Interesting news indeed. A long time ago, I fielded a storage solution for a customer that used nearly 150 SCSI drives to offer almost 1TB of capacity for a company's server room (you know, before we started calling them data centers, heh) for an ungodly amount of money. We've come an awfully long way since then.
24 years ago I had a computer with a 120MB HDD, which I thought was huge: Nearly 300x 360k 5.25 floppies of storage, or more than 80 of the expensive 3.5" 1.44mb sort! Then I got a CD drive. Today I have a a TB of flash in my gaming PC and a pair of 6TB HDDs in my NAS.
I suspect both will last me until at least 2020 when I'll be due for a new gaming PC and the Server 08r2 Windows build underlying my WHS2011 NAS goes end of life. Whatever replaces the latter might well be my last HDD purchase ever, due to projections suggesting the mid 2020's are when SSDs will drop below HDDs in cost per GB. Once the price gap gets within ~$100/HDD (or equivalent) or so switching over just to replace a largish MITX box with something NUC-Router sized will start looking rather attractive. 2020's probably going to be too soon for that though.
My situation is pretty similar to yours. The first PC that I bothered to tinker with much was a 386sx at 16MHz. It shipped with a 40MB drive and I added a 60MB hard disk when it became available. I recall being extremely impressed with myself over the idea of having 100MB of total storage space.
Like you, I don't see myself purchasing another hard drive in the future. Both of my laptops use solid state drives and there's a 1TB drive in my old netbook which I'm using as a NAS box. It's using less than 100GB of that space and there's just not a big enough cost gap for capacity to warrant using a HDD in any system at this point. Of course, people with less modest storage requirements might still have a need, but I think perhaps around 2020 we'll be largely done with using hard drives across the industry as a whole.
I've got ~3TB on my NAS (2x 6TB in RAID0 equivalency). Mostly backups of my active systems and snapshots of retired HDDs/computers. Based on historical trends I expect I'll be near capacity again in 3 years when I need to replace it anyway.
Bulk storage (eg home nas, cold data in the cloud, etc) isn't expected to hit cheaper on flash until the mid 2020's; so we're probably a decade out industry wide. OTOH for end user devices 2020 might be doable. The problems being that below a minimum capacity lack of parellelism causes SSD perf to fall off a cliff, making the cheapest HDD cheaper than the cheapest non total crap SSD; and that there are a lot of people who only look at cheap laptops in a boxmart see 500gb > 128gb, and know the first is obviously better. The sales man is clearly trying to scam them pushing the second. *sigh*
And yet 4 years ago I bought a bunch of 3TB drives for an array. They're out of warranty so I'd like some new ones. I'm used to replacing drives every 3-5 years at the same price point, getting a capacity increase in the process. Much to my annoyance, the drives I bought are still exactly the same price. There has been no movement in price, the only thing that has changed is that larger, more expensive drives are available.
Exactly. When I bought my 2TB HDDs like 5.5 Years ago, they cost $99. And now they can be had for maybe $80 here. Yeah that's still 20% less but little compared to previous times. Shows how the whole market is stagnating, not just CPUs.
You're never going to see 3.5" old drives slump much below $100 because at that price level manufacturing/etc costs eat almost the entire price. Capacities that small are mostly drives made years ago that have been sitting in a warehouse for years unsold. At the barely making any money price level what we do get is a lot more capacity for the dollar . You can get 4TB for $105 on Newegg today or 3TB for $80 ($70 if you're willing to accept a no-name model instead of Seagate or HGST).
You didn't say exactly which model you bought; but the Camel Camel Camel price charts for several 3TB drives from around that era all show substantial price drops over the last few years. My first thought is to suspect you found a crazy sale that wasn't captured; and those sort of sales are rarely repeated afterwards, especially for old stuff.
When it comes to fading technology, when it comes down to one manufacturer expanding on it, it is on its way out. This was true for the floppy drive (first the 2.88MB floppy and later the LS-120 superdisk) and external mechanical drives (the 750MB Zip drive and 2GB Jazz drive) and even backup tapes (LTO-5, 6, and now 7) as they all were products that required heavy investments and had such little returns they nearly wiped out their makers. Seagate is going to continue to research into bigger drives and eventually fall into bankuptcy, while WD gets into the SSD field (their purchase of Sandisk and HGST show this) and manages to survive. They'd be better off spending research dollars on SSD technology.
