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.