backblaze (who uses desktop hdds) says they paid $0.044/gb in sept 2011: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-a...

Today on newegg it's about $0.03/gb.

That statement neither disputes nor supports the statement you made it in reply to. The statement you were replying to was referring to the trend line. That is to say it was referring to the line representing the rate at which the price was changing, not the price itself. You would need significantly more than two data points to make an argument for or against that assertion. As you would need enough enough points to show what the trend was both before the flood and currently.

I only point this out because I assume you misunderstood what was said about the trend line, if you had another purpose for pointing this out which I am missing I would be interested in knowing it.

re-reading it, I agree with you. I missed the word "trendline" when I read it the first time.

I'm not able to find an up to date enough trendline to agree or disagree with his statement.

> they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked.

They have. I remember buying 2TB drives a year before (2010). I paid about $200 each. Last year (2014), I bought 4TB drives for $130 each. That's about 3x improvement over 4 years, right?

Appled to oranges. In 2010, you overpaid by more than 100%: http://slickdeals.net/expired/2495085-79-99-seagate-barracud...

Apples to oranges. Can't compare the seagate junk to a quality WD or Hitachi that's far more likely to still be spinning _today._

The prices may not be falling at the same rate as they were before the floods, though.

That's likely the case, since a lot of industry consolidation has happened since (5 to 3).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv...