Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2021 October 14

= October 14 =

HDD prices
Some months back there was a jump in HDD prices because of Chia mining. The pandemic can't have helped either. I get the impression Chia is now sort of dead, or at least less active before. Does anyone know if the shortages have subsided? Have HDD prices dropped, or at least gotten back to their normal trend which I guess was gradually falling? I also notice the Seagate Exos 16TB seems to have suspiciously high specs per dollar compared to other drive. Is that a market for lemons situation? Thanks. 2602:24A:DE47:B8E0:1B43:29FD:A863:33CA (talk) 18:28, 14 October 2021 (UTC)


 * PCPartPicker maintains useful trend statistics for the average prices of various PC components: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/ -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 19:41, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * ... although looking at some of their stats, like https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/video-card/, shortages cause some confounding effects on their method of calculating. It looks like, when a product goes completely out of stock (in conventional retail channels) there's no trading volume, so they're counting the price as $0 - when in fact scalpers are selling those scarce GPUs, for considerably over MSRP, on secondary markets like eBay. None of the large capacity spinning-rust disks seem to have reached that condition, but they don't track that specific 16TB range you specify. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 19:56, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It's one specific 16tb drive that is cheaper than all the rest, yet having good specs, that is suspicious. I'm in the market for hosted storage whose costs will be related to HDD costs, but I'm not looking to buy physical HDD's directly, so am only indirectly concerned with models or capacity.  Thanks. 2602:24A:DE47:B8E0:1B43:29FD:A863:33CA (talk) 20:01, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't pay much attention to the enterprise HD market, satisfied with the far cheaper when on special consumer external drives (shucked or not), but from what I can see from Anandtech figures, it's not so much one specific drive but rather the entire Seagate Exos Enterprise line which is cheaper. The big question seems to be why Toshiba and Western Digital don't have anything that is cheap since even the Exos Enterprise is fairly expensive. Toshiba are still a relatively small player so that's probably one factor. And another obvious point is that I'm not sure the retail Enterprise market is particularly competitive anymore if it ever was. Most customers buying these are likely buying significant quantities direct from a supplier or even from the manufacturer rather than a few from NewEgg or Amazon. In any case, a good place to get info on pricing and any concerns for the consumer is IMO the Data Hoarder subreddit, if you're able to sort the wheat from the chaff. Nil Einne (talk) 19:04, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
 * From a quick look whether due to Chia or whatever it sounds like prices for externals are still above late 2020 prices e.g. the 14TB for $239 is a good price [//www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/prylmo/23999_wd_14tb_elements_desktop_usb_30_lowest/] but WD 14TBs were regularly at $200 (admittedly mostly at Best Buy with their unique Easy Stores)[//www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed77du/wd_easystore_14tb_back_on_sale_200/]. Although I did find [//www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/muq29p/seagate_14tb_external_drive_for_199/] so I wonder if it's just that WD that is currently having problems. What this says about the enterprise market, I have no idea. Nil Einne (talk) 19:30, 16 October 2021 (UTC)