Why have SSD prices fallen so low? +Are you still buying HDDs?

[WolframaticAlpha]

I was browsing HDDs for my PC and I was shocked how low SSD prices had fallen. For the same prices that I paid for 500 gig sticks 3 years ago, I can now buy 2TB sticks. My current setup is a mix of HDDs(for documents and other things) and SSDs(for programs and OS) but now I have been thinking of migrating completely to a pure NVMe system. The prices are absurdly low and HDD prices haven't budged that much.

 

Do you think I should wait a bit more and see prices go down even more?  How many of you have sworn off spinning rust completely for non archival/data hoarding stuff?

[filpo]

3 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Do you think I should wait a bit more and see prices go down even more?

they'll defo go down more. Not by as much in the last 6 months tho

 

3 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

How many of you have sworn off spinning rust completely for non archival/data hoarding stuff?

me, never was and never will 

SSD Prices Have Fallen 15 to 30 Percent Since January | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

And this was only in March

[Ottoman420]

SSDs are great but when you need 3-4TB and above spinning metal wins.

 

Bought a 10tb HDD not long ago

 

[johnno23]

We are in a period where older stock Gen 3s are being cleared as are many Gen 4s and at the same time the newer Gen 5s are only useful to those that own the latest Gen 5 PCI capable motherboards to gain the speed benefits.

If you are wanting to replace HDDs just grab some Gen 3s as the cost is so low but the speed increase over a mechanical drive is just a crazy good upgrade right now.

[porina]

I have to wonder if SSD pricing is working in a similar way to ram pricing, in that there are cycles of over and under supply causing pricing to fluctuate accordingly. While the long term trend will be a reduction, I have to wonder if we're in a local minima combined with global economic conditions.

 

I was very tempted by some offers on over the sales of recent days, but reflecting on it, I don't really need more SSD storage at the moment. There may or may not be cheaper or faster drives when I really do need it, so I'm gambling on that.

 

Hard disks are a kinda separate category, even if both fall under storage in general. HDs are more for bulk storage, and they're still cheaper than SSDs in that area. Without overly min-maxing it, an 8TB Seagate works out around £15/TB. The cheapest SSDs I've seen are Crucial 2TB models >£30/TB, so that's still over double that of a HD.

 

Still, the gap feels closer than ever. If you don't need big storage, you could go solid state only for a manageable price premium.

[PDifolco]

Still using a 4TB HDD for archives but thinking of replacing it with a 4TB NVme indeed, can get one for less than 200EUR (and bought my HDD for 130 or so 3 years ago...)

HDD only still makes sense if you need 10TB+ of storage

 

[Ottoman420]

2 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Still using a 4TB HDD for archives but thinking of replacing it with a 4TB NVme indeed, can get one for less than 200EUR (and bought my HDD for 130 or so 3 years ago...)

 

 

Agreed but also the ammount of use the drive is going to have, If you are always writing and reading off that 4tb NVME how safe is the data on it after 5 years of 24/7 activity? Compared to HDD

[filpo]

8 minutes ago, porina said:

I have to wonder if SSD pricing is working in a similar way to ram pricing, in that there are cycles of over and under supply causing pricing to fluctuate accordingly. While the long term trend will be a reduction, I have to wonder if we're in a local minima combined with global economic conditions.

I mean they're essentially the same things apart from speed and storage space (but they're still chips for storage on a PCB)

 

8 minutes ago, porina said:

I was very tempted by some offers on over the sales of recent days, but reflecting on it, I don't really need more SSD storage at the moment. There may or may not be cheaper or faster drives when I really do need it, so I'm gambling on that.

they're still gonna go down tho, probably not by much but a bit at least

Steve touched on it in his last video on Hardware Unboxed

 

1 minute ago, Ottoman420 said:

Agreed but also the ammount of use the drive is going to have, If you are always writing and reading off that 4tb NVME how safe is the data on it after 5 years of 24/7 activity? Compared to HDD

Are you talking about reliability? SSD's are much better than HDD's for reliability

[Ottoman420]

1 minute ago, filpo said:

Are you talking about reliability? SSD's are much better than HDD's for reliability

I thought these NVMEs & SSDs had a read write limit of 10,000/100,000 cycles or whatever it is.

[tkitch]

on a normal desktop, there's no need for HDDs anymore, and hasn't been for some time.

 

Last year, however, I did buy 60TB of HDDs to populate my NAS.  Ain't gonna look back.

[PDifolco]

2 minutes ago, Ottoman420 said:

Agreed but also the ammount of use the drive is going to have, If you are always writing and reading off that 4tb NVME how safe is the data on it after 5 years of 24/7 activity? Compared to HDD

Much better on a NVme

My 0.5TB Sabrent Rocket 4 boot drive is 4 years old and still 95% good, my SN850X game drive is 2y old and 98% good, so I expect my drives to outlive me now that I'm near 60 yo 

HDD can live 5-10yrs but many fail even before that, thing is if you need large storage you also usually RAID and backup them

 

[tkitch]

Just now, Ottoman420 said:

I thought these NVMEs & SSDs had a read write limit of 10,000/100,000 cycles or whatever it is.

iish?

