Cloud storage specialist Backblaze expects the downward trend in HDD prices to continue. That might sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy, but Backblaze doesn’t just look at well-known HDD price trends. The company expects that consumers will be able to purchase his storage space at a rate of $0.01 per GB by 2025, an unprecedented rate. Even if only slightly, that’s the story According to Backblaze’s Andy Klein, the company’s Principle Storage Cloud Storyteller. Over his lifetime he has purchased 253,500 of his HDDs, and his Backblaze certainly has numbers to spin the story.
Andy Klein analyzed HDD purchases during Backblaze’s operating period, starting in 2009. At the time, Backblaze’s HDD purchases averaged a storage cost of about $0.114/GB (for capacities of 1TB to 2TB per HDD). By 2017, with the advent of 8 TB HDD, its cost had dropped by 73% to $0.03/GB. Thanks to high-density HDDs in the previous few years, culminating in the company’s current acquisition of 16 TB HDDs, Backblaze reached his $0.014/GB, making the density/dollar equation nearly doubled.
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Klein also mentioned how higher HDD densities typically drive down prices. From 12 TB to 14 TB, and from 14 TB to 16 TB, new high-capacity HDDs are typically introduced at higher prices than their predecessors. Ultimately, however, high-density manufacturing technology allows us to lower the minimum price of new products.
Overall, the HDD $/GB formula has dropped by 87.4% since 2009, even after accounting for the 2011 Taiwan floods’ “fluctuations” twice a year, but most of that drop has occurred since 2017. doing. From 2017 to today, the cost of HDD storage density has decreased by 56.36% despite the impact of the crisis across specific HDD farming cryptocurrencies and COVID-19 components.
According to Klein, the increasing storage density of 22 TB and 24 TB HDDs is expected to push HDD storage prices to the legendary $0.01/GB by 2025. This means that a consumer can buy his one such HDD in 2025. This currently has more storage space than the average user would occupy in his two lifetimes (disclaimer: at current rates!), at $220 or $240. That’s…relatively, not many.
HDDs may have been displaced as the primary storage medium due to their relatively slow performance and added material costs compared to NAND-based SSDs, but their higher performance has made them a cold storage medium. or still serve its purpose for non-critical storage requirements. Storage density compared to SSD. It’s easy to see why. The only 22 TB HDD available on Amazon, The 22TB Western Digital Purple Pro is currently priced at $540 (opens in new tab) (Down from an MSRP of $599).
Admittedly, these are the worst terms for 22 TB HDD pricing. This is the latest highest capacity available (remember the premium price mentioned above) and there is only one model available. Still, the $540 22 TB price is about $0.0245 per GB. That’s far better than the $0.0745/GB achieved by the best pick budget NVMe SSD, the Crucial P5 Plus. Even factoring in all the benefits of that particular SSD (like its current discounted price of $149.99), its $/GB formula is about 200% higher than Western Digital’s 22TB HDD. And you can certainly expect Solidigm’s 61TB SSD to claim a much higher $/GB than that.