Except it's not just one manufacturer, because Seagate will be the _2nd_ manufacturer to produce a 12TB HDD, after Western Digital (as it says in the article).
zipdrives aren't a great analogy, because zip drives (as a storage medium with greater capacity than floppies) had multiple plausible competitors - ironically HDDs (with the internet) were one of them.
Modern large HDDs aren't a great niche, but I don't see the alternatives either. SSDs are much more expensive and likely to stay so for a while - so what else are you going to use for bulk storage? Tapes?
Sure, eventually SSDs may drop to competitive prices, but by comparison zip drives where a much trickier proposition: the alternatives were cheaper (per storage), although they did require a change in habits.
Heck, with an external bay you could use plain old 2.5" drives as kind of zipdrive today.
What's needed for bulk storage these days? We have many cloud storage providers for documents, from Dropbox to OneDrive. Music and movies are now typically watched through streaming services, so there's no need for huge repositories for media files. Nearly all programs and drivers are immediately downloadable, so there's no need to go store those anymore. What's left? What do we need to store anymore?
Umm... you ask what's needed for bulk storage these days, then literally rattle off half a dozen applications that require huge quantities of large capacity and high reliability HDDs.
End users may not be the primary customers for huge capacity HDDs, but as long as places like Dropbox and Netflix exist, and HDDs are lower total cost of ownership than SSDs, there will be plenty of demand for high capacity HDDs.
Big business is moving to flash storage instead of hard drives for performance reasons. With some storage situations, such as user documents, the larger the repository, the more efficient deduplication can be, and thus cheaper and faster storage is through systems with lots of memory and flash and far less HD storage. Even with Netflix and Hulu, flash storage is far better because they can serve more systems from the same storage. A single movie in flash storage can be served out to a hundred people at once, while ten sets of HD RAIDs would be needed to serve the same customers, simply because of the IOPS. Then take corporate backups to the "cloud". Flash storage is much better for that, in combination with deduplication, as the performance is much better over the internet. Trying to use rotational storage for cloud backups increases the latency far too much, and the backups get horrible performance, leaving the overnight backup taking several hours into the work day. Flash comes out cheaper, across the board.
HD storage is going down, fast. It just isn't fast enough anymore.
Even if relying on an internet connection wasn't bad (it is) where do you think your data sits when it's "in the cloud"? Well I can tell you it's not in an actual cloud :). It's on HDDs like these because "the cloud" needs to store as much data in as little (physical) space as possible to save costs. That's why these offerings come first in Enterprise models (https://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrasta... and then trickle down in the consumer space as it gets cheaper.
Plenty of people need to store TBs of audio/video data or virtual machines just to give a few examples. It's not only a matter of privacy but until the internet link is as fast and reliable as a SATA cable the two solutions will simply complement each other.
I'm well aware that "cloud" is just another term for "someone else's" redundant storage or computer system. However, most cloud storage these days is moving to flash, either over SAS, FCoE, or iSCSI, and is set to duplicate across the internet to other systems. Rotational storage for that use is just not fast enough in IOPS to work well enough.
I know this because I used to work for a storage company, Quantum. Their business is lagging badly. the only thing keeping them going at this point is government contracts, where it takes an act of Congress to make any changes.
Rotational storage for internet reasons is dying faster than home user storage. Even for home users, the most used is flash drives, and they're getting big enough that people don't need the internal storage for most things.
You have a terribly odd reasoning for a person claiming to have worked in the field. Then again you don't say what you were doing there so... First of all you completely ignore the cost per GB for all flash storage, then you say that the technology should die because it's not the best at everything anymore.
If all storage was flash you wouldn't afford your current cloud storage. And if only the products that are best at everything would be allowed to "live" I don't even know where you'd be... Not here anyway.
Rotational storage doesn't work "well enough"? For who? For what? Maybe you should have worked for an argumentation company. It may not have more than a few years ahead of it but as long as it offers more GBs for the same buck it will chug along just fine.
Someone should tell Ford, GM, or Toyota to roll over and die because Ferrari makes faster cars. I know because I worked in a car dealership...
