Nov 30, 2022 17:00:00

The price per 1 GB of HDD falls to 2 yen, the price drop range is 80% in the last 10 years

Backblaze, a cloud storage service known for operating a large number of HDDs and publishing their failure rate reports, has published changes in costs over the past 10 years.

The Cost of Hard Drives Over Time

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

Storage price records on Backblaze are from January 2009 to the latest November 2022. The total number of HDDs purchased in the 13 years recorded was 265,332, excluding those purchased before 2009 and the test products received from the manufacturer.

The list by capacity is like this. Backblaze continues to purchase only the 16TB model, and plans to purchase an additional 12,000 not included here. It seems that other models may be purchased in small quantities as spares.

Capacity (TB)	number	first purchase	last purchase
1	696	January 2009	September 2009
1.5	3,545	April 2009	April 2010
2	4,731	April 2009	July 2011
3	1,1210	April 2011	September 2014
Four	5,5812	November 2011	July 2016
Five	50	February 2015	February 2015
6	2,484	July 2014	August 2015
8	25,704	December 2015	August 2017
Ten	1,200	September 2017	September 2017
12	69,740	September 2017	August 2020
14	43,280	September 2018	July 2021
16	46,800	January 2021	November 2022

18TB, 20TB, and 22TB models will come out in 2023, but it is said that bulk purchases will be made after confirming that it can be operated stably in the long term and whether the price per capacity is reasonable. thing.

The HDD to be purchased is of perpendicular magnetic recording method (PMR) or conventional magnetic recording method (CMR). It seems that the single magnetic recording method (SMR) will obviously slow down when random writing and area reuse.

Below is a graph of the price per 1 GB of HDD purchased by Backblaze since 2009. In 2009, it was around $ 0.11 (about 15 yen) per 1 GB, but after that it basically fell to the right, and since 2019 it has been less than 0.02 dollars (about 2.8 yen) per 1 GB. The turbulence in the graph from 2011 to 2013 is due to flood damage to factories in Thailand, a major HDD production country .

Below is an extract from 2017 onwards. We can see that the introduction of new capacity models only temporarily increased costs slightly.

According to Backblaze, the price drop during the aggregation period is 87.4%, which means that the price per 1 GB drops by 0.52% every month.

Regarding the fact that the cost per unit of storage has fallen, the amount of data stored in HDDs in the world as of 2009 is about 0.3 ZB (Zettabyte: 1 ZB is 1 billion TB), Backblaze points out that this is due to the increase in the amount of data worldwide, which is expected to reach 1.8 ZB by the end of 2022.

In addition, Backblaze himself admitted that it was a mistake to express that the storage price had bottomed out in 2017, saying that the cost reduction competition was over. Approximately 1.4 yen), he showed a new forecast that 22TB and 24TB HDDs will appear in the middle of 2025. If this prediction is true, the 22 TB HDD that will be released in the middle of 2025 will be about $ 220 (about 30,000 yen), and the 24 TB HDD will be (about 33,000 yen).