 

NAND does have a "lifespan" but it tends to be more graceful about death than HDDs, where "Oops.  No more data."  

 

You can also easily check SSD Lifespans with CrystalDiskInfo

[filpo]

2 minutes ago, Ottoman420 said:

I thought these NVMEs & SSDs had a read write limit of 10,000/100,000 cycles or whatever it is.

That's right but SSD's can work in many different environments hot or cold, stressful or not. They're also much faster and indefinitely more reliable. In terms of raw data and life cycles, yes HDD's are better

 

But then you have more of a chance to lose your data so you need to set up a raid which will mean two of the same HDD which mean essentially the same cost as an SSD

 

Also that's still a lot of cycles

[porina]

4 minutes ago, filpo said:

I mean they're essentially the same things apart from speed and storage space (but they're still chips for storage on a PCB)

Yes and no. I guess the ram players are also flash players. The strategy is basically to out-sell your competitors hence the continuing cycles of over and under supply. Also why there are no real smaller players left. If we assume both have such a cycle, I haven't looked if they follow the same cycle or could there be an offset?

 

4 minutes ago, filpo said:

they're still gonna go down tho, probably not by much but a bit at least

Again, longer term that'll probably be the trend, but shorter term fluctuations will happen. I do feel we're in a particular low right now, and there may be some rebound  upwards in coming months before more distant future drops.

 

4 minutes ago, filpo said:

Steve touched on it in his last video on Hardware Unboxed

I haven't watched their content in a long time as they frankly haven't got a clue how the world works.

 

4 minutes ago, filpo said:

Are you talking about reliability? SSD's are much better than HDD's for reliability

For long term storage I'm less sure about SSDs. I've experienced suspected cases of bit rot on low class SSDs on the timescale of a year or so. We're talking about Kingston A400, WD Green types here, so still big name branded. Doing a surface read will come up with errors, yet SMART reports nothing is wrong. Flash levels shift over time if not refreshed now and then. I guess the same could be said of magnetic storage too. Still, I've had two SSDs die from suspected controller problems, plus more with suspected bit rot. HDs can grow bad sectors or suffer other mechanical malfunction. I couldn't trust either to be reliable by itself without additional redundancy measures.

[filpo]

10 minutes ago, porina said:

I haven't looked if they follow the same cycle or could there be an offset?

Over the past 10 months (basically since last summer) it seemed to be like that. DDR4 and DDR5 as well as nand prices have gone down seemingly proportional

11 minutes ago, porina said:

Still, I've had two SSDs die from suspected controller problems, plus more with suspected bit rot. HDs can grow bad sectors or suffer other mechanical malfunction. I couldn't trust either to be reliable by itself without additional redundancy measures.

There’ll always be anomalies 

 

11 minutes ago, porina said:

Kingston A400

I bought this drive when it was on a deal in media world last year and for 70 euros (1tb model) it looked like a good deal (I only had a 500gb crucial p5 plus at the time)

its treated me well as bulk storage and even though it’s dramless (I’m pretty sure) it’s not actually terrible for a game drive. Then again, it’s not the best ssd

[porina]

1 minute ago, filpo said:

There’ll always be anomalies 

I wouldn't treat failures as anomalies. It's normal, just that they're rare enough it may feel that way if you're only looking at one or two devices. If you're looking at thousands, they will happen.

[Mark Kaine]

So what does a good 8TB SSD cost now?

 

if its more than 200 us, i don't think you know what you're talking about  = )

[Mark Kaine]

8 minutes ago, filpo said:

Then again, it’s not the best ssd

its ok, *as long it works* <--- thats the problem, also keep in mind they use parts that wildly differ in quality between batches, so you might get lucky, you might not... its one of the worst ssds ever simply and there's a reason its so cheap.

[Mark Kaine]

42 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Still using a 4TB HDD for archives but thinking of replacing it with a 4TB NVme indeed, can get one for less than 200EUR (and bought my HDD for 130 or so 3 years ago...)

HDD only still makes sense if you need 10TB+ of storage

 

i mean i get it not everyone needs a lot of storage,  but if you do ssds financially make zero sense, got a wd black 8tb for 130 euros last year, and yes, even though its external it can play games just fine (i use it mostly to store Shadowplay recordings however) 

[Ottoman420]

Dancing in the rain

[PDifolco]

9 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

i mean i get it not everyone needs a lot of storage,  but if you do ssds financially make zero sense, got a wd black 8tb for 130 euros last year, and yes, even though its external it can play games just fine (i use it mostly to store Shadowplay recordings however) 

Won't ever use an external big HDD for gaming, unless you're playing thousands of small games you need faster load times, a new AAA games (100GB+) will take ages to load on a HDD

Personally I've bought an external Crucial X8 SSD, USB-C, speed 1GB/sec, that's good enough. I got the  2TB model but the 4TB is now 250ish...

