Hard Drive Prices Have Surged By an Average of 46% Since September (tomshardware.com) 43
Tom's Hardware: Extensive research into the pricing of some of the best hard drives on the market for large capacity, economical storage indicates that prices are beginning to increase sharply, with some of the most popular models on the market seeing increases upwards of 60%. According to research from ComputerBase, pricing analysis on 12 of the most popular mainstream drives on the market indicates an average price increase of 46% over the last 4 months.
While the research and price checks on these drives track movement based on European prices (ComputerBase is a German outlet), Tom's Hardware checks on similar or identical SKUs in the U.S. indicate that the trends are indeed replicated, or perhaps worse, on the other side of the pond. CB reports that various drives like Seagate's IronWolf NAS line, Toshiba's Cloud Scale Capacity Drives, Western Digital's WD Red, and Seagate's BarraCuda lines are all showing price increases of between 23% and 66%. As noted, the average price increases clock in at 46% since September 2025.
While the research and price checks on these drives track movement based on European prices (ComputerBase is a German outlet), Tom's Hardware checks on similar or identical SKUs in the U.S. indicate that the trends are indeed replicated, or perhaps worse, on the other side of the pond. CB reports that various drives like Seagate's IronWolf NAS line, Toshiba's Cloud Scale Capacity Drives, Western Digital's WD Red, and Seagate's BarraCuda lines are all showing price increases of between 23% and 66%. As noted, the average price increases clock in at 46% since September 2025.
counter for why production hasn't increased (Score:5, Informative)
A great counter for why production hasn't increased (spoiler: because the manufactures got burnt before).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone... [msn.com]
Re:counter for why production hasn't increased (Score:4, Interesting)
A great counter for why production hasn't increased (spoiler: because the manufactures got burnt before).
No doubt. Back in the day, the HDD market was notorious for booms, busts, and profit margins thinner than the oxide layer on the platters.
Supply has also got to be tight. Manufacturers are going to tightly plan production to keep costs in line, thus making it hard to rapidly ramp up production. In those circumstances, even a small shift in demand can lead to large jumps in price.
Fake AI bubble is affecting the economy (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me guess (Score:2)
Rust Is Expensive (Score:2)
Sure, memory chip demand may be impaction SSDs. But, you've got to understand that rust is an expensive commodity in these trying times. It's only natural that hard drive prices increase dramatically.
Expect it to get worse, before it corrects and gets better.
Re: (Score:3)
I was going to buy an 8TB SSD to replace the 4TB SSD in my laptop. But they're now more than twice the price I paid for the 8TB SSDs in my gaming PC in 2023 so I bought a 20TB hard drive and moved the non-essential files off the SSD.
There's probably a lot of demand from people who can no longer afford to buy big SSDs.
Re: Rust Is Expensive (Score:2)
Hard drives have either aluminium or glass platters with coatings that are devoid of iron oxides. It's been that way for over quarter of a century now. Talk of spinning "rust" is ignorance personified.
Re: (Score:2)
"Rust" that's flat at the sub-nanometer scale, with a head that flies about 1nm above the surface and seeks to the middle of a 50nm-wide track, is a bit more expensive. (for comparison, green light wavelength is about 500nm)
Surprised the market is still as large as it is (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for an enterprise storage company making secondary storage devices (that is, destinations for backups). High capacity and low cost were the selling points (and write performance and reliability, but those don't figure in here).
For the last 15 years, the shift in the enterprise storage industry has been to SSDs for everything, just like for home use. Around the coffee machine, we talked about how secondary storage was the last industry segment which still used spinning rust. Last I checked, even that division was selling purely SDD based systems.
I checked some HDD market stats. Apparently something like 150 million units shipped last year, compared to a peak of around 600 million in 2010. I'm surprised there's even that much of a market for HDDs left.
Re:Surprised the market is still as large as it is (Score:4, Insightful)
SSDs are currently around 8x more expensive per TB when you scale up in capacity. The gap closed quickly but it seems like it's settling into a plateau...
At low enough demand, you are on the floor where you might as well do SSD, and in many applications the SSD performance is worth it, but if you need capacity and not too picky about performance, then HDD still wins in cost effectiveness by a wide margin.
Re: (Score:2)
SSDs are currently around 8x more expensive per TB when you scale up in capacity. The gap closed quickly but it seems like it's settling into a plateau...
