Xanthious said:
HDDs are still really bloody cheap. I recently picked up a bunch of 2TB External HDDs for considerably less than 100 dollars each delivered. If remember correctly I paid about the same price a little over a year ago for 1TB HDDs so I'm just not seeing the increase in HDD prices myslef.
If you were paying that price for 1TB drives last year, you were getting ripped off. I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the US it was trivially easy to get 2TB drives for $70 shipped even nearly two years ago from what I remember, and even less than that last year sometimes. They only recently have gotten back to the sub-$100 level (and even then still nearly 50% more expensive than pre-flood on average), but with much shorter warranties and much higher failure rates, so I wouldn't exactly consider things anywhere near back to normal. It doesn't help that basically all hard drives are now made by two companies instead of four, after Seagate and WD ate Samsung and Hitachi, so there's even less competition.
As far as SSDs, they're even cheaper than this article suggests. Go look at Slickdeals [http://slickdeals.net/] and there's a new deal posted every day from Newegg or Amazon or whoever else that's cheaper than the day before. I think someone did the math in the forums the other day and found that SSD prices had dropped by 40% just since December, at least if you take sales into account (which seem to happen on a near-daily basis, so that seems fair). 120GB SATA3 drives are easy to find for $90, which is $.75/GB, and I've seen the SATA2 ones that they're clearing out for as low as $.50/GB a few times. Even the bigger ones are dropping rapidly, with 512GB for just over $300 turning up this week. It's nice to see prices moving again after they pretty much plateaued at $1/GB for an entire year. The drives got faster, but they didn't get any cheaper for a while, but now that's changing.
