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It’s been awhile since we’ve covered price trends in the storage market, but recent fluctuations in the consumer hard drive segment warrant attention. 18 months after the Thailand floods that critically damaged vital hard drive production facilities, what do prices look like? How have SSD costs changed over the same period — and what sort of drives are people buying?

Kris Kubicki, of Dynamite Data, helped provide a comprehensive data set that answers these questions stretching back to April, 2011. The figures presented here are whole-market averages weighted by product popularity. They reflect what people are paying on average. SSD prices tend to vary considerably depending on product age, controller configuration, and performance — you can beat the SSD per GB figure by a fair margin if you shop around and watch for sales. The sheer size of DynamiteData’s database gives us much better visibility into price shifts across the entire internet rather than spot-checking a basket of products.

Hard drive prices recede

Almost a year ago, we predicted that hard drive prices would gradually decline, returning to pre-flood levels very slowly. Major manufacturers took advantage of the event to drive record profits and retire less-profitable lines in favor of higher capacities and drives that use a smaller number of platters.

At NewEgg, 7200RPM 3TB drives are as low as $135 (4.5 cents per GB). 4TB drives started off with a small price premium, but have since fallen as low as $189 (4.7 cents per GB). That’s actually slightly lower than the graph shown above, but remember — it’s a weighted graph that covers the entire HDD market, rather than focusing on a single product. After having nearly doubled during the flood, we can safely say prices are trending slightly below the 2011 level.

If you held off on upgrading after the floods and haven’t looked back since, it’s time to buy. The market has re-corrected. The price spike delivered some strong profits to Western Digital and Seagate, but as we predicted at the time, those jumps were temporary; neither manufacturer has taken advantage of the situation to gouge consumers. (Whether other retail vendors engaged in predatory pricing in the wake of the floods is a different question).

SSD prices stabilize, but capacities are rising

SSD prices follow a different curve. Instead of the slow, steady decline towards pre-flood levels, they’ve actually risen very slightly since November.

What’s more interesting, in this case, is the way drive densities have changed. The following graph shows SSD capacities starting in April, 2012 (the two line graphs started in April, 2011) through the present day.

Next page: SSD pricing and the new solid-state sweet spot…