Storage Prices

As Geoff Gasior pointed out in Tech Report last month, 3.5" HDD prices are still significantly higher than pre-flod last year. Interestingly, some of the 2.5" drivers are cheaper than last year, while some of the smaller 3.5" drivers are up to 60% more expensive. Couch critics explain it with lack of demand, and HDD companies still recovering their loses from last year.

Despite this lag in price reductions, or perhaps due to the prevailing high prices of 2TB drives, both the WD Green 3 TB (internal and external) drives are now on top of the list. This is a first, and has been a long time coming. It is not much, but you now get 2.7% more bytes for your Euros on a 3TB drive, compared to 2TB internal.

Also interesting in this round, is that Western Digital has finally gotten around to release a 4 TB drive, more than a year after Hitachi showed off their Deskstar 7K4000 4 TB. What's surprising about WD's offering, is that this is, like the Deskstar, a five platter (5 x 800GB) drive. Surprising, since WD is already offering 1 TB platters in their Red line, but with max capacity of 3 TB. As discussed earlier, the 4 and 5 TB 1TB/platter drives are highly overdue. What's more, WD has chosen to introduce the 4TB drives at the top of the range, in its RE 24/7 support, and Black lines. In terms of speed, it does makes sense use more platters in those high-end drives, however, they might also be less reliable, due to more moving parts. Five years factory warranty on the former line does mean they are serious about quality, though.

Finally, as a first, I have included Sandisk's line of high-end SDHC cards. This is mostly with Raspberry Pi. It is tested and works on most SD cards, but performance might vary.

Exchange rate: 1 Euro = 1.208000 CHF.