Hard-drive Prices Have Gone Crazy

[KultiVator]

As per the headline above, anyone looking to buy a 14TB Western Digital My Book Essentials drive over the past few days may have noticed the price jump from less than £250 to £499.99!

It's likely this marks the beginning of a bad run of storage shortages and price-hikes following the latest Cryto-Currency craze ('Chia') going mainstream last week.

The price hikes seem to be across the board, albeit affecting larger drives (e.g. 8TB and above) most severely.

Let's hope the storage industry can respond to the increased demand more effectively than has been the case with GPUs.

[TeePee]

As per the headline above, anyone looking to buy a 14TB Western Digital My Book Essentials drive over the past few days may have noticed the price jump from less than £250 to £499.99!

It's likely this marks the beginning of a bad run of storage shortages and price-hikes following the latest Cryto-Currency craze ('Chia') going mainstream last week.

The price hikes seem to be across the board, albeit affecting larger drives (e.g. 8TB and above) most severely.

Let's hope the storage industry can respond to the increased demand more effectively than has been the case with GPUs.

It's the perfect storm. Crypto, inflation, chip shortage and massive shipping rates. None of these things are a quick fix. Don't expect the prices to drop anytime soon.

[Spreadie]

Chia, dude - HDDs are the new GPUs

[DanceswithUnix]

It sounds like to use those HDDs well you need a ton of RAM and a high end CPU with lots of threads (one per HDD). Just as the likes of the 5800X were becoming readily available, expect it all to go to heck real soon.

Meanwhile you've got the likes of Stellar which is fast, cheap and uses minimal energy fulfilling the promises of these nonsense currencies but those properties means it can't be mined by the greedy and so won't generate the hype of Eth and Chia.

[Saracen999]

Prices on these bigger drives have been up and down like ... well, I won't use the phrase that sprung to mind as I like my account active and unsuspended, but let's say, frequently, recently.

I've been watching them from 8TB and upwards for about a month, trying to decide on which capacity, and what timing. I finally pulled the trigger on the 12TB MyBook (1-bay) a few days ago. It was about £230, shot up to nearly £270, went in and out of stock like a yoyo, and then back down to £230-ish (I think, without looking it up, it was £232.xx). It's now sitting on the floor in a corner of my home office, still in shrinkwrap, awaiting unboxing. And is currently showing out of stock again, but then, it was a week or so ago too, and came back into stock and dropped £40-ish in price, too.

The moral of that. Prices are .... volatile. And so is stock. But immediate history suggests prices might drop again.

Oh, and as of 5 minutes ago the 14TB was £370 (£369.99 to be exact) which is £5 more than the 16TB.

So unless there's something specific about the 14TB (like knowing it's a Red Pro or something and the 16TB isn't, the 16TB is a better bet right now.

Prices tomorrow or next week? Who knows, could be 50% or 100% more, or 25% less, or just not available.

All you can do, IMHO, is keep a close eye on it and pull the trigger, or not, when they hit an acceptable price .... if they do. And accept that they may go down right after you buy, or become unavailable while you dither.

I needed one, and fairly soon. I'd have preferred a bit bigger but 12 TB will do for now, and quite a while, and the cost/TB was acceptable. Waiting months for a better price that might never come was not.

As the old adage goes, it was time for me to poop or get off the potty.

[Saracen999]

....

The moral of that. Prices are .... volatile. And so is stock. But immediate history suggests prices might drop again.

Oh, and as of 5 minutes ago the 14TB was £370 (£369.99 to be exact) which is £5 more than the 16TB.

So unless there's something specific about the 14TB (like knowing it's a Red Pro or something and the 16TB isn't, the 16TB is a better bet right now.

And in 5 hours, between my last post and this one, which is between 12:45AM and 5:45AM, that 16TB is now showing

"Currently unavailable.
We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock"

[Rob_B]

Whereas from what I can see SSDs are falling, 1tb for under £70/£80 is something I don't recall seeing before.

[Spreadie]

I expect SSDs with high TBW will be the more sought after models, and we'll see those prices rise.

