Question Why are SATA drives so expensive?

[jamesdsimone]

Noticing refurbed SATA drives are a lot more expensive compared to last year. I posted a thread about refurbed 12gb HGST drives when they were going for 79.99. Now you can barely find 6Gb for that price. I needed some offline storage so picked up 4 of these instead.

https://www.newegg.com/hgst-ultrastar-7k3000-clar2000-2tb-enterprise/p/1Z4-001J-00281?Item=9SIAEENGC77407

 

[mikeymikec]

The Seagate Ironwolf 8TB drive I've kept an eye on for several months hasn't changed much in price in the UK, it might have even come down in price. US tariffs?

 

[Quintessa]

You're competing with everyone who still wants spinning rust while production has shifted to high-capacity SAS and nearline drives.

 

[manly]

The Seagate Ironwolf 8TB drive I've kept an eye on for several months hasn't changed much in price in the UK, it might have even come down in price. US tariffs?

OP is referring to used drives, i.e. server pulls.

Quite obviously it's supply and demand. Some huge quantity of 12TB HDD were decommissioned a year ago (and earlier) and thus prices were very low.

The current AI boom revolves around massive deployments of Nvidia GPUs. But prior to that, there was steady expansion of conventional data centers from the cloud operators going back many years. I'm guessing there was a huge surge during the heart of the pandemic (2020), and a lot of spinning rust was deployed at that time. Presumably, most of those drives have since been retired.

The other factor is that SSDs have gotten cheaper. So unless you need massive storage capacity of hard drives, cloud operators just don't need as much spinning rust as they used to.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Roger that! Supply and demand. Two years ago, I could pick up Hitachi Enterprise drives of a certain size for about $80 -- pulled from server farms and other business use. You find fewer and fewer of these, and now the refurb-surplus is with drives of a higher capacity. I'm not sure the prices have increased as much as the OP thinks, but there's a lot of change occurring.

OEM desktops don't ship with 3.5" HDDs anymore -- or that's what I've long assumed. You can either buy new -- if a manufacturer thinks he can make a little money with a certain size or spec -- or buy corporate surplus refurbed.

Personally, I'm inclined to a goal of deploying only 2.5" HDDs. But you can't get a 12TB 2.5" Barracuda. 5TB seems to be the upper limit.

 

[mikeymikec]

Personally, I'm inclined to a goal of deploying only 2.5" HDDs. But you can't get a 12TB 2.5" Barracuda. 5TB seems to be the upper limit.

They're going to be SMR drives so sustained write performance is going to tank. Even at best they're going to be significantly slower than similar-capacity 7200RPM drives, and 7200RPM CMR drives are going to leave them in the dust.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

They're going to be SMR drives so sustained write performance is going to tank. Even at best they're going to be significantly slower than similar-capacity 7200RPM drives, and 7200RPM CMR drives are going to leave them in the dust.

The reasons I built my computers to include those 2.5" HDDs are two: to store media for playback, which, once written to disk, is not likely to change; and for backup that is easily removeable. Since I began in 2017 to include those drives as part of a strategy for building my PCs, I have had one of those drives fail, on three systems used or built during that time. Each of two PCs has two of those HDDs mounted and running. I have to adjust the firmware on those units I would call "laptop" drives to avoid high load cycle count and unnecessary head parking, so I tend to acquire those drives that aren't meant for laptops. (And of course today's laptops don't use those spinners anymore.)

Microsoft's exclusionary hardware policy shown with Windows 11 is probably doing a lot to retire hardware that would otherwise maintain a niche in the marketplace. But some things, like ODDs, I find useful no matter how new the latest hardware in my "computer creations".

I should spend some time today on my laptop -- which has neither ODD nor HDD. For maintenance.

 

[jamesdsimone]

I'm switching to SAS drives for my offline storage for the time being. A cool feature of the z840 is the drive bays take both SATA/SAS drives. I need 90+ TB to back up my media so budget is a consideration. The drives don't have do much work.