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.
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.
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.
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 ↗