Disk Prices
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Disk Prices
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Price Comparison
The post shares a website (diskprices.com) that compares prices of various disk drives, sparking discussions on disk pricing trends, storage costs, and alternative storage solutions.
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Oct 14, 2025 at 10:02 PM EDT
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The one I bought literally this month : $169.
Same WD drive from gHD.
https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...
People had better get used to the economic reality of no longer being the economic superpower of the world.
Basically inflation measures against itself at an earlier time, devaluation measures against other currencies at the same moment. So it both describes the fact that the currency in question is using purchasing power, measured from different points of view.
But I'm not knowledgeable on the topic, I just mentally stumbled a little when reading this thread which seemingly (to my interpretation of what was written) made them sound like different concepts entirely.
Might have had some interesting effects on the economy if we didn't simultaneously have tariffs making it so that 1) it's hard to buy the machinery to increase US industrial capacity, and 2) nobody wants to invest in the US economy because tariffs cause economic slowdowns.
This is especially painful for what I want to buy a ton of right now, RAM. I find all these year old posts with people talking about DDR4 at $0.70/GB, and it's twice that now.
I don't know why, but the obvious explanations are a combination of the dollar devaluation and tariffs. Both of these are ongoing, so strap in for even higher prices soon, I guess?
Following that, a regional sales manager for Micron pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in 2003, and then in 2004, Infineon also pled guilty. Hynix Semiconductor took their turn in 2005 and plead guilty and paid a fine. 2005 Samsung pled guilty in connection with the cartel and paid a fine.
Next up in 2006, Sun Woo Lee, the Senior Manager of DRAM at Samsung Electronics, entered into a plea bargain for price fixing. This barely seems to have slowed down his career, however, as after 8 months in prison he was promoted to President of Samsung Germany in 2009, and then President of Samsung Europe in 2014.
Unfortunately for the DRAM cartel, in 2010 the EU joined the party and fined everyone for what they did in 2002. Micron snitched and did not get fined though.
In 2018, Samsung, Hynix, and Micron got new charges of price fixing levied at them. In Jan 2018, prices of DRAM were triple their 2016 low.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
Yeah I have no idea why they could be high.
whats the difference? You see industry leaders getting away with it, so you do it as well.
Actually slowly rising since about 2011, induced by shortages (of critical components) due to flooding in Thailand (Seagate/WD), some supplier of so called 'sliders', motors (Nidec) restructuring/mergers of corporations like Showa Denko/Resonac, leading to fears that the supply of thin films for the platters goes bust, some other supplier of platters itself goes bust, and on and on. Not to forget sarscovidious² hick-ups of all sorts of supply-chains. Then came AI, and the datacenter boom. Endless 'opportunities' loom...
Same. Bought 6 hgst 10TB @ $84/ea in mid Dec. By New Year's they were $110 and in short supply.
I would love to hear if anyone has any similar purely functional and utilitarian site suggestions
Like Disk Prices at first glance it's a bit overwhelming but after a while it becomes super crisp to deal with.
It seems like they haven’t really kept pace at all. Obviously cloud providers have many costs other than disks, but I’m a bit disappointed by how much more expensive it is.
OK, it's just an "L" layed on it's side...
[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-...
Overall glacier is only really suited for backups, and I don't need that much durability for a single backup. And even if durability is a big deal, I can get there cheaper. Especially using a realistic expected life cycle and not the warranty period.
Like you, I also considered the implications of mixing TOTP into KeePass, but eventually landed on going all-in on the one database. It does mean raising the bar for keeping it secure, but it was already very high to begin with.
One thing I have considered is combining this all-in-one approach with an additional keyfile, which I could then share OOB to devices, effectively adding a second factor. I like the idea of using Yubikey or similar, but the fear of locking myself out is too great.
https://www.proteinmath.app/
The best value HD on that list, among ones I'd want to buy for NAS use, is a Seagate 28TB for $480. An LTO-9 tape is 45TB for $90. I found a USB-C (because why not) LTO-9 drive for $6,499.
