HDD and SSD Market Pricing Is Increasing.

Prices of HDDs has largely stagnated over the last 6 months, and in some cases for the past 2 years or more. SSD prices has actually increased since the summer.

This is due to global shortage of NAND chips and many delays of 3D NAND production capabilities of everyone else than Samsung. This in combination that the 15k RPM HDD screamers are currently singing their swan song, and enterprises moving increasingly to 3D TLC NAND. Enterprise vendors are already seeing shortages, and the manufacturers are sure to cater to them first for the higher gross margins than consumer markets.

All of this means what we are already seeing: SSD prices are increasing. Today the market prices are much higher than in the summer.

HDD market has been taking a beating, as expected, from the SSD market. As a result they have tightened production, and moved from smaller capacities to the high end of the spectrum. Then all of sudden HDD market is rebounding astoundingly and sales have been increasing in big numbers quarter to quarter.

As a result this might create a kind of domino effect, where SSD prices are in steep increase and shortages, everyone turns to HDDs where manufacturing for smaller capacities has decreased with focus shift on high capacity enterprise drives. SSD prices increasing enterprise might put more emphasis on the high capacity enterprise HDDs as well, increasing their price, and demand even faster than currently. Tom’s hardware reports that many analysts are expecting SSD prices to increase 20-25% in the following months.

If this creates the domino effect, on already stagnated HDD high capacity drive prices, we might see an increase of HDD prices in the same magnitude as well. Expectancy is that this situation is to last the entire 2017 and perhaps deep into 2018 before prices levels to today’s rates again.

We are already seeing this, some additional capacity for SSD series was postponed because the drive models we want either simply are not available, or price has tremendously increased. At the previous price point we would be stuck with previous generation of SSD. HDD prices are exactly the same for some models than a long time ago. Our nearest local vendor has not had a 3TB capacity price decrease for more than 2 years now. Our main vendor from Germany prices have remained fairly stable and the same for the whole year, with the exception of Toshiba’s 5TB drives which had last price drop in the summer.

What does it mean for Your Seedbox?

Initially not much, there is a delay in market prices to service pricing. We will do our best to keep prices the best on the market per TB, but we will need to keep availability of services up as well. This means that we might be forced to increase new slot pricing sometime during 2017. All pricing is “grandfathered”, meaning existing users will enjoy the current pricing, as long as there is no changes to the current service.

This means if you were planning on a upgrade or long term renewal, this might be just the right time to do it. Same goes if you were planning to purchase a new HDD or SSD soon, it might be time to pull the trigger before the shortages start to really show.