I've noticed refurbished HDD prices creeping up recently. I used to grab 10TB drives from goharddrive for around $80, but they’ve been out of stock for months. Now most other sellers are listing them closer to $150. Has anyone else seen this trend too?
I've only been looking in the past month, but yes, at about that ratio too, when I come across posts on Reddit from last year.
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?
Of actual uses of the Sherman antitrust act, starting in 2002, DRAM manufactures were investigated and then pleaded guilty to price fixing to the US. Eventually Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida all pled guilty.
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.
Not only that, but also 'greedflation' by traders anticipating more demand than supply.
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...
Isn't a devaluation the same as inflation, just measured against other currencies?
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.
It's inflation fornouschains foreign products, but also makes us products cheaper to the rest of the world which means it's an incentive for exports.
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.
The price response in secondary markets (refurbished drives here) can be much bigger than the direct effects caused by increases in price for newly produced goods, I think? If the price goes up for new drives, purchasers of new drives hold on to current product for longer, and they are the suppliers to the secondary market. Also, more people might buy from the secondary market than from the primary market due to the price increase, creating a greater supply pressure and price response than is seen in the primary market. I guess it all depends on the shape of the demand curve.
Everyone is going to SSDs now for faster access. Having a SATA drive as a secondary drive to store downloads on. https://www.mamedev.org/ The MAME emulator, for example, takes up at least 10TB for all of the ROMs, Software disk images, Compressed Hard Drives, and ect.
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.
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.
Can you add complex filters and sorting?
The intent of this site is to be a simple reference rather than a comprehensive search index. If you would like to do more complex analysis, try entering the following into Google Sheets: =IMPORTHTML("https://diskprices.com/", "table")
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, 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.
Sure, I'm all for paying taxes if you get good services in return.
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.
That’s not the EU’s fault, is it? At best the import taxes (if any) are on the EU. VAT is added by your country, and if something is more expensive after everything than importing it yourself, that’s on a lack of competition in your marketplace…
This looks like a classic EU vs constituent countries debate.
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.
I wish I had known about this site when I was writing [1]. If we use warranties as our expected lifecycle, this lets me drop down from $5 per TB-year of storage down to almost $2 per TB-year. What immense savings compared to the cloud!
Doing a self-audit like this is actually an amazing idea. I consider and re-consider my choices every once in a while, but sitting down and doing an end-to-end write-up would put me a lot more at ease.
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.
I don't get it -- AWS deep archive is $12/TB/yr and provides actual durability and connectivity, not just drive-in-a-shoebox. That seems pretty hard to beat by buying raw storage at retail
AWS connectivity is stupidly expensive in the outgoing direction, so that connectivity may or may not be worth much of anything. Connectivity is also a risk.
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.
I would like to see a chart that compares the disk price costs, versus cloud storage costs over the last 10 years.
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.
And if you want the same disk from Dell (without any warranty or support), you take the highest price you can find and multiply it by five (after VAR discounts, ten without discounts).
I've seen one or two fake capacity disks show up. I check this site every couple weeks, for a couple years now. The more common listing issues are hybrid drives showing up as SSD, or disk bundles showing as a single larger disk, that type of thing. Issues are rare and barely mar how great a site it is.
Disk drives are under the monopolistic control of Thailand. Don’t piss off Thailand or your disk drive supply will be cut off. Thailand is glorious. Bask in the shadow of Thailand.
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