HDD Cost Per Gigabyte
StorageNewsletter.com, December 14th, 2022
'A penny for your thoughts' is a common boomer expression (so says my 23 year old). Instead, how about 'a penny for a gigabyte of HDD'? That's new, tech-y, and, well, it's almost true.
When Backblaze purchased HDDs back in 2009, we paid over $0.11 per gigabyte. In 2017, when we did a review of the cost of HDDs, the cost per gigabyte had fallen to just below $0.03 per gigabyte. Today, we can get 16TB HDDs for about $0.014 per gigabyte on average. That's not quite a penny, but we think we'll get there soon enough. In the meantime, let's look at our HDD purchases over the years and see what we can learn about the cost per gigabyte of HDD storage.