The Ferrari comparison isn't that far off: at least consumer flash runs 10x more per $/gig than rotational media. I'd understand if tape was eating rotational media from below (can anybody undercut Amazon for backup using tape? Is anybody, it should be possible?), but I'm not seeing it.
If anything, I'd assume that such companies would be buying rotational media for backups (except for organizations with hard rules about "hard drives are not backup, use punch cards instead".
It would be extremely odd if Moore's law (for silicon) died almost identically with the inability of magnetic media to continue to scale, but that appears to be happening. It might just be that flash has eaten enough of rotational media's lunch that they can't afford the huge R&D costs to keep going. Remember, while flash isn't eating all of rust's lunch, it certainly is eating the most profitable.
Tape is a great technology... until you have to restore a backup and the time you lose restoring from tape costs a lot more than backing up to disk. And then you give backup to disk a chance :). Flash is far from cheap enough to use anywhere else but performance critical applications and caching.
Really, though, the only benefit to a hard drive, over an SSD, currently, is $$/GB. When you see 1TB SSD's going on sale for ~$250 (meaning, ~$0.25/GB, before formatting, of course), then realize that even 20 years ago, hard drives had barely (or not quite yet) reached $1/GB, it's nothing more than a matter of time, before larger capacity will be the ONLY benefit of an HDD over an SSD.
My first home-built rig, in late 2001, had a WD 80GB "Black" hard drive, that I paid $80 for, on sale. What a steal!!
I could see eventual need to move from 4TB drives in the NAS with 4k UHD BD images. Currently everything fits in a 6 disk raid 5. But with 4k blu ray disc image double the size and as movies i want increase in number I could see moving to 10-12TB.
I just noticed I actually have less data space now than I had 5 years ago since I got 200MB simetric fiber...
I still download huge files, but I don't keep them. I know I am not a syvarite 4k BR Movie packrat but I doubt I will need more than a couple TB of storage. Including an SSD for my SO and games in my PC and another 2 for important files offline backup. Also, if anything HDDs have not gone down in price as a 5 year interval would suggest.
I rip all my blu rays as a disk image file and that's the only time they come out of the case. Preserves them and keeps them in tip top shape. Yeah I buy them all and rip them all myself I promise ;), I have watched people shift more and more to online cloud streaming of their movies and such and I don't care what it is streaming does not provide the same bit rate as an actual blu ray disc when watching the film and you can see the extra banding and blockiness and poor low light detail when streaming, especially from my Panasonic plasma 65 inch st60 which has excellent black levels which really exposes the poor black detail when streaming.
Trust me doing this just eats up space no problem and these are only regular 50GB blu ray discs. 20 movies per TB is really not a ton of space. I've got over 250 blu ray disc images in my library. Then I also have over 5TB of FLAC audio some 24 bit 96khz flac.
Changing over all these bluray to 4k will probably make me need to expand to 10TB drives in 6 bay NAS most likely 12TB to give myself breathing room as RAID 5 makes you lose 1 disk in capacity. Or I could get a higher bay count system. Depends how big of a premium they ask for these larger drives,
Yeah that's my greatest concern. I still remember buying 3TB drives in 2010-2011 for $99 and they're only just getting back around to that pricing now. I really want to be purchasing 4TB and up these days but the prices just aren't falling. New products come in at a the top of the range and then those prices are just higher and higher.
Bought 3* 2TB drives before 2011 floods for 75$ each, and now, 6 years later, I could by 1 6TB drive, but price is the same. These consolidations like WDs merge with HGST and others has killed competition.
