Decline price per GB for HDDs comes to an end

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Simply put, they're not getting any cheaper. In its latest report Backblaze has been monitoring the average price per Gigabyte of hard disk drives, Backblaze bases theor numbers on the 75,000 HDDs it purchased the last couple of years.



When you focus at the years 2009 up-to 2011 the cost per GB dropped with 45%, from $0.11 to $0.05 per GB.

Inbetween 2015 up-to 2017 the average costs dropped 26% from $0.04 to $0.03 per GB, a drop of a mere $0.01 per GB. “This means that the declining price of storage will become less relevant in driving the cost of providing storage,” Andy Klein of BackBlaze writes on the company’s website.
 

 
He also mentions something about a prediction of research company IDC that states that from 2020, 44 trillion GB of data will be generated annually. “That’s quite a challenge for the storage industry especially as the cost per gigabyte curve for hard drives is flattening out,” Klein writes. Possibly new improvements in HDD technology, such as Helium and Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), and future technologies such as quantum storage, are a solution.

p through the 4 TB drive models, the cost per gigabyte of a larger sized drive always became less than the smaller sized drives. In other words, the cost per gigabyte of a 2 TB drive was less than that of a 1 TB drive resulting in higher density at a lower cost per gigabyte. This changed with the introduction of 6- and 8 TB drives, especially as it relates to the 4 TB drives. As you can see in the chart above, the cost per gigabyte of the 6 TB drives did not fall below that of the 4 TB drives. You can also observe that the 8 TB drives are just approaching the cost per gigabyte of the 4 TB drives. The 4 TB drives are the price king as seen in the chart below of the current cost of Seagate consumer drives by size.
 

Seagate Hard Drive Prices By Size

Drive SizeModelPriceCost/GB
1 TB ST1000DM010 $49.99 $0.050
2 TB ST2000DM006 $66.99 $0.033
3 TB ST3000DM008 $83.72 $0.028
4 TB ST4000DM005 $99.99 $0.025
6 TB ST6000DM004 $240.00 $0.040
8 TB ST8000DM005 $307.34 $0.038

 
The data on this chart was sourced from the current price of these drives on Amazon. 

Decline price per GB for HDDs comes to an end


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