Hi guys I'm looking to buy a new HDD for movies and music but the prices are very very high and have been for last couple of years. Any ideas what is it this time? Flood, earthquake, low supply or hight or whatever they said each time the prices when up or stay high. I just want to know if there is a reason to hold of for a bit or no need?
Mechanical hard drives prices?
- Thread starter himen256
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Many factors, but the main one (IHMO) is the current lack of competition due to the effective disappearance from the market of every HDD manufacturer apart from Seagate, WD and Toshiba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
I can't see any reason to expect price drops any time soon, so if you need a new HDD right now you might as well just suck it up and get one. 4TB seems to be the sweet spot at the moment in terms of capacity for your money - you might pay around £100 if you're patient and shop around, slightly more for a NAS-specified version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
I can't see any reason to expect price drops any time soon, so if you need a new HDD right now you might as well just suck it up and get one. 4TB seems to be the sweet spot at the moment in terms of capacity for your money - you might pay around £100 if you're patient and shop around, slightly more for a NAS-specified version.
As said above, hard drive prices have been where they are for quite a few years now so I wouldn't expect them to move.
I recently had to suck it up and purchased 4 6Tb WD Reds for £500, 2nd hand for my NAS and then sold my 4 2Tb WD Greens for £140 which somewhat eased the initial pain of the £500 spent on the upgrade. Hopefully this will see me through a few years by which time the entire world will be streamed
I recently had to suck it up and purchased 4 6Tb WD Reds for £500, 2nd hand for my NAS and then sold my 4 2Tb WD Greens for £140 which somewhat eased the initial pain of the £500 spent on the upgrade. Hopefully this will see me through a few years by which time the entire world will be streamed
As said above, hard drive prices have been where they are for quite a few years now so I wouldn't expect them to move.
I recently had to suck it up and purchased 4 6Tb WD Reds for £500, 2nd hand for my NAS and then sold my 4 2Tb WD Greens for £140 which somewhat eased the initial pain of the £500 spent on the upgrade. Hopefully this will see me through a few years by which time the entire world will be streamed
I've just bitten the bullet on 3x8TB to do the same. I remember calculating HD prices in cost per MB, then GB, and now TB, in general prices have fallen significantly per TB over time, they just take longer and recently the exchange rate hasn't helped. What I paid for 1TB drives is what I paid for 2TB drives that replaced them and what i'd now pay for 4TB drives. Looking at the cost per TB I decided to go with a deal on 8TB's as it actually worked out slightly cheaper for me to buy 3x8TB drives than 6x4TB, not to mention made expansion a lot easier and with reduced power/heat load etc.
Either way if you need the storage, pay the price, you won't see a massive drop in HD prices any time soon, but remember that in a few years you will likely be able to buy drives twice as big for what you pay now.
You missed the point. I'm not comparing a 1TB drive from 2014 to a 1TB drive today. Hard drives work on supply and demand, OEM's produce certain sizes of drive, the ones they want to sell are priced more favourably per TB than those that are not being produced/are in short supply. In 2014 it was probably still 2TB and possibly 3TB drives and the sweet spot was around the £36-38/TB mark from memory. Today the sweet spot is 4TB drives and around £27/TB, i've just paid £23/TB. If you go above or below the capacity point the market wishes to push, you pay a premium, either way stop comparing the price of 1TB drives, they weren't the optimum choice in 2014 and they certainly aren't now.
I wasn't responding to you lol
My idea was to buy one drive for now to keep me save as one of my 1.5tb die so now I have that feeling in my stomach..... I was thinking of buying 6/8TB WD red with extended warranty and in September to pick up NAS and one more drive for redundancy... As I want to move all my data to new nas.. so the 4 drives I have can go to heaven.
That doesn't alter your comparison being flawed unfortunately
Also 4TB starts from £108 all in (£27/TB) elsewhere, based on OCUK prices the only 4TB £130 drive is the WD Blue (£32.74/TB) which can be easily found for £117 (or 29.25/TB) elsewhere. Given it's only a 2 year warranty product i'd be tempted to look at other items like the X300 or Ironwolf which are both cheaper and have an extra year of warranty. Recommending Segate on here may attract a negative comment, they had issues for a while, much like IBM/Hitachi or OCZ have, but the enterprise and NAS drives review OK and seem to have a much more reasonable failure rate relative to other options.