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BrokenCrayons - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
Interesting news indeed. A long time ago, I fielded a storage solution for a customer that used nearly 150 SCSI drives to offer almost 1TB of capacity for a company's server room (you know, before we started calling them data centers, heh) for an ungodly amount of money. We've come an awfully long way since then.DanNeely - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
24 years ago I had a computer with a 120MB HDD, which I thought was huge: Nearly 300x 360k 5.25 floppies of storage, or more than 80 of the expensive 3.5" 1.44mb sort! Then I got a CD drive. Today I have a a TB of flash in my gaming PC and a pair of 6TB HDDs in my NAS.I suspect both will last me until at least 2020 when I'll be due for a new gaming PC and the Server 08r2 Windows build underlying my WHS2011 NAS goes end of life. Whatever replaces the latter might well be my last HDD purchase ever, due to projections suggesting the mid 2020's are when SSDs will drop below HDDs in cost per GB. Once the price gap gets within ~$100/HDD (or equivalent) or so switching over just to replace a largish MITX box with something NUC-Router sized will start looking rather attractive. 2020's probably going to be too soon for that though.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
My situation is pretty similar to yours. The first PC that I bothered to tinker with much was a 386sx at 16MHz. It shipped with a 40MB drive and I added a 60MB hard disk when it became available. I recall being extremely impressed with myself over the idea of having 100MB of total storage space.Like you, I don't see myself purchasing another hard drive in the future. Both of my laptops use solid state drives and there's a 1TB drive in my old netbook which I'm using as a NAS box. It's using less than 100GB of that space and there's just not a big enough cost gap for capacity to warrant using a HDD in any system at this point. Of course, people with less modest storage requirements might still have a need, but I think perhaps around 2020 we'll be largely done with using hard drives across the industry as a whole.
DanNeely - Wednesday, February 1, 2017 - link
I've got ~3TB on my NAS (2x 6TB in RAID0 equivalency). Mostly backups of my active systems and snapshots of retired HDDs/computers. Based on historical trends I expect I'll be near capacity again in 3 years when I need to replace it anyway.Bulk storage (eg home nas, cold data in the cloud, etc) isn't expected to hit cheaper on flash until the mid 2020's; so we're probably a decade out industry wide. OTOH for end user devices 2020 might be doable. The problems being that below a minimum capacity lack of parellelism causes SSD perf to fall off a cliff, making the cheapest HDD cheaper than the cheapest non total crap SSD; and that there are a lot of people who only look at cheap laptops in a boxmart see 500gb > 128gb, and know the first is obviously better. The sales man is clearly trying to scam them pushing the second. *sigh*
Gigaplex - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
And yet 4 years ago I bought a bunch of 3TB drives for an array. They're out of warranty so I'd like some new ones. I'm used to replacing drives every 3-5 years at the same price point, getting a capacity increase in the process. Much to my annoyance, the drives I bought are still exactly the same price. There has been no movement in price, the only thing that has changed is that larger, more expensive drives are available.beginner99 - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
Exactly. When I bought my 2TB HDDs like 5.5 Years ago, they cost $99. And now they can be had for maybe $80 here. Yeah that's still 20% less but little compared to previous times. Shows how the whole market is stagnating, not just CPUs.DanNeely - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
You're never going to see 3.5" old drives slump much below $100 because at that price level manufacturing/etc costs eat almost the entire price. Capacities that small are mostly drives made years ago that have been sitting in a warehouse for years unsold. At the barely making any money price level what we do get is a lot more capacity for the dollar . You can get 4TB for $105 on Newegg today or 3TB for $80 ($70 if you're willing to accept a no-name model instead of Seagate or HGST).DanNeely - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
You didn't say exactly which model you bought; but the Camel Camel Camel price charts for several 3TB drives from around that era all show substantial price drops over the last few years. My first thought is to suspect you found a crazy sale that wasn't captured; and those sort of sales are rarely repeated afterwards, especially for old stuff.http://camelcamelcamel.com/Red-3TB-Hard-Disk-Drive...
http://camelcamelcamel.com/Model-Seagate-3-5-Inch-...
http://camelcamelcamel.com/Seagate-Desktop-3-5-Inc...
dgingeri - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
When it comes to fading technology, when it comes down to one manufacturer expanding on it, it is on its way out. This was true for the floppy drive (first the 2.88MB floppy and later the LS-120 superdisk) and external mechanical drives (the 750MB Zip drive and 2GB Jazz drive) and even backup tapes (LTO-5, 6, and now 7) as they all were products that required heavy investments and had such little returns they nearly wiped out their makers. Seagate is going to continue to research into bigger drives and eventually fall into bankuptcy, while WD gets into the SSD field (their purchase of Sandisk and HGST show this) and manages to survive. They'd be better off spending research dollars on SSD technology.stephenbrooks - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
Except it's not just one manufacturer, because Seagate will be the _2nd_ manufacturer to produce a 12TB HDD, after Western Digital (as it says in the article).Michael Bay - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
I sure hope they manage to hold on just enough to give me one or two of those 20 TB models!And they`ve bought some SSD expertise too.
emn13 - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
zipdrives aren't a great analogy, because zip drives (as a storage medium with greater capacity than floppies) had multiple plausible competitors - ironically HDDs (with the internet) were one of them.Modern large HDDs aren't a great niche, but I don't see the alternatives either. SSDs are much more expensive and likely to stay so for a while - so what else are you going to use for bulk storage? Tapes?
