For 1 drive, the differences are perhaps not much. When you have a cluster with 2k HDD drives, the difference in handling both squential and random workloads (see my other comment) can add up.

A 2.5x difference in IO/s adds up quickly.

As for HDD prices, neither 12TB nor 8TB were top of the line at the timeframes you mention. If you buy largest available drives, or a model lower, the prices have been going down. Not as much as we all would like, but overall the trend has been moving in the downward direction.

The helium filled drives also appear to be much, much more reliable. Only thing that worries me about them is that if you need to do disaster recovery you are pretty much out of luck unless you can get the original manufacturer to do it or find a highly specialized place.

I think we might be hitting a point where technology improvements can no longer outrun inflation.

All kinds of "legacy" products go up in price-- RAM a couple generations back, etc.

SSDs have won. Spinning hard drives are going to ship fewer and fewer units. The economies of scale are not going to improve ever again and are already getting worse. Further, the market just doesn't care about paying for capacity for the most part.

We peaked in 2010 with 650 million drives/year. Current unit counts are about one third of that. Compare to SSDs with about 400 million units/year.

All I want is a cheap tape drive for backups. Seek can be slow, as long as throughput is high.

I too would like a tape drive. It's frustrating that tape is so cheap, yet the drives cost so much for home use.

If you go used on LTO you can get a drive a few generations back for not insane prices, but it's still not entirely competitive with additional spinning rust.

Yeah, it seems once you go back far enough where the drives are reasonable, the capacity is just too low to be cost-effective vs buying a HDD or two.

i miss the days when optical drives were practical for backups

Same. There's something fun about optical disks.

The drives I looked at were cheaper when I checked a few months ago? Have prices gone up again?

It's been a year since prices recovered from the earlier madness & got back to where they were. It's not totally stable, but prices as I see them have been going slowly down since.

I personally have some Exos 16TB's. There's a decent price history available[1] reaching back to mid-2019. Make sure to tick on "3rd party new". These aren't going to be the best prices available in many cases, but it's reasonably indicative.

[1] https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07SPFPKF4

I always buy enterprise drives - much higher reliability and lifetime and usually I have found they benchmark higher. They are also way heavier and almost always use better bearings on all surfaces. Some people complain they are super loud but the three types I have randomly purchased over the years have been just as quiet as any other spinning disk (as in I do not notice the sound at all once its inside my desktop)

This is my pain point. For those of us who are aware the cloud exists and would rather do tape anyway, why on earth is a recent vintage tape drive so expensive?

I was talking spinning disks - tape is too niche now

Oh wow, you're right. I bought two 12TB WD drives in March 2020 for $175 each. The same drive on Amazon is now $218.

The pair of 8TB I had previously are within $5 of what I paid in 2017.

Might be temporary? How about if you look at different drives like seagate enterprise or HGST or Toshiba?

I purchased several 8TB WD Red's about 18 months ago, when they were ~$300. Can now find them for ~$180. Same story for IronWolf.

- adjusted for inflation?

- did you buy those drives in the "sweet spot" of capacity per dollar? 8 and 12 TB drives aren't the sweet spot anymore

- there's also this covid disruption thing

- when was the factory fire in ?vietnam?

- and how much competition is there? Are we down to two companies basically?