Interestingly, this price per capacity ratio for SSDs compared to HDDs has stayed roughly at 10x for the last 25 years. Even in the last 20 years when the historic 10-year cadence for new generational technology has been dramatically slowed (e.g., HAMR was supposed to arrive more than 10 years ago), HDDs have still managed to eek out areal density increases. We'll see if this ratio continues in the future.
Re: (Score:2)
At low enough demand, you are on the floor where you might as well do SSD, and in many applications the SSD performance is worth it, but if you need capacity and not too picky about performance, then HDD still wins in cost effectiveness by a wide margin.
That's the thing. My impression was the class of applications where a SSD wasn't appropriate had shrunk to just backup and archive storage.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if you are hosting rips of your video collection or have surveillance footage, HDD is still attractive since those scenarios can push you relatively easily into the space where the cost difference matters and accessing that video for playback from HDD is pretty much just as good as from SSD practically speaking.
Re: (Score:2)
You either want fast storage or you want slow. And honestly, hard drives are too fast and too expensive to be slow storage.
Re: (Score:2)
You either want fast storage or you want slow. And honestly, hard drives are too fast and too expensive to be slow storage.
Not really. What you want is fast (for streaming writes) and cheap per byte. What you can buy is slow and cheap or fast and expensive. No one actually wants slow devices, that's just what they settle for.
And it turns out with very clever software and careful hardware design, you can make many slow disks pretty fast.
Re: Surprised the market is still as large as it i (Score:2)
Fast writes just means using solid state for inbound data before offloading to slower storage.
Re:Surprised the market is still as large as it is (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance, it used to be that media creatives would have a SSD for their go-to / work drive and a high-TB HDD or RAID to store the bulk media data, but - at least until AI blew the market apart - unless you were either seriously budget-limited or producing a vast amount of raw content, then a lower-spec high capacity multi-TB SSD or two was a potentially affordable option. In high-end server land, it was similar; you were spending so much on things like per-core software subscription licenses and however many chassis full of CPUs/RAM, that the storage uplift from HDD to SSD on the drive arrays (excluding the stuff that really needs to be SSD, like VM image storage) is largely a rounding error for PO approval until you get up into the 100s of TB or even PB range. But again, then along came AI...
I suspect a lot of people with upcoming hardware refreshes and large SSD drive arrays are going to be taking a good hard look at how much of that data *really* needs to be on SSDs until the AI bubble pops. It might be a bit of a last hurrah for the tech, but the next few years could be very good for distributors and other bulk suppliers of HDDs if those reviews go the way I expect.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
HDDs are still the most cost effective solution for large storage arrays
I beg to differ. In the enterprise space, "large" arrays are measured in petabytes and they all use SSDs now. I don't think you can buy a primary storage array which still supports HDD. Even the small enterprise arrays, tens to hundreds of TB, are exclusively SSDs.
...although putting an SSD in front of the drive array to act as a cache can make even some of those workloads viable.
That was popular 15 to 5 years ago. Last I looked, SSDs and NVMe devices had gotten large and cheap enough to entirely replace HDDs except for limited applications. Well, maybe not "entirely" but for huge swaths of the market. At least, that was
Re: Surprised the market is still as large as it i (Score:2)
In the HPC sector we spin large numbers of disks for PB class storage still and now plan on changing any time soon. We are in the process of replacing our storage right now and it's spinning disk again (Lenovo DSS-G aka GPFS) though we do have all the metadata on SSD these days.
Re: (Score:2)
Why are you surprised? If you think a 1TB SSD is "enough space", you should remember before SSDs took over multi-TB hard drives were common in computers.
People have a lot of stuff. Data stuff. They take a lot of photos and nowadays a lot of video. A 1 or 2 TB SSD (which is the most economical you can have now before the AI crisis) won't cut it for bulk storage.
Hard drives in the 8TB range (about the max for consumer SSDs) are still much cheaper than the SSD. And for bulk data storage, perfectly adequate.
Har
Re: (Score:1)
Why are you surprised? If you think a 1TB SSD is "enough space", you should remember before SSDs took over multi-TB hard drives were common in computers.
In the consumer space, I think the vast majority of systems are laptops with less than a TB of local storage. The number of systems which had multi-TB is a small slice of the market, probably just gamers and media creators. That's why I'm surprised: I wouldn't think there were enough of them to buy 150 million units.
Maybe I shouldn't be. How many professional photographers and videographers can there be? Tens of millions? Probably not 100 million.