Due to massive issues in the past I wouldn't touch the Bolton place, never even look at prices on there, my comparisons are simply what I paid on OCUK in the past and now, buy off the ******* ***** if you wantThat doesn't alter your comparison being flawed unfortunately
Also 4TB starts from £108 all in (£27/TB) elsewhere, based on OCUK prices the only 4TB £130 drive is the WD Blue (£32.74/TB) which can be easily found for £117 (or 29.25/TB) elsewhere. Given it's only a 2 year warranty product i'd be tempted to look at other items like the X300 or Ironwolf which are both cheaper and have an extra year of warranty. Recommending Segate on here may attract a negative comment, they had issues for a while, much like IBM/Hitachi or OCZ have, but the enterprise and NAS drives review OK and seem to have a much more reasonable failure rate relative to other options.
Due to massive issues in the past I wouldn't touch the Bolton place, never even look at prices on there, my comparisons are simply what I paid on OCUK in the past and now, buy off the ******* ***** if you want
I've used pretty much everyone over the years (believe it or not people did purchase hardware before OCUK - it was just harder to find *good* hardware and rather than forums we used newsgroups), if I have issues they get sorted via the card issuer, it's rare a company who are in the wrong will risk it's merchant services account and the agro of a justified charge back. Either way nothing to do with the place you're suggesting and on drives I prefer to deal direct with the OEM for RMA - it's generally quicker and usually easier as in WD's case they tend to offer you the option of an advanced replacement on the higher end stuff. That said I have don't have many failures and the last advanced replacement WD shipped me was DOA.
To be honest I would have gone bigger and was looking at the 8Tb drives also but my Buffalo NAS has a 4Tb limit and even using the 6Tb drives was a risk for me. As it turned out the 6Tb drives wouldn't actually work in RAID5 due to the created array being larger than 16TiB so I had to hack into the NAS to get an SSH prompt then did some poking around to reduce the size of each data partition on each drive, by 5Gb as it happens before the NAS was happy.
In hindsight, the 8Tb drives would have worked but I'd have to configure them in RAID10 else I'd be well over the 16TiB limit.
Anyway back to advice, get as large a drive as you can afford and make sure you have some redundancy, so for example I have most of my important stuff like pictures backed up to my NAS, then my PC and then also to 2 USB external drives, you can never be too safe especially with digital images.
In hindsight, the 8Tb drives would have worked but I'd have to configure them in RAID10 else I'd be well over the 16TiB limit.
Anyway back to advice, get as large a drive as you can afford and make sure you have some redundancy, so for example I have most of my important stuff like pictures backed up to my NAS, then my PC and then also to 2 USB external drives, you can never be too safe especially with digital images.
Be aware that to use a NAS, it has to wipe the drives on first use. So any data you have on an existing HDD will be wiped when you set up a NAS. They don't use NTFS, they use EXT4 or BTRFS.
Yep, been there
It must have taken something like 5 days to backup my NAS and then restore it once the larger disks were installed and working. Kept on thinking there must be faster way of doing this but alas there wasn't.I think I will pick up a 8TB and in September two more with nas. Would it be posible to raid two driver same size 8TB then copy all my staff from one 8TB to two drives and add my first drive to raid?
Not too sure to be honest, I suppose it must depend on the RAID config you choose and the NAS. My old Buffalo NAS for example needs a min of 3 disks in order to complete a RAID5 config and I'm not too sure if after doping this you can then add another disk and grow the space. RAID0 has no resiliency, RAID 1 needs and equal number of disks as does RAID 10.
Not as of yet
Still I would never buy mechanical hard drive used without warrant...Not as of yet
Most put up a SMART test showing it's fine, used doesn't always mean bad although I would probably never want a used PSU.