Flash drive costs develop rapidly whereas SAS and SATA diverge
Stable-state drive (SSD) costs per gigabyte (GB) have headed sharply upwards over the previous two quarters.
In the meantime, on the spinning disk entrance, SAS laborious disk drive (HDD) costs elevated in value and SATA stayed steady, to depart an elevated hole between the 2.
SSD costs had been predicted to extend as producers slowed manufacturing in an ongoing effort to boost costs that had dropped away throughout a protracted interval of surplus manufacturing.
In the meantime, SAS drive costs additionally elevated whereas SATA spinning disk value per gigabyte stayed regular. The web impact is for the SAS facet of the scissors to maneuver upwards and away from SATA.
Attainable causes embrace the same scenario of oversupply that’s now working its manner out as producers reduce on manufacturing. Additionally, SAS is the extra performant of the 2 HDD varieties and could also be in higher demand for large-scale information storage for synthetic intelligence (AI).
Through the previous two quarters, Flash drive costs (MLC, TLC and QLC) elevated from $0.079/GB to $0.086/GB, an 8.8% improve. If we take QLC out of the equation – due to a low pattern dimension within the information (see under) – that rises to $0.093/GB and a 17.7% improve. The fact most likely lies between the 2.
Additionally, through the previous two quarters, SAS spinning disk costs per gigabyte rose from $0.049 to $0.051, a rise of simply over 4%. Throughout the yr, nonetheless, the rise has been from $0.041 to $0.051, nearer 25%.
SATA drive costs – the much less performant of the 2 protocols – have remained regular. SATA value per gigabyte six months in the past was $0.035 and is now $0.036.
The explanation for the massive improve in SAS costs additionally lies in a current historical past of overproduction being throttled again to assist the value by producers, and certain greater demand for performance-hungry AI purposes.
It have to be famous that HDD continues to be the dominant medium in information storage in 2025.
Flash costs hit a ceiling in late 2023 and early months of 2024 when producers slowed manufacturing to attempt to increase costs and enhance profitability. SSD costs per gigabyte reached a median of $0.095 in April 2024, which was an increase of 26.67% from autumn 2023.
On the time, many thought SSD costs would obtain even higher highs in 2024, however whereas manufacturing elevated, buyer demand didn’t, and costs decreased.
These figures are from unique evaluation by Laptop Weekly that gathers drive costs aggregated by Diskprices.com (see graph) each week from Amazon.com. Since March 2023, greater than 84,000 drive costs and specs have been gathered, with averages calculated each week for TLC, QLC and MLC/unspecified flash drives, in addition to SAS and SATA spinning disk.
Diskprices.com aggregates new drive costs that it takes from Amazon.com, with greater than 700 disk costs and specs processed each week. Knowledge is then filtered by flash and spinning disk sort, and the common value per gigabyte calculated.
The evaluation is predicated on Amazon.com costs, that are principally aimed toward shoppers and SME prospects, and due to this fact lacks, for instance, a lot illustration of QLC flash, which is aimed toward use circumstances that require predominantly sequential entry and supply higher density.
Having stated that, the quantity of knowledge gathered helps to point out traits in drive pricing. We use it right here as a proxy for drive costs due to the absence of value information from enterprise drive and storage array makers.
Value per gigabyte is a significant consideration for purchasers, however complete value of possession over a drive’s lifecycle can be vital, with buy value, vitality utilization and upkeep prices key amongst them.
Knowledge gathered covers drives that vary in capability from lower than 1TB (terabyte) as much as 30TB for HDDs and as much as 12TB for SSDs.
SSD prices extra per drive to purchase than spinning disk, however upkeep prices are sometimes decrease. Cloud storage supplier Backblaze publishes reliability figures for the 300,000-plus drives in its property. It discovered its SSD annual failure charge (AFR) to be 0.9% in mid-2023. There have been no AFR stats for SSDs from Backblaze since, however for HDDs, the determine for 2024, reported in February 2025, was 1.57%.
