Hard drives.... I remember those things... didn't I used to use them before the Great HDD and SSD Extinction of 2025-2026?
Seriously, I had to replace 2 hard drives in my NAS this year like a bad luck lottery and my hard drives have doubled in price. I was terrified that my NVMe was failing as well.
I've been tracking 12TB HDD prices for replacing a faulty one in my NAS for the past 6 months, I bought 4x 12TB HDD in 2024 for a total of 13k SEK (around 1300 USD) and right now a single one of the same brand/model is selling for 6750-7000 SEK (~675-700 USD).
It is 2x the price of just 2 years ago, it's too bad.
I usually don't spite people or companies but in this case I hope all these AI slop bullshit machines fail & fail hard.
So that we can get hardware at sane prices for actually useful thing. And to serve as a warning to never ever do such a stupidly disruptive shit ever again.
It's not the AI tech itself, it's that a select set of people have been given far too much money - anything they decide to invest in could be like this. AI isn't even the first - GPU prices were driven up by Ethereum miners, and just like AI, Nvidia flirted with exiting the customer sector and only selling to miners.
Thankfully for many folks there's the option of going either with whitelabel or recertified drives!
I think for the folks in the US this was a site that works: <a href="https://www.goharddrive.com/default.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.goharddrive.com/default.php
Whereas for those in the EU there's this: <a href="https://datablocks.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://datablocks.dev/
For the second link, you'll have to ignore the horribly tasteless AI slop image for the site background (someone should e-mail them about it or something), the site itself is legit, bought some drives from them: <a href="https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablocks/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablo...
Never buy a recertified drive, talking from my own experience, my recertified Seagate Exos X16 failed exactly after a year. They are very cheap for a reason.
It failed for a reason before, so it will likely fail again before the end of its usual lifecycle.
This has not been my experience at all. All of my NAS drives are recertified enterprise models. I've never had one fail. (But then I've only had a single spinning disk fail on me ever. Generally I retire them because they become too small to justify occupying a slot. Slots are scarce.)
A really long time (at least by residential standards). Close to 24/7 for many years.
If a single HDD failing is traumatic then you're doing something wrong. At absolute minimum you should be in raid1. Backups should amount to snapshots that can be restored in a single step.
> If a single HDD failing is traumatic then you're doing something wrong. At absolute minimum you should be in raid1. Backups should amount to snapshots that can be restored in a single step.
I wasn't storing anything important on it anyway, mostly movies ripped from Blu-rays. So its failure wasn't traumatic. However I expected it to last at least three years, but it died after exactly 365 days of use. The seller refused to send a replacement, and legally speaking, they were in the right.
Melodramatic mutch? The first new IDE HDD I ever bought died within a week. The first new USB HDD I ever bought was dead on arrival. My first server SSD became read only after a year.
Better telling everyone not to buy this things. /s
Those have also shot up though. The past couple years is the first time I can recall cost per GB increasing rather than decreasing in a sustained manner. And it's been all forms of storage.
As I see it, the prices are basically what they were in 2020. Not ideal, but survivable. I had a hard drive in 2020, and probably so did you. Since 2020, they dropped in half, and then they doubled again.
My take on hard drive economics is that the cost of an HDD is relatively constant, modulo the platter count, while capacity increases over time, as the components are pretty much the same in each generation.
There's one exception to this - HAMR added additional components, and a corresponding increase in BOM cost, but there's probably a learning curve on this.
However the recent AI data center boom is probably hitting HDDs in two ways - (a) general demand for anything datacenter-related, and (b) high DRAM prices, with most HDDs containing 256-512MB of DDR3. (I haven't physically examined the newest drives - they may be DDR4 and go beyond 512MB; also the 40TB supposedly includes NAND flash, adding yet more cost)
It's not the economics of manufacturing rust-coated glass disks and more than chips have the economics of molten sand. Both are actually the economics of very precise devices requiring very specialised knowledge and equipment to make that can't be readily scaled up.
My NVMe died a month ago (failed self-test in bios). Was 4.5 years old. Western Digital had a 5 year warranty. SanDisk owns them now and honored the warranty. The replacement NVMe is on the way.
reenorap · · focus · HN ↗
Seriously, I had to replace 2 hard drives in my NAS this year like a bad luck lottery and my hard drives have doubled in price. I was terrified that my NVMe was failing as well.
literalAardvark · · focus · HN ↗
Yeah I'd prefer it to be even cheaper but the prices for HDDs aren't too bad.
reenorap · · focus · HN ↗
literalAardvark · · focus · HN ↗
When I bought these they were peak GB/$, which is a fair couple of years ago.
piva00 · · focus · HN ↗
literalAardvark · · focus · HN ↗
But for me hdd prices feel like when people were panicking about crypto going down to prices that hadn't been seen in... days.
Now RAM and GPU prices, yeah. Those are bloody expensive.
piva00 · · focus · HN ↗
It is 2x the price of just 2 years ago, it's too bad.
SirMaster · · focus · HN ↗
m4rtink · · focus · HN ↗
I usually don't spite people or companies but in this case I hope all these AI slop bullshit machines fail & fail hard.
So that we can get hardware at sane prices for actually useful thing. And to serve as a warning to never ever do such a stupidly disruptive shit ever again.
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
KronisLV · · focus · HN ↗
I think for the folks in the US this was a site that works: <a href="https://www.goharddrive.com/default.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.goharddrive.com/default.php
Whereas for those in the EU there's this: <a href="https://datablocks.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://datablocks.dev/
For the second link, you'll have to ignore the horribly tasteless AI slop image for the site background (someone should e-mail them about it or something), the site itself is legit, bought some drives from them: <a href="https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablocks/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablo...
nalekberov · · focus · HN ↗
It failed for a reason before, so it will likely fail again before the end of its usual lifecycle.
fc417fc802 · · focus · HN ↗
nalekberov · · focus · HN ↗
idk, it was such a traumatic experience for me that I decided to pass on recertified HDDs.
fc417fc802 · · focus · HN ↗
If a single HDD failing is traumatic then you're doing something wrong. At absolute minimum you should be in raid1. Backups should amount to snapshots that can be restored in a single step.
nalekberov · · focus · HN ↗
I wasn't storing anything important on it anyway, mostly movies ripped from Blu-rays. So its failure wasn't traumatic. However I expected it to last at least three years, but it died after exactly 365 days of use. The seller refused to send a replacement, and legally speaking, they were in the right.
noAnswer · · focus · HN ↗
Better telling everyone not to buy this things. /s
nalekberov · · focus · HN ↗
fc417fc802 · · focus · HN ↗
SirMaster · · focus · HN ↗
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
pjdesno · · focus · HN ↗
There's one exception to this - HAMR added additional components, and a corresponding increase in BOM cost, but there's probably a learning curve on this.
However the recent AI data center boom is probably hitting HDDs in two ways - (a) general demand for anything datacenter-related, and (b) high DRAM prices, with most HDDs containing 256-512MB of DDR3. (I haven't physically examined the newest drives - they may be DDR4 and go beyond 512MB; also the 40TB supposedly includes NAND flash, adding yet more cost)
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
andruby · · focus · HN ↗
How old is your NVMe?