Comments on: Hard Drive Cost Per Gigabyte

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 11:57:36 +0000

Now double all the prices and you have the realworld cost to the consumer as these devices are sold to fail so we have to back everything up.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 10:27:24 +0000

I haven’t found any hard drives even close to the price you say, the lowest I find are around $0.0315 per GB even on eBay for refurbished drives. Where are the low per GB prices you talk about?

By: Navin Shajan

Navin Shajan — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 15:52:53 +0000

In reply to Gucek. These comments whining about consumer prices are hilarious to read a couple years later as prices predictably dropped despite all the supply chain issues.

By: Cole Thompson

Cole Thompson — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 15:03:24 +0000

Refreshing to hear someone say: we were wrong!

You raised the question about why your services do not cost less, given that the cost of hard drives have dropped so dramatically. But you never answered the question?

How much lower might prices go? Lower than we think.

By: Marc xx

Marc xx — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 09:17:58 +0000

In reply to Matt Drury.

In 1962, in his book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible”, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated his famous Three Laws, of which the third law is the best-known and most widely cited: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

we have arrived …

By: Dave Etchells

Dave Etchells — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 15:32:17 +0000

In reply to Guest_47. I don't think the new WDs (even the ones that still carried the HItachi name for a while) are as reliable as the HGST ones were. I owned a fair number of HGST drives in the 4-6TB range that were just incredible workhorses, I think some that I bought back when are still running 24/7 7+ years later.

By: Dave Etchells

Dave Etchells — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 15:28:46 +0000

In reply to JoeTaxpayer. That's nothing: I ran a VAR (Value-Added Reseller) selling Mac-based graphics systems back in the 1990-1993 time frame and sold a good number of 2GB Seagate Barracuda drives (in enclosures) for $1,999 each. If I've got the decimal in the right place, that'd be $1,000,000 per TB :-0

By: melliott

melliott — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 16:27:47 +0000

I’m also interested in the cost of GB, available over the network. The calculation that includes the server’s required to expose all this storage to a network. How has that changed over the last 14 years.

By: Shaurya Verma

Shaurya Verma — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 00:56:59 +0000

Thanks for this detailed analysis. A lot of people would be benefited if a follow-up to this story were done today. It seems that HDD prices have plateaued in a way that seems to be artificial inflation. Cui bono – Maybe the manufacturers (Samsung/WD etc), but also online services like Netflix/Prime/Hotstar – in a bid to make streaming look more economical in comparison (in addition perhaps to more convenient). At this point these ideas are just thought vapours, so it’ll be good to have real data to understand this better.