Why are mechanical HDD prices increasing instead of decreasing?

All the prices of 1/2TB have touched almost 5k and 4/5TB has gone from 7k to 9k in 2-3 months ⊙⁠﹏⁠⊙

Has there been a flood in some mfg facility in Taiwan or something else?

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If you are referring to the mechanical ones, manufacturing is going down as demand for hdds is getting replaced with that for ssds. So there is less and less of them being available in the market. Moreover a large portion gets used in the external drives. One could even argue companies want you to move to SSDs and hence driving up prices of HDDs.

But even prices of SSDs are increasing. Unless 4TB ssd price is cheaper to buy than a similar 4TB mechanical drive I don’t understand why the mechanical drive is so costly. Even the external mechanical drive prices are increasing every month. Maybe they dont want people buying hdd or ssd for storage and just use online storage?

I’ve been noticing this for some time now. I remember buying WD 4TB Ext. HDD 2 years ago for little less than 7k. Now they are 8.5k or more.

I don’t think the reason is that they want consumers to move onto SSDs.
There are so many applications where HDD is more than adequate and SSD would be a waste in those places.

Online storage cannot be used for everything, even on 300Mbps connection, it would still be faster to copy something from an Ext. HDD or local NAS over gigabit ethernet.

There is a real usage scenario which can be fulfilled only by hard disks.

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HDD manufacturers are moving more towards higher capacity drives where they will continue to have an enterprise market and away from smaller capacity drives aimed at consumers.

SSD drive prices are falling like anything but there is not much of a market here for these still expensive drives and hence there is some price gouging going on locally.

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I guess external drives prices are cheaper than normal internal hdd

Everywhere - SSDs are taking over. Even recently, there was a deal on primeABGB for 2TB EVM SSD for around 6K. At that price point, its better to take that vs a normal HDD!

Almost all my servers with the exception of backups are SSD driven. Planning to make a media server with SSD storage!

I have been noticing the same trend as well… got a WD 4TB My Book for 7.8k in 2020 but now it’s priced at 9.9k

Another Seagate 4TB Backup Plus I got in 2021 for 7k is now unavailable but a similar model is priced at 8.7k

Also, deals on onlines sites are now-a-days largely on SSD’s. Price drops on external HDD’s have all but evaporated.

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High capacity SSDs like 4 TB remain costly as not much stock gets sent here anyways. Costs for the more general consumer and prosumer category of 1-2 TBs have come down drastically.

Also consider the INR lost it’s valuation 22% after 2021.

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But reliability-wise, a good branded hdd like WD/Seagate/Toshiba will last longer and more reliable than such cheaper unknown brand SSDs right?

Ditto for 2230(all)/2242(some) SSDs - still expensive here. Only things which are imported in mass volume remain affordable.

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But even with increased prices of 4TB drives, the per GB cost is still less in 4TB drives when compared to 1-2TB drives.

But even with increased prices of 4TB HDDs, the per GB cost is still less in 4TB drives when compared to 1-2TB HDDs.

[Source](’

https://www.techpowerup.com/311836/seagate-starts-shipping-commercial-exos-hamr-hdds

)

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China put cap on base mineral/material that need to use/mfg. Micro Chips

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Really, for SSDs ? Can you share some numbers ?

I think the storage manufacturing companies like seagate , western digital have merged so their is less of competition.

Better to get used in warranty hdd’s

My bad, I didn’t realise that you were talking about SSDs.

I was talking about HDDs.

Used HDDs always seem risky to me. Can’t trust the data with them.

Used hdd are much better then used ssd