The late 2011 Thailand floods sent shockwaves through the market and demonstrated how fragile the modern manufacturing ecosystem can be. Hard drive manufacturers like Western Digital, Samsung, and Toshiba had key facilities located in Thailand, as did some of the major component manufacturers. Hard drive prices skyrocketed in the wake of the floods and stayed up for months. At the time, we predicted it would take 9-12 months for prices to stabilize.

It took longer than that, at least for some businesses. According to cloud data backup provider Backblaze, drive prices have only now returned to previous levels and may still be markedly higher than if the crash had never happened.

I’m not convinced Backblaze’s data extrapolates perfectly to the mass market. While it’s true that the HDD crash sent prices skyrocketing, the floods also drove further consolidation and impacted the total mix of available drives after production came back online. A number of lower-end, lower-capacity storage SKUs simply vanished off the market, replaced by more cost-efficient high-end equipment. It was more efficient, in other words, to rebuild the factories for the latest generation of hardware (or phase out ruined sites) than to repair the old, ruined equipment.

I admit, I’ve also got some issues with the next graph:

The “Status Quo” is what Backblaze would have paid for storage, if it had paid retail. “Actual” is what the company really paid. But it achieved “Actual” by unabashedly buying every single hard drive it could get its hands on, to the point that its own employees were banned from Costco. Backblaze justifies this by claiming it allowed the company to keep its $5-per-unlimited-storage policy. In reality, if your hard drive died in the Bay Area in late 2011, and you had to buy an expensive retail replacement at double the normal price, it was partly because Backblaze wasn’t willing to raise its prices to $6 or $7 as a temporary measure. Given how many tech companies in Silicon Valley had to be doing something similar, I wouldn’t have wanted to need an HDD replacement in the Bay Area for love or money.

According to Backblaze, the price per GB on 4TB drives has finally dropped back to where it was in 2011, which means that even the largest hard drives are now commoditized again. The two year return time isn’t particularly surprising if you consider that the drive manufacturers themselves had every reason to draw out higher prices and earn some profits in the process.

We’d seen signs of a price return some months earlier, but since our comparison basket relies on a different product mix, both measures are likely valid. If you’ve been waiting two years for a drive but are eyeing the 4TB market for Christmas, enjoy the drive — at historically normal prices.

Now read: How long do hard drives actually live for?