Not at all. The price of storage has plummeted so much that most video games comfortably use ~100GB for large games and don’t care because even SSD storage is extremely cheap.
If you don’t believe me, here’s a post on Reddit that shows it off pretty well.
There’s two ways to take that statement. The price of a hard drive will remain the same, or the price per memory unit will remain the same. Price per hard drive remains largely the same. Price per unit of memory drops.
The only exception here is SSDs are slowly dropping in price to meet magnetic disk drives.
Interpreted the other way, I don’t think that makes sense because on the whole storage has always gotten cheaper with time. Hard drives may cost the same, but they’re larger capacity so really this would only work as an argument if hard drive storage space stayed the same and prices remained the same for consumers but went down for manufacturers.
Also there’s a lot of competition in the space similar to other chips so I don’t see how a company making NAND or platters can afford to sit on their hands like that. The whole point of drive innovation right now is to drive the price per GB down for B2B sales. And that usually translates well to consumer sales too.
They do get cheaper but the cheaper ones don’t get made because they aren’t worth anything anymore. Like sure you can get a 500GB HDD which used to be a moderately priced option and is now basically trash or free. The prices go down, but the key is that consumers no longer want the old thing either.
Actually those are still available. And I will admit if anyone tried to get me to pay 100 dollars for one now I would probably laugh them out of the room.
The actual shells and manufacturing costs aren’t going down meaningfully. Giving you more for the same price is how consumers benefit the most. Especially because consumer demands for storage (among people willing to buy any, at least) keep going up and there isn’t a big market for HDDs that are half the price but 1/4 of the storage.
I’m not exactly sure what that chart is using for data sources. Historically every couple of years I’ve bought whatever goes on sale for around $200 and added it to my unraid.
I was able to pick up exos 14s a couple of years ago. And they’re still not back down to $200.
It looks like it depends on the drive size but also I think the pandemic has leveled this out in recent years. Some additional data I found by BackBlaze shows a bit more of the story though they have changed their drive sizes which leads to a more interesting graph.
SSDs were relatively new in 2010, and priced accordingly. Now it’s just about increasing sizes and (hopefully) reliability. I just don’t think that all of a sudden we’ll have huge cheap SSDs - people are used to a certain price point and manufacturers will take advantage of that.
Regarding your 2nd link:
I would only consider storge by known manufacturers like Intel, Samsung, Crucial/Micron, WD/SanDisk, Kioxia and maybe Kingston.
No experience with brands like Sabrent.
Same reason why I wouldnt shop for them on AliExpress. No confidence in those NAND.
The prices will stay the same. Manufacturers will just make more profit.
Is that what has happened to the storage market historically?
Not at all. The price of storage has plummeted so much that most video games comfortably use ~100GB for large games and don’t care because even SSD storage is extremely cheap.
If you don’t believe me, here’s a post on Reddit that shows it off pretty well.
There’s two ways to take that statement. The price of a hard drive will remain the same, or the price per memory unit will remain the same. Price per hard drive remains largely the same. Price per unit of memory drops.
The only exception here is SSDs are slowly dropping in price to meet magnetic disk drives.
Interpreted the other way, I don’t think that makes sense because on the whole storage has always gotten cheaper with time. Hard drives may cost the same, but they’re larger capacity so really this would only work as an argument if hard drive storage space stayed the same and prices remained the same for consumers but went down for manufacturers.
Also there’s a lot of competition in the space similar to other chips so I don’t see how a company making NAND or platters can afford to sit on their hands like that. The whole point of drive innovation right now is to drive the price per GB down for B2B sales. And that usually translates well to consumer sales too.
That’s business logic. Consumer logic is that when things get cheaper they should actually be cheaper.
They do get cheaper but the cheaper ones don’t get made because they aren’t worth anything anymore. Like sure you can get a 500GB HDD which used to be a moderately priced option and is now basically trash or free. The prices go down, but the key is that consumers no longer want the old thing either.
Actually those are still available. And I will admit if anyone tried to get me to pay 100 dollars for one now I would probably laugh them out of the room.
The actual shells and manufacturing costs aren’t going down meaningfully. Giving you more for the same price is how consumers benefit the most. Especially because consumer demands for storage (among people willing to buy any, at least) keep going up and there isn’t a big market for HDDs that are half the price but 1/4 of the storage.
I’m not exactly sure what that chart is using for data sources. Historically every couple of years I’ve bought whatever goes on sale for around $200 and added it to my unraid.
I was able to pick up exos 14s a couple of years ago. And they’re still not back down to $200.
It looks like it depends on the drive size but also I think the pandemic has leveled this out in recent years. Some additional data I found by BackBlaze shows a bit more of the story though they have changed their drive sizes which leads to a more interesting graph.
That looks like I expected it to. Inflation probably doesn’t help.
Honestly, nowadays a 100Gb game is small. Games are easily 200+ for the AAA section.
Yeah, but modern consoles come with as little as 512 gigs of storage.
I’m optimistic. I’m making numbers out of my butt because I literally can’t remember.
But I think My 20GB SSD from 2010 was about $100. I used to dualboot.
Today, I can get a 512GB SSD for $50.
SSDs were relatively new in 2010, and priced accordingly. Now it’s just about increasing sizes and (hopefully) reliability. I just don’t think that all of a sudden we’ll have huge cheap SSDs - people are used to a certain price point and manufacturers will take advantage of that.
Same SSDs are about 40% more expensive today than they were this time last year.
I got a 1TB SSD for 55€, so about 60 something dollars. Prices are certainly dropping
Maybe 2.5" but not 2280
Just have a look
Regarding your 1st link: Receiving a geo block :|
Regarding your 2nd link:
I would only consider storge by known manufacturers like Intel, Samsung, Crucial/Micron, WD/SanDisk, Kioxia and maybe Kingston.
No experience with brands like Sabrent.
Same reason why I wouldnt shop for them on AliExpress. No confidence in those NAND.
Yup.
For SSDs this has historically not been the case, there’s no way in hell you could buy a 1TB SSD within $200 a decade ago.
A decade ago 1TB SSDs were rare and, like all new things in tech, expensive.