Solid-state drive (SSD) costs per gigabyte (GB) dropped during the last two quarters – for the reason that starting of September 2024 – whereas SAS hard disk drive (HDD) costs elevated over the identical interval.
Flash drive costs (MLC, TLC and QLC) fell from a median of $0.085/GB to only below $0.079/GB. That’s a 7% lower.
On the identical time, SAS spinning disk costs per gigabyte rose from $0.041 to $0.049, an increase of 18%. The explanation isn’t obvious, however there was a flurry of high-capacity HDD drive launches in 2024, together with Western Digital’s 32TB (terabyte) shingled drive and Toshiba’s 24TB and 28TB items.
Previous to the current two quarters, flash drive costs had fallen within the first three quarters of 2024 to $0.085/GB. That was a slide of simply above 10% since April and adopted price-per-gigabyte highs earlier within the 12 months.
Flash costs hit a current ceiling in late 2023 and the early months of 2024 when drive makers slowed manufacturing in an try to lift costs and enhance profitability. SSD costs per gigabyte reached a median of $0.095 by April 2024, which was an increase of 26.67% since autumn 2023.
Many on the time believed SSD costs would obtain even higher highs in 2024, however whereas manufacturing elevated, buyer demand didn’t, and costs decreased.
In the meantime, common spinning disk (SAS and SATA) laborious drive costs have hardly moved, with an increase since September 2024 from $0.039 to $0.041 now. That, nevertheless, masks the 18% improve in SAS drive costs over the identical interval.
The figures right here consequence from unique evaluation by Laptop Weekly that gathers drive costs weekly from Amazon.com which can be aggregated by Diskprices.com (see graph). Since March 2023, greater than 65,000 drive costs and specs have been amassed, with averages calculated each week for TLC, QLC and MLC/unspecified flash drives, in addition to SAS and SATA spinning disk.
The evaluation makes use of Diskprices.com’s collation of latest drive costs that it takes from Amazon.com, with a median of greater than 500 disk costs and specs processed every week. Knowledge is then filtered by flash and spinning disk sort and common value per gigabyte calculated for every week.
Whereas the evaluation is predicated on Amazon.com costs, that are aimed toward shoppers and SME prospects, the quantity of information gathered helps to point out developments in drive pricing. We use it right here as a proxy for drive costs due to the absence of value knowledge from enterprise drive and storage array makers.
Worth per gigabyte is a serious consideration for purchasers, however whole value of possession over a drive’s lifecycle can be necessary, with buy value, vitality utilization and upkeep prices key amongst them.
Knowledge gathered covers drives that vary in capability from lower than 1TB as much as 26TB for HDDs and as much as 12TB for SSDs, with a median of three.8TB per drive provided on the market.
SSD prices extra per drive to purchase than spinning disk, however upkeep prices are sometimes decrease. Cloud storage supplier Backblaze – which publishes reliability figures for the 300,000-plus drives in its property – discovered its SSD annual failure price (AFR) to be 0.9% in mid-2023. There’s been no SSD AFR stats for SSDs from Backblaze since, however for HDDs the determine for 2024, reported in February 2025, was 1.57%.
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Sourcing from TechTarget.com & computerweekly.com
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