Storage Prices

Writing for Softpedia, Constantin Murariu claimed last week that the "HDD crisis" has been greatly exaggerated by the big manufactures, Seagate and Western Digital. For a fact, they have posted very healthy profits over the last months. Furthermore, there is now a duopoly in the HDD market, after Seagate bought Samsung’s hard drive division in April 2011, and Western Digital bought Hitachi’s HDD division.

Murariu laments that we will never see prices as low as pre-flood, however, that would of course go against more than half a century in improved technology and value for money. After all, storage capacity has seen extreme growth and its own "Moore's law", but at a much more rapid phase than the transistor density. We already have Hitachi’s 4 TB Deskstar and Seagate’s 4 TB GoFlex Desk from last year. The later uses 5 platters of 800 GB, but the former is already at 1 TB / platter, which means that a 5 TB disk is already feasible if they wanted to. However, four platters usually makes for more stable and reliable disks, as they have less components, so that's usually what the follow-up drives are made up from.

Looking at the current prices, they've come down a bit since right after the flood, but still have further to go before getting back to June 2011 levels. For example, the external 3 TB WD disk was ~140 Euros last year, went up to 203 Euros, and is now at 165 Euros (but with the faster USB 3 interface), or still 18% higher. Not a disaster for your wallet, but still a bump in the ever decreasing prices per byte.

Other than that, the relative ranking remains the same. The 2 TB disk still gives most bytes for money, optical disks don't change much at all, SSD is coming down, but is still a lot more expensive than spinning disks, and CompactFlash is the most expensive medium around (but with increasing read/write speeds for ever larger sensors and pictures).

Exchange rate: 1 Euro = 1.201378 CHF.