Sure, eventually SSDs may drop to competitive prices, but by comparison zip drives where a much trickier proposition: the alternatives were cheaper (per storage), although they did require a change in habits.
Heck, with an external bay you could use plain old 2.5" drives as kind of zipdrive today.
dgingeri - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
What's needed for bulk storage these days? We have many cloud storage providers for documents, from Dropbox to OneDrive. Music and movies are now typically watched through streaming services, so there's no need for huge repositories for media files. Nearly all programs and drivers are immediately downloadable, so there's no need to go store those anymore. What's left? What do we need to store anymore?LordanSS - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
Those that rely only on the Internet for such things suffer heavily when their connection fails.Absurd majority of the whole world does not have reliable internet services. HDDs are not going away anytime soon.
Concillian - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
Umm... you ask what's needed for bulk storage these days, then literally rattle off half a dozen applications that require huge quantities of large capacity and high reliability HDDs.End users may not be the primary customers for huge capacity HDDs, but as long as places like Dropbox and Netflix exist, and HDDs are lower total cost of ownership than SSDs, there will be plenty of demand for high capacity HDDs.
dgingeri - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
Big business is moving to flash storage instead of hard drives for performance reasons. With some storage situations, such as user documents, the larger the repository, the more efficient deduplication can be, and thus cheaper and faster storage is through systems with lots of memory and flash and far less HD storage. Even with Netflix and Hulu, flash storage is far better because they can serve more systems from the same storage. A single movie in flash storage can be served out to a hundred people at once, while ten sets of HD RAIDs would be needed to serve the same customers, simply because of the IOPS. Then take corporate backups to the "cloud". Flash storage is much better for that, in combination with deduplication, as the performance is much better over the internet. Trying to use rotational storage for cloud backups increases the latency far too much, and the backups get horrible performance, leaving the overnight backup taking several hours into the work day. Flash comes out cheaper, across the board.HD storage is going down, fast. It just isn't fast enough anymore.
ddriver - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
For porn, when the internet is off.close - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
Even if relying on an internet connection wasn't bad (it is) where do you think your data sits when it's "in the cloud"? Well I can tell you it's not in an actual cloud :). It's on HDDs like these because "the cloud" needs to store as much data in as little (physical) space as possible to save costs.That's why these offerings come first in Enterprise models (https://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrasta... and then trickle down in the consumer space as it gets cheaper.
Plenty of people need to store TBs of audio/video data or virtual machines just to give a few examples. It's not only a matter of privacy but until the internet link is as fast and reliable as a SATA cable the two solutions will simply complement each other.
dgingeri - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
I'm well aware that "cloud" is just another term for "someone else's" redundant storage or computer system. However, most cloud storage these days is moving to flash, either over SAS, FCoE, or iSCSI, and is set to duplicate across the internet to other systems. Rotational storage for that use is just not fast enough in IOPS to work well enough.I know this because I used to work for a storage company, Quantum. Their business is lagging badly. the only thing keeping them going at this point is government contracts, where it takes an act of Congress to make any changes.
Rotational storage for internet reasons is dying faster than home user storage. Even for home users, the most used is flash drives, and they're getting big enough that people don't need the internal storage for most things.
Rotational storage is dying. Let it die.
close - Wednesday, February 1, 2017 - link
You have a terribly odd reasoning for a person claiming to have worked in the field. Then again you don't say what you were doing there so... First of all you completely ignore the cost per GB for all flash storage, then you say that the technology should die because it's not the best at everything anymore.If all storage was flash you wouldn't afford your current cloud storage. And if only the products that are best at everything would be allowed to "live" I don't even know where you'd be... Not here anyway.
Rotational storage doesn't work "well enough"? For who? For what? Maybe you should have worked for an argumentation company. It may not have more than a few years ahead of it but as long as it offers more GBs for the same buck it will chug along just fine.
