NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
HDD price
Hi all,
slightly OT conversation here.
I purchased 2xWD RED 4TB HDDs last summer for my Pro 6. The idea was to add another 4TB HDD once the price had fallen.
I have been monitoring the prices, those HDDs actually went up over the winter and now they're back to what they were last summer. How is that possible? 12 months and the price hasn't dropped a penny?
Does anybody know What the forecast for the HDD industry is?
I've just found this: is the era of cheap storage over?
http://www.infostor.com/storage-management/is-the-era-of-cheap-disk-storage-over-1.html
Thanks
16 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
Here's another: http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm
ryanrk posted live pricing of drives on the HCL last May (Amazon and Newegg): https://community.netgear.com/t5/ReadyNAS-Hardware-Compatibility/self-promotion-Harddrive-Price-comparison-site/td-p/961998
A direct link to his site is: http://goobam.com/internaldrives
To the main question: Historically the introduction of new larger capacity drives drives down prices of the smaller capacities already on the market. We appear to be at the limits of what perpendicular recording (PMR) can do. SMR is a niche, so it won't go mainstream. HAMR is the next disk technology, it should show up in a year or two.
It's clear that enterprises and cloud providers will continue to need more and more capacity. Apart from home NAS, end users might not - consider cloud services (netflix), the shift away from PCs, the increased interest in SSD. It's hard to guess how that will impact pricing. But enterprises tend to buy in bulk, so there might be even more of a focus on volume discounts, slowing price drops in retail.
Price per TB seems to me to be where it was several years ago ( before the supply issues) for the drive size that is cheapest per TB and that seems to be 3-4 TB at the moment.
I don't think I would expect to see falls in price/TB of 4 TB drives until we see more 6 and 8 TB drives available. Of course then many users won't want the lower capacity 4TB drives any more.
Supply and demand.
australia does not produce hard drives
the downward of AUD would push up import prices
Thanks for your contribution.
I did not realise we had reached the maximum storage capacity of perpendicular recording.
Oh well, this explains why the 4TB HDDs have been holding their price for a while.
I have plenty of empty bays on my NAS, I currently have 2x4TB. Would you buy a 5 or 6TB HDD for future expansion (can I use the extra space if I factory reset the unit?) or would you stay on 4TB confident that by the time the NAS is full, something new has come up on the market?
Thanks
Antonio
OS 4 has two expansion limits - a volume cannot expand over 16 TiB, and it cannot grow more than 8 TiB larger than its starting point. You cannot install mixed disk sizes with a total volume > 16 TiB, because the xraid2 won't vertically expand when it creates the initial volume.
If you are needing more space now, I'd get another 4 TB drive - that will double your volume size, and is cheaper (per gigabyte) then the larger disks right now.
Later on (when you are faced with a factory reset anyway) you can perhaps migrate to OS6 - which doesn't have those expansion limits.
Thanks Stephen,
Sounds good.
I tried OS6 in the past and I felt it was a little young. As you say by the time I need extra space - and I'm faced with a factory reset anyway - I may want to move to OS6 and install whatever the market offers in the future.
Thanks for your advice as usual.
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
