one time event.
Your best deals in hard drives are external hard drives (preferably with a USB 3.0 interface) rather than raw drives. I'd love to know how they compute internal transfer pricing to make external drives cheaper than internal drives, but I guess that's for finance people to know and the rest of us to wonder at.
If you have a choice, I would wait another three months before buying any 4 terabyte drives. It usually takes 3 to 6 months for a new drive capacity to get the production bugs out, yields up, and marginal costs down.
Today, the sweet spot is in the 2 to 3 TB drives. Yet 4 terabyte drives are also coming down in price as availability improves, and should hit the sub-3¢/GB level by the second half of 2013.
You can also expect to see Western Digital and Toshiba follow Seagate's lead into hybrid drives. There is substantial room for performance improvements and creative engineering to make hybrid drives higher-margin.
Comments welcome, as always. Find any good deals lately?
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Talkback
4TB for $110
Yup.
on top of Linux or BSD.
External drives cheaper?
Jumping to 4TB, some external are cheaper because they're actually two 2TB internal drives, and usually older technology at that. That said, I think 4TB just isn't common enough for prices to drop. Right now they're at 4-6¢/GB and even 2TB drives are 4.5¢/GB, so I'm not sure where 3¢/GB comes from unless it's older, SATA2-gen hardware, or has some other flaw that makes it less desirable to system builders. (Slow speed, inefficient cache, etc.)
OMG!
I am trying to forget those prices
My first HDD
A few years later I paid $400 for a 10MB CF card for my much-liked Omnibook 300.
Robin
first drives
My colleagues are probably right I am an Seagate fan - my last purchase of yesterday were some Savvio 10k.6 900GB drives. For some reason, other brand disks almost always fall on me,
$1 per MB was a big deal, then $1 per GB was a big deal.
Supply and Demand.
I'd love to know why you put this sentence in your story. I find it hard to believe you are as ignorant as the people who buy an external drive instead of an internal drive just because they don't know how to physically install one.
Add that to the other reasons (no open internal sata slots, swapping convenience, backup drives) that other people choose to buy the external drives and the answer is simple.
huh?
And yes, the reason clearly is market demand and pricing models, but that doesn't make it any less un-intuitive or wasteful.
unfortunately
It's true
I generally use dual layer dvds for archiving because i fear mechanical failure of a hard drive more than aging of dvds. But now with 3 tb external drives under $ 120 it's not only cheaper but I can basically mirror my data on 2 hard drives and it's less than a tenth of a cent difference to storing it on a single dual layer dvd ! Plus it's much easier to find stuff on hard drive than having to sort though hundreds of dvds.
DVDs
What about cloud drives?
What about growing demand for cloud storage? What kind of drives Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft use? Don't they need drives with higher areal density, consuming less power and more reliable?