Someone should tell Ford, GM, or Toyota to roll over and die because Ferrari makes faster cars. I know because I worked in a car dealership...
wumpus - Sunday, February 5, 2017 - link
The Ferrari comparison isn't that far off: at least consumer flash runs 10x more per $/gig than rotational media. I'd understand if tape was eating rotational media from below (can anybody undercut Amazon for backup using tape? Is anybody, it should be possible?), but I'm not seeing it.If anything, I'd assume that such companies would be buying rotational media for backups (except for organizations with hard rules about "hard drives are not backup, use punch cards instead".
It would be extremely odd if Moore's law (for silicon) died almost identically with the inability of magnetic media to continue to scale, but that appears to be happening. It might just be that flash has eaten enough of rotational media's lunch that they can't afford the huge R&D costs to keep going. Remember, while flash isn't eating all of rust's lunch, it certainly is eating the most profitable.
close - Monday, February 13, 2017 - link
Tape is a great technology... until you have to restore a backup and the time you lose restoring from tape costs a lot more than backing up to disk. And then you give backup to disk a chance :).Flash is far from cheap enough to use anywhere else but performance critical applications and caching.
marvdmartian - Thursday, February 2, 2017 - link
Really, though, the only benefit to a hard drive, over an SSD, currently, is $$/GB. When you see 1TB SSD's going on sale for ~$250 (meaning, ~$0.25/GB, before formatting, of course), then realize that even 20 years ago, hard drives had barely (or not quite yet) reached $1/GB, it's nothing more than a matter of time, before larger capacity will be the ONLY benefit of an HDD over an SSD.My first home-built rig, in late 2001, had a WD 80GB "Black" hard drive, that I paid $80 for, on sale. What a steal!!
Laststop311 - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
I could see eventual need to move from 4TB drives in the NAS with 4k UHD BD images. Currently everything fits in a 6 disk raid 5. But with 4k blu ray disc image double the size and as movies i want increase in number I could see moving to 10-12TB.valinor89 - Monday, January 30, 2017 - link
I just noticed I actually have less data space now than I had 5 years ago since I got 200MB simetric fiber...I still download huge files, but I don't keep them. I know I am not a syvarite 4k BR Movie packrat but I doubt I will need more than a couple TB of storage. Including an SSD for my SO and games in my PC and another 2 for important files offline backup.
Also, if anything HDDs have not gone down in price as a 5 year interval would suggest.
Laststop311 - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
I rip all my blu rays as a disk image file and that's the only time they come out of the case. Preserves them and keeps them in tip top shape. Yeah I buy them all and rip them all myself I promise ;), I have watched people shift more and more to online cloud streaming of their movies and such and I don't care what it is streaming does not provide the same bit rate as an actual blu ray disc when watching the film and you can see the extra banding and blockiness and poor low light detail when streaming, especially from my Panasonic plasma 65 inch st60 which has excellent black levels which really exposes the poor black detail when streaming.Trust me doing this just eats up space no problem and these are only regular 50GB blu ray discs. 20 movies per TB is really not a ton of space. I've got over 250 blu ray disc images in my library. Then I also have over 5TB of FLAC audio some 24 bit 96khz flac.
Changing over all these bluray to 4k will probably make me need to expand to 10TB drives in 6 bay NAS most likely 12TB to give myself breathing room as RAID 5 makes you lose 1 disk in capacity. Or I could get a higher bay count system. Depends how big of a premium they ask for these larger drives,
doggface - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
Sad to hear that the price per GB doesn't appear to be dropping significantly.creed3020 - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
Yeah that's my greatest concern. I still remember buying 3TB drives in 2010-2011 for $99 and they're only just getting back around to that pricing now. I really want to be purchasing 4TB and up these days but the prices just aren't falling. New products come in at a the top of the range and then those prices are just higher and higher.Guspaz - Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - link
I'll settle for reasonably priced 8TB drives. The cost of magnetic storage hasn't really changed for at least half a decade.HollyDOL - Wednesday, February 1, 2017 - link
I wonder how is the error rate. While the capacities increase, error rate doesn't really go down much... so the failure likehood increases :-/Anato - Wednesday, February 1, 2017 - link
Bought 3* 2TB drives before 2011 floods for 75$ each, and now, 6 years later, I could by 1 6TB drive, but price is the same. These consolidations like WDs merge with HGST and others has killed competition.