[DanceswithUnix]

Crazy bit is you have been able to "mine" with hdds for some years, and again in a much more productive way than Chia.

Storj is a way of people basically renting their hdd space and broadband traffic out for cloud storage. That's a useful service, for which people are willing to pay money.

[Saracen999]

Whereas from what I can see SSDs are falling, 1tb for under £70/£80 is something I don't recall seeing before.

From what I can make of it, what's primarily appealing to the Chia crowd is, whether HD or SSD, the more "enterprise" level drives. More like 2TB, even 4TB SSDs and NVMe or, what is it, U.2? Not SATA. And those with a design that allows for much higher levels of 24/7 constant read/write, for ironically (and thankfully) smaller (say, 8TB and down) HDs and most "consumer" SSDs aren't seen as an attractive buy by the Chia crowd because they probably don't have the required longevity.

But if you want big drives, enterprise, or "NAS" or "Surveillance" type .... might bea good idea to get in while you can. Or might not. I'm no expert.

[KultiVator]

Yeah I ran some test plots on Chia last week, mostly out of curiosity... the SSD's ideally need to be spacious (for parallel plotting at least), fast and crucially have a high TBW rating (unless you're willing to burn the drive out pretty quick). However, once the finished plots hit the magnetic HDDs, the actual amount of subsequent access is minimal during the actual 'farming' and 'harvesting' phases of their lifecycle.

I have a decent rig and managed to churn out 20+ Chia plots in a 24 hour test period (Ryzen 3900x running in parallel with two high-TBW SSDs used for plotting) - but the massive uptake in Chia adoption over the past few days is a bandwagon that I won't be jumping on, as the odds of 'wins' are really pretty slim - unless you have a datacentre-sized operation - and despite all the hype about chia being a 'green' crypto-currency, the computation involved in creating each plot is pretty intense and wasteful).

Couldn't help thinking it was a massive waste of the planet's power and resources - all in the name of false hopes for a quick buck that most will never get the faintest whiff of.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I saw what was going to happen with Chia and nabbed some extra storage even though I was going to hold out for better deals. I tried some plots too,and the thing is unless you have a ton of storage for the plots,TBW isn't as big an issue if you think about it. A single plot needs 1.8TB of writes. Each end plot is 101GB. So you will barely get 70~75 plots on an 8TB hard drive. That is 135TB of writes. The issue is unless you have tons of storage,even a 600TBW disk would required 32TB of storage. One with 1200TBW would require 64TB of storage.

Many SSDs with Phison E12/E16 controllers(most of the PCI-E 4.0 ones),have TBWs of between 1300~1800 TB for the 1TB models,and 2600~3600 TB for the 2TB models. You will need a ton of HDD storage to actually wear out even a consumer SSD!!

[DanceswithUnix]

I saw what was going to happen with Chia and nabbed some extra storage even though I was going to hold out for better deals. I tried some plots too,and the thing is unless you have a ton of storage for the plots,TBW isn't as big an issue if you think about it. A single plot needs 1.8TB of writes. Each end plot is 101GB. So you will barely get 70~75 plots on an 8TB hard drive. That is 135TB of writes. The issue is unless you have tons of storage,even a 600TBW disk would required 32TB of storage. One with 1200TBW would require 64TB of storage.

Many SSDs with Phison E12/E16 controllers(most of the PCI-E 4.0 ones),have TBWs of between 1300~1800 TB for the 1TB models,and 2600~3600 TB for the 2TB models. You will need a ton of HDD storage to actually wear out even a consumer SSD!!

Just buy 512GB of ram and do the initial plot on a 400GB ramdisk?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Just buy 512GB of ram and do the initial plot on a 400GB ramdisk?

Each plot needs around 260ish GB of temporary space,so its essentially 3 plots for a 960/1TB SSD AFAIK if you do it in parallel.

[DanceswithUnix]

Each plot needs around 260ish GB of temporary space,so its essentially 3 plots for a 960/1TB SSD AFAIK if you do it in parallel.

I guess Optane drives will finally have customers willing to pay Intel's prices!

[Ttaskmaster]

active and unsuspended

Just like the knickers of the individuals in the phrase you can't use....?