[rushi_agrawal]

It is interesting that even after falling prices of HDDs, S3 costs have remained the same for at least 8 years. There's just not enough competition to push them to reduce costs. But imagine money it brings in in AWS because of this.

[layoric]

Same with every other aspect of their offerings. Look at EC2 even with instances like m7a.medium, 1 vCPU (not core) and 4GB memory for ~$50 USD/month on demand or ~$35/month reserve 1 year. It isn't even close to be competitive outside other big cloud providers.

EDIT: clarity on monthly pricing.

[master_crab]

There is inflation, so it has effectively dropped in price. But your point is taken: inflation’s effect on prices is most assuredly slower than the progress of technology’s effect.

[Pxtl]

How much have hdd prices really fallen? AFAIK the incredible improvements in price per byte in HDD had slowed so much that they'll be eclipsed by SSDs in a few years.

[pjdesno]

Flash went from within 2x the price of DRAM in 2012 or so to maybe 40-50x cheaper today, driven somewhat by shrinking feature sizes, but mostly by the shift from SLC (1 bit/cell) to TLC (3 bits) and QLC (4 bits) and from planar to 300+ layer 3D flash.

Flash is near the end of the “S-curve” of those technologies being rolled out.

During that time HDD technology was pretty stagnant, with a mere 2x increase due to higher platter count with the use of helium.

New HDD technologies (HAMR) are just starting their rollout, promising major improvements in $/GB over the next few years as they roll out.

You can’t just look at a price curve on a graph and predict where it’s going to go. The actual technologies responsible for that curve matter.

[Dylan16807]

> mostly by the shift from SLC (1 bit/cell) to TLC (3 bits) and QLC (4 bits) and from planar to 300+ layer 3D flash

That "and" is doing a lot of work.

In 2012 most flash was MLC.

In 2025 most flash is TLC.

> During that time HDD technology was pretty stagnant, with a mere 2x increase due to higher platter count with the use of helium.

They've advanced slower than SSDs but it wasn't that slow. Between 2012 and 2025, excluding HAMR, sizes have improved from 4TB to 24TB and prices at the low end have improved from $50/TB to $12/TB.

[Dylan16807]

This is one of those times a downvote confuses me. I corrected some numbers. Was I accidentally rude? If I made a mistake on the numbers please give the right numbers.

If my first line was unclear: We might say the denser bits give us a 65% density improvement. And quick math shows that a 80-100x improvement is actually nine 65% improvements in a row. So the denser bits per cell aren't doing much, it's pretty much all process improvement.

[pjdesno]

It’s mostly 3D, not process.

3D flash is over 300 layers now. The size of a single 300-bit stack on the surface of the chip is bigger than an old planar cell, but that 300x does a lot more than make up for it.

3D NAND isn’t a “process improvement” - it’s a fundamental new architecture. It’s radically cheaper because it’s a set of really cheap steps to make all 300+ layers, not using any of the really expensive lithography systems in the fab, then a single (really complicated) set of steps to drill holes through the layers for the bit stacks and coat the insides of the holes. Chip cost basically = the depreciation of the fab investment during the time a chip spends in the fab, so 3D NAND is a huge win. (just stacking layers by running the chip through the process N times wouldn’t save any money, and would probably just decrease yields)

A total guess - 2x more expensive for extra steps, bit stacks take 4x more area than planar cells, 300 layer would have 300/8 = 37.5x cheaper bits. (That 4x is pulling a lot of weight - for all I know it might be more like 8x, but the point stands)

[Dylan16807]

I was counting all the 3D manufacturing innovations as "process improvement". I'm not sure why you don't.

Anyway the point stands that bits per cell is barely doing anything compared to making the cells cheaper.

[pjdesno]

Oh, and no one has a solution to make HDDs faster. If anything, they may have gotten slower as they get optimized for capacity instead of speed.

(Well, peak data transfer rate keeps going up as bits get packed tighter, but capacity goes up linearly with areal bit density, while the speed the bits go under the head goes up with the square root.)

(Well, sort of. For a while a lot of the progress came from making the bits skinnier but not much shorter, so transfer rates didn’t go up that much)

[rbranson]

Magnetic hard drives are 100X cheaper per GB than when S3 launched, and are about 3X cheaper than in 2016 when the price last dropped. Magnetic prices have actually ticked up recently due to supply chain issues, but HAMR is expected to cause a significant drop (50-75%/GB) in magnetic storage prices as it rolls out in next few years. SSDs are ~$120/T and magnetic drives are ~$18/T. This hasn't changed much in the last 2 years.

[Hilift]

Reducing costs is the wrong incentive. If you look at a modern vendor such as Splunk or CrowdStrike, they have huge estates in AWS. There are huge swaths of repeating data, both within and across tenants. Rather than pointing this out, it is simpler and more effective to charge the customer for this data/usage, and use simple techniques so that it isn't duplicative. Reducing costs would only incentive and increase this asinine usage.