In 2017, I bought a 1TB 960 Evo for 466€. Now, in 2023 the 1TB 970 Evo Plus is 43€.
It's incredible how much the prices have fallen and that's how it should be. Sure, I bought the 960 close to launch but still the difference is staggering.
The 960 Evo still chugs along albeit it's a new one because a few months after I bought it, I had to RMA it.
I guess that's what happens when you are an early adopter. I lost a few hours of work when the original 960 Evo decided to stop working but it also taught me to be more paranoia with backups.
Just since I've setup a plex server (about 8 years now) midrange sizes have gone from 4->16 TBs. Personally I think the bulk of the issue is that HDD customers switched from a mix of enterprise and personal, to nearly all enterprise. Companies really don't care if a HDD is $200 or $500, so basically all high capacity drives are priced at B2B prices, not consumer
We're very close. 30TB HAMR drives are expect later this year, and 50TB a year or two later. I think HDDs will continue to present the best value for data hoarders.
Until you would have to replace a HDD: +23 hours of nerve racking RAID repair time for 10TB drive at 120MB/s
Even with some advanced (like ZFS etc.) system you can't go around the fact the HDDs are slow.
And when the HDD fails, you can't read it. It's toast.
Some cheap non-volatile memory devices are like this too, but good ones go into read-only mode and you can at least
attempt data recovery from them if no better option is left.
I'm liking that it is possible get cheap+good 1TB NVMe devices for less than 100€.
The consumer SATA market for large SSDs (capacity over 1TB) is unfortunately quite dry.
I need replacement for HDDs and even if the speed is capped by SATA bus it would be an massive improvement.
That repair time is the bear. Particularly as so many consumer grade NAS device really don’t have the horsepower for it. System works great until you have to rebuild an array. When that time comes don’t plan on doing much of anything while it’s grinding for the next few days.