People have a lot of stuff.
Right. But how many casual creators keep that locally versus
Re: (Score:3)
I checked some HDD market stats. Apparently something like 150 million units shipped last year, compared to a peak of around 600 million in 2010. I'm surprised there's even that much of a market for HDDs left.
There definitely is, but it's shifted from "everyone" to "a sizable-niche market segment". Back in 2010, basically everyone had spinning rust in their computers.
As SSDs came down in price, at capacities that made it viable to have SSDs as system drives (256GB is my candidate for this; it works for enough people by default), spinning rust quickly fell out of favor for desktops and laptops, but anyone with more than maybe 2TB of data was still on spinning rust. That crept up bit by bit, but 8TB SSDs are stil
Re: (Score:2)
My understanding is that the HDD market (by TB, at least) is mostly hyperscale operators - Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Microsoft Azure and OneDrive, etc. They store most of their data on HDD, because HDD capacity is cheaper, and do most of their reads/writes from SSDs, because SSD performance is cheaper. Unaccessed files get moved to slower and cheaper parts of the system over time.
Note also that NVMe SSDs cost a lot to deploy. A normal (non-Google) person can buy a bare system with 45 3.5" HDD slots for may
Re: (Score:2)
I used to work for an enterprise storage company making secondary storage devices (that is, destinations for backups). High capacity and low cost were the selling points (and write performance and reliability, but those don't figure in here).
For the last 15 years, the shift in the enterprise storage industry has been to SSDs for everything, just like for home use. Around the coffee machine, we talked about how secondary storage was the last industry segment which still used spinning rust. Last I checked, even that division was selling purely SDD based systems.
I checked some HDD market stats. Apparently something like 150 million units shipped last year, compared to a peak of around 600 million in 2010. I'm surprised there's even that much of a market for HDDs left.
Datcenters in general (and AI and Hyperscalers in particular) need HDDs to store vast ammounts of (cold) data. Think google storing the Gmail emails from 2005. Or hotmail and yahoo storing emails from 1995. Or facebook storing pictures from 2006. Or even bigger, each single AI company storing a copy of the whole internet (and then some) to train their models.
Those types of data are best stored on HDDs as GB/$ is superior, and (thanks to the data being seldomly accessed) do not consume that much energy overa
Re: (Score:2)
If operating systems shipped with backup software by default, instead of relying on all this Cloud crap, demand for HDDs would be far, far higher.
I am seriously disappointed that after decades of geeks screaming about the importance of backups, even Linux distros don't offer to set up a backup plan on installation. I've been calling for that for the better part of 20 years. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.
Market for the pros (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah... once you get used to the response time and data transfer rates of an SSD, there is no going back to hard drives.
Maybe I would use them for some sort of overnight archive backup, but I wouldn't have the patience to use them for anything else.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I don't know...
In my computer i have 4tb of solid state storage (2tb NVME + 1tb NVME + 2 500gb SATA), and then i have two 7200rpms 4tb disks for things i do not need speed (pictures, videos, etc). And they have no cell retention issues, nothing. I have instant access to any picture or video and the speed for those is perfectly sufficient.
In my work i have most computers with SSD's installed. A few of them became very slow, and those disks needed to be refreshed with an 3rd party utility to bring back to lif
Re: (Score:1)
I have a few of WD/Hitachi DC520 disks for backups. ,one is outside my house (in case of robbery/fire). Doing this with ssd doesnt make sense (cell retention issues, and COST).
Those disks have continuous read/write speeds of almost 250mb/s. Very fast compared to the almost 90-100mb/s of "regular" hard disks.
I have a lot of photos, videos, etc. I have all of my information triple-backed, CRC checked every month and always of those 3 backups
I do not trust cloud services and i don't want to pay every month. Co
User frustration surges 146% (Score:1)
or more.
Yet another "tax" on us proles (Score:2)
All part ot the cost of building our new AI gods.
Affordability (Score:4, Insightful)
Western Digital's website (Score:1)
LOL right on their home page in jumbo point text "Storage Is No Longer a Commodity"
"The storage market has moved from a commodity business to a strategic bottleneck, and for now, Western Digital holds the keys to the warehouse".
Some deals still out there (Score:2)
I picked up a 22TB external hard drive (Seagate Expansion) for $300. I got it to solve a specific problem, how to get data from my file server on the West coast to a new file server on the East coast. Ideally before I get broadband service at the destination.