I’m close to the point where my 8 TB backup disk drives need to be replaced by something bigger. No problem I thought, I’ve had those drives for four and a half years now, so bigger drives will probably come at the same price by now. I expected around 150 euros per 20 GB drive