 

 

[WolframaticAlpha]

38 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

So what does a good 8TB SSD cost now?

 

if its more than 200 us, i don't think you know what you're talking about  = )

I should be clearer. I meant average storage people have on their daily PCs (ie, less than 4tb) for storing documents, programs, project files etc. Sure, HDDs are still irreplaceable if you are hoarding "linux ISOs"

 

29 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

(i use it mostly to store Shadowplay recordings however) 

>How many of you have sworn off spinning rust completely for non archival/data hoarding stuff?

1 hour ago, porina said:

Hard disks are a kinda separate category, even if both fall under storage in general. HDs are more for bulk storage, and they're still cheaper than SSDs in that area. Without overly min-maxing it, an 8TB Seagate works out around £15/TB. The cheapest SSDs I've seen are Crucial 2TB models >£30/TB, so that's still over double that of a HD.

Price per GB is still roughly 2x but has fallen quite substantially. Just 2-3 years ago, the pricing would be closer to 5x of normal HDD storage.

43 minutes ago, filpo said:

DDR4 and DDR5 as well as nand prices have gone down seemingly proportional

RAM is stupid cheap too. I can't believe that we had actual RAM shortages a few years ago. The only components that might have gone up are PSUs and GPUs. The PSUs mostly because 850W went from being overkill to required. And GPUs because, well, price gouging almost.

 

1 hour ago, filpo said:

Steve touched on it in his last video on Hardware Unboxed

True, my pc went from almost appreciating(I upgraded most of it in prepandemic 2020) to depreciating so hard. But great time to get into the space. Everything, except GPUs(which are sanely priced used at least) is so cheap and the CPUs especially are so good(went from 4/8 to 16/24 threads around 400 in 4-5 years).

1 hour ago, johnno23 said:

We are in a period where older stock Gen 3s are being cleared as are many Gen 4s and at the same time the newer Gen 5s

Are gen4/5 so much better or is it just for that youtube niche where everyone is editing 4k videos? I haven't been bottlenecked by my SSD(970 evo), even when I am punishing it with massive intellij projects.

[porina]

4 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Price per GB is still roughly 2x but has fallen quite substantially. Just 2-3 years ago, the pricing would be closer to 5x of normal HDD storage.

I kinda agree with you, if feels like SSD pricing is dropping faster than HD pricing.

 

Looking at my Amazon history, I bought a Crucial BX500 1TB for £50 in December 2019. The only record I have of HDs around that time were Toshiba 8TB enterprise drives which were £180 a pop in October, or £45/TB. Even if you assume cheapest consumer tier drives were half that cost/capacity, that would have put ball park 2x. Ok, that's only a snapshot of one point in time, and not necessarily the cheapest available at the time either. I think it may be that higher end and/or bigger capacity SSDs are dropping fastest, whereas the cheaper ones are not, so that skews the perspective.

 

14 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Are gen4/5 so much better or is it just for that youtube niche where everyone is editing 4k videos? I haven't been bottlenecked by my SSD, even when I am punishing it with massive intellij projects.

IMO I'd rather have a high end 3.0 drive than a budget 4.0 drive, as it really helps with write responsiveness. However the affordable pricing of decent 4.0 drives makes me not want to take the small saving possible from an older 3.0 drive. My main desktop can't even support 4.0!

[johnno23]

In games once the game has actually loaded you have no real benefit. Even LTT did a blind test with the slower Sata SSD and the fastest M.2 available at the time and no one could see the difference.

The Gen 5 SSDs might become more useful in the future when the ability to instantly load a saved game state as is done on the consoles has finally been fully implemented on the PC and outside of businesses moving huge amounts of data around that extra speed is pretty much redundant for 99% of home PCs right now.

For myself personally I dont see myself ever using a Gen 5 as a boot drive as the M.2 slot is covered by the GPU and those SSDs get dammed hot. So personally I have no intention right now of moving past Gen 4.

I have a couple of the Gen4 corsair force 600s in my rig but the included M.2 covers that came with the X570 motherboard are not good enough to keep the temps down so I have to use the included Corsair heatsink so a Gen 5 in the M.2 slot closest to the CPU with a heat sink will not let me use the 1st PCI slot which is x 16. it simply would not fit.

I also have 2 x 2TB Gen 3 SSDs and use them for my steam libraries...no problems an no issues with the speed. I have also just ordered 2 more of them and will just keep them in the packaging for when I might need them in the future. Pricing is just too good right now to pass up.

 

[tkitch]

11 minutes ago, porina said:

I kinda agree with you, if feels like SSD pricing is dropping faster than HD pricing.

It does, for a very simple reason:

 

There's a lot more mechanical construction that goes into building a HDD than a SSD.  There's a floor for the minimum cost of a HDD, and it's much higher than the floor cost for a tiny pinky sized PCB with 4 small chips soldered onto it.