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Toshiba exec claims hard drives are 7X cheaper than SSDs and will continually evolve for large datacenters
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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A 4TB SATA SSD is 200 EUR. For 96 TB you would need 24 (probably less for 80TB usable). It would cost between 4k and 4.5k. Prices are going down fast.
And a way to have that many drives connected at once, which means more cost.
Ok, like 100 bucks for 16-18 SATA controllers, assuming the mobo comes with 6.
5 20tb HDDs in raid5, for about 1.2-1.5k
But how much is 5 100TB HDDs?
I have seen nowhere near 250-300 for 20TB disks in Europe. Maybe in the US the SSDs will also be cheaper...
I don't understand why more people don't do this, but if you go to pcpartpicker.com, go to start a build, go to storage, and sort by price per gb, you'll get all the info you need. I've purchased Seagate Exos X20 20TB drives for under $350 us dollars this year. I buy off Amazon US and ship to my country, Honduras. I believe ebay has them at $319 or something.
For reference, that's around $0.016 usd/gb with some smaller drives going for as low as $0.011 usd/gb (you can get a 6tb Seagate enterprise drive for $64 us dollars), whereas the cheapest SSD you can get is still going to cost you at least twice to three times as much, at $0.037 usd/gb for the cheapest SSD on pcpartpicker, which is still a 2TB SSD for $75 us dollars (crucial p3 plus), amazing value for an SSD but still has a hard time competing with HDDs.
I don't trust shipping internationally. More chance of damage, plus import duties, plus tax, plus difficulties for RMA or warranty.
The conclusion is similar tho: SSDs are only 2 times more expensive (not 7 as the article claims) and that makes it worth it for me given all the advantages the offer.
It's the only way I can get anything, and it can and will go badly, but it is what it is. Currently dealing with returning the wrong version of a pixel 8 pro via Amazon, all the way from Honduras. Amazon's outsourced CS from India doesn't help one bit, those guys don't read for shit. We have one advantage, though, there's some legal Grey area thingy going on in Honduras and we can import and pay simply based on weight or volume. Like $0.80 per pound if shipped via water. No import fees, even though we should be paying them (and last I checked, they're high). Gotta love third world countries, amirite?
Speaking as someone from Honduras, 2-3x the price for the same functionality, specifically if it's going to a NAS, doesn't cut it for me. HDDs are reliable and cheap enough that, if you have the physical space, they make the most sense, and if you need the extra speed, you throw a couple of SSDs in raid 1 for caching. Maybe if you're going for a smaller-sized NAS, and especially if you're going to do stuff like video editing off it, SSDs make sense. For my needs, which is mostly data hoarding/photo editing/content serving through plex or jellyfin, I want the most space and can accept gigabit speeds (although an SSD cache would alleviate speed constraints if I wanted more than gigabit speeds).
Of course, if you're not aiming to build or maintain a NAS, absolutely don't go for an HDD in 2023. That's probably the same advice I'd give anyone if they'd asked me in the past 5 to 8 years, though.
Fair enough, for Germany there's no chance of paying such low taxes. And when I checked there were no deals, 160 bucks for a 6 TB HDD, and 20 TB are all $400+.
And my media library (Kodi gang) sits at around 2 TB at the moment, plus maybe 500GB of photos and documents, and some work files, so one 4 TB drive is enough for everything, my 8 TB NAS and 8 TB USB HDD are just backups now, plus some rarely accessed data (steam library, for instance).