Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Brockenstein 2758 days ago
>Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte

I think you should go shopping, because the time where SSDs cost 10x as much as an HDD is over.

When a WD Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB is $46 on Amazon and a Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch is $134.

Unless you're comparing the cheapest 1TB HDD you can find to a Samsung 970 pro 1TB or something... which really isn't a reasonable comparison imo.

6 comments

I agree that for 0.5-1 TB disk there really is no reason to not to get an SSD. However the price difference jumps significantly once you're looking at larger disks though. The cheapest 4TB SSD costs about to 8 times more than the cheapest 4TB HDD for example.
>When a WD Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB is $46 on Amazon and a Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch is $134.

those are cherrypicked numbers because 1TB is at the very low end for HDD sizes. compare with a more typical HDD size (3TB or 4TB) and you'll see the differences become more obvious.

I don't know about you, but 500-1000 GB is more than enough for my SSD needs, so the comparison at 1TB is much more relevant to me than at 4TB.
Wasn't the parent discussion about a new high-capacity HDD and the per-capacity cost of HDD vs SSD? I don't think that people satisfied with under 1TB are relevant to that topic.

In that market, people are comparing a pile of disks in an array to a pile of solid state storage needed to replace its capacity. The bulk price of storage inverts when it is cheaper to store hundreds of TB on huge SSDs rather than on huge HDDs. That would be the death of HDD, since nobody really wants spinning disks in their datacenter.

> a pile of disks in an array to a pile of solid state storage

It doesn't even need to be a pile of disks. Even for a PC the differences are big.

My computer has a 1 TB SSD which is a decent size for an SSD. It's still a bit tight for me, so I complement with a spinny rust NAS. If I had an HDD instead it would have been like 8 TB and I wouldn't necessarily need the NAS. I think that's what GP is hinting at when he says "me SSD needs". I think he's also complementing with HDD somewhere for bulk storage (be it external drive, NAS or even cloud storage)

If I'm GP, yeah; I use 250-500GB SSDs as primary disk and have a small NAS with a RAID1 of two 5 TB disks for slow archival storage. For that slow archive, though, I don't care what factor SSD price is to HDD price (as long as it's still >1.0).
Sure, that's fair.
Cost isn't linear with storage. On Newegg a 1 TB drive is $37, a 2 TB is $61, a 4TB is $84, a 6 TB is $158 for $26/TB. The metal shell of the HD costs a certain amount no matter how much storage is inside. Still not a full factor of 10 but certainly more significant.
HDD market is basically a monopoly with arbitrary prices not reflecting actual cost of anything. They only compete on price with SSDs.
It’s a monopoly? Kryder’s law may have ended, but HDD prices were $40 a terabyte two years ago.
1TB HDDs are expensive per GB though. The sweet spot is at 4 or 6T these days.
You can't compare 1TB hard disks, they are comparatively expensive. The cheapest per TB I can find right now is 20 euros for HDD, and 120euro for SSD. So factor 6 if you buy the cheapest, respectively.
> I think you should go shopping

Sorry, you're right! I had quickly searched for a few multi-terabyte drives. But at around 100 GB the two kinds are close.