The crossover price is at 448TB, where the total cost of 16 HD drives is $7,680, but tape drive + 10 tapes is "only" $7,399.
Huh. That's a lot lower than I would've expected. That's a very manageable price for the kind of business that wants someone to take a backup offsite nightly, and is probably a whole awful lot more robust for that kind of regular transportation.
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ts4500-tape-library?topic=cartri...
Automated tape libraries add a few grand to the total, but you get the added benefit of not having to change tapes daily.
My only concern is that tape speeds are stagnating around a terabyte per hour, while you can somewhat parallelize jobs with multi-drive libraries, it increases cost and complexity significantly.
I picked a random Seagate 8TB drive that the site lists as costing $103. It's GBP 145 in the UK (~EUR 166) and as much as EUR 200 in my Eastern Europe country!
I'm blaming tariffs and VAT. The EU sucks.
I, on the other hand, I love the EU. In spite of the fact that many products are sold for a lower price in the American market (not just electronics, also cars and others). I imagine it's even worse in the Australian market.
But, in the grand scheme of things, I can live with that, with free education and healthcare, among others.
That is not a EU-wide thing. If you are getting some of it in your country, enjoy it while it lasts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care_by_count...
But what kills me is when buying stuff from the US and paying whatever import taxes are required on top of shipping, and VAT on top of all that, you still end up cheaper.
Taking GP's example, shipping, taxes on the product + shipping won't end up more than doubling the initial price.
Hell, things are so ridiculous that a while ago I bought an Italian-made[0] tripod and gear head from BH in NY. Had it shipped by UPS (large and heavy parcel, so not cheap), paid taxes on the complete price, and it was still way cheaper than buying locally from France.
--
[0] It pretends to be actually made in Italy, not only an Italian brand off-shoring production to Asia.
Your points are correct, but that's a general rebuff against photios' points: nothing is imposed by the EU itself; everything comes from the countries themselves, even if they all do the same thing.
However, I think photios' point was rather that EU countries tend to tax things to hell and back, even if the countries arrived at the same situation by their own means, rather than it being a general EU directive. dvfjsdhgfv's comment is the same: all the positive things in that comment come from the countries themselves; they're not EU directives, either.
Either the EU is doing something wrong or the UK is doing something right or both.
Does anybody remember the name?
Found it, it is:
https://www.productchart.com/ssd_drives/
It would be nice to have an export to csv option for the results of a given search. I saw that the HTML includes all models of devices rather than just what's being displayed. Automating the output to a file would be a nice-to-have feature.
However, I discovered that the table was formatted well enough that I was able to copy the results directly into a spreadsheet. The "Price per TB" header and the "Price" header were flipped, so I corrected them. But this means that I don't trust the spreadsheet to be without other errors (especially as some cells in the web page were blank or empty). If I see something in spreadsheet that grabs my interest, I'm going to assume that it's wrong until I confirm that it's right, but that's not a big deal if errors are few. Time will tell.
Thanks again! This is awesome, plus so minimal and lightweight. I love it.
As described in this post:
https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/
... it is distressingly common for Amazon sellers to resell used and/or refurbished drives as brand new.
We generally source drives in much larger quantities from specific suppliers we have relationships with.
However, once in a while we are forced to look at what can be quickly or easily sourced from Amazon and it is only with the utmost caution that we do so.
As can be seen in the link above, sometimes our proofing process reveals bad actors.
Works for an amazingly large set of products!
Pretty expensive for anything semi-recent (as in, past 6 years, 20TB+). what happened?
Diskprices.com makes $5k/month with affiliate marketing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066480 - Jan 2024 (118 comments)
Disk Prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377826 - Oct 2022 (65 comments)
Disk Prices on Amazon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156292 - Jan 2020 (222 comments)