The cost of storage has exploded - so, has this changed anything for you?

Karim D. Ghantous · February 27

Some storage and memory components have gone up in price by a factor of three or more. So I wonder: are you going to change anything about how you do your job?

For example, you could not buy SSDs and just use HDDs. HDDs are fast enough these days, I think, and they certainly hold more data per dollar. Or, you could go back to shooting 2K. Or 4K but with more compression.

I'm just curious, really. I do not need that much storage because I don't do professional video and I don't shoot very high resolution photos. I'd be happy with a HDD, at least for photography.

Daniel D. Teoli Jr. · February 28

Some changes. I have been making do with what I got for now. I wanted to buy more HDD, but have been holding off. I've got quite a bit of SSD. Someone had told me AI is grabbing it all up so that is why the price rise. Another one said tariffs caused it. But have no idea.

A lot of my stuff gets put on M-Disc DVD, M-Disc BD-R and archival BD-R for an optical disc library. But M-Disc is not cheap either. M-Disc skyrocketed in price after covid hit. So, some of my archive does not need hard drives. I would have liked to get into LTO, but it is too complex setting it up and the drives are too $$ for me.

I got tons of films that need scanning. Luckily for me they are 75% - 80% shorts and don't require massive storage like feature films. They can be handled with optical disc. But if I scanned them at 5K and above then there may be a problem with it and fitting on discs.

Edited February 28 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

Robin Phillips · February 28

havent had a large project since the prices shot up, but its gonna be a problem. if you need 100tb + for a show and drive prices even just double, its gonna be a bad time.

will say Im kicking myself for not grabbing a bunch of 8tb nvme drives while they were still "cheap"

Tyler Purcell · February 28

I knew this was going to happen and bought a ton of storage before the prices went up. I did miss out on the HDD's tho, I feel stupid for not filling a box with them because I didn't feel they would go up THAT much, seeing as they aren't used for AI workflow. I've seen around a 30% rise in HDD's over the last few months, but I think the older tech drives we are using today, will be displaced/discounted shortly when the laser based drives are released later this year. The "classic" HDD tech will slowly be discontinued and they'll blow things out, so don't fear about HDD as of yet.

SSD/NVME, we're totally screwed on. The current pricing isn't even based on today's manufacturing either, most of the current inventory was made BEFORE the shutdown of consumer devices. So yea, the prices went up fast, but the moment those consumer companies like SanDisk have to use higher priced NAND's, oh gosh it's all over. I feel we will see prices double from what they are today when that happens. I have a total of 5 SanDisk Professional 4TB NVME's that I bought right before the prices went up, paid around $330 - $380 for each of them. Today they're $580 - $630 depending on where you look. I have a feeling 4TB NVME's, which are the sweet spot, will be around $800 in an enclosure shortly. They'll market them as "Thunderbolt 5" so people will think they're special, but it'll be the same Gen 4 4TB NVME we've seen for a while.

My goal is to buy some HDD's once the prices start dropping again, I generally get the 18 - 24TB refurbished ones from Seagate and simply store them as single drives in my safe. I have drives that go back to 2003 still running great. I keep 3 backup's of "final" projects. One on dropbox/cloud, one on a 2.5" 4TB shuttle drive and the master files/finished edits on those bare 18 - 24TB HDD's. Spreading out their location helps a lot, we're going to be paying for vault space shortly to help with this. If you power up HDD's once every year, you can generally get pretty good life out of them. They need to be on and spinning for a few days, just to keep the bearings from ceasing. I pulled a drive from 2009 out of my safe few days ago, ran great.

Karim D. Ghantous · March 1

Thanks, everyone.

6 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

I think the older tech drives we are using today, will be displaced/discounted shortly when the laser based drives are released later this year.

Wait wait wait. What is this sorcery of which you speak?

And thanks for the tip about storing HDDs. Good to know.

Tyler Purcell · March 1

4 hours ago, Karim D. Ghantous said:

Thanks, everyone.

Wait wait wait. What is this sorcery of which you speak?

Yea check out HAMR and ePMR laser HDD recording, it's very fascinating. They have some smaller (30TB) drives out, but the next generation which is around a year out, will be in the 40 - 50TB and SSD speeds, around 600MB/s throughput, so around tripe that of a typical single HDD.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/western-digital-unveils-massive-40tb-hdd-that-records-data-using-lasers-plans-100tb-hamr-hard-drives-by-2029

4 hours ago, Karim D. Ghantous said:

And thanks for the tip about storing HDDs. Good to know.

Fo sho!

Where I love LTO tape, because they keep changing formats every year or two, which means in 5 - 6 years you need to upgrade everything. With HDD"s, SATA hasn't changed much outside of performance metrics for 25 years. Unless there is a new "SATA" type that is not backwards compatible, then maybe we could have a discussion about something else. But frankly, HDD's sitting on shelves in a static bag, in a plastic pelican case, should last a lot longer than an LTO solution and I don't trust solid state at all.

Karim D. Ghantous · March 2

19 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Yea check out HAMR and ePMR laser HDD recording, it's very fascinating. They have some smaller (30TB) drives out, but the next generation which is around a year out, will be in the 40 - 50TB and SSD speeds, around 600MB/s throughput, so around tripe that of a typical single HDD.

I like it! Partly because it's an unexpected comeback from an older medium (but with a serious upgrade). It's as if film got 20 stops of latitude and digital is 'stuck' at 17! Progress doesn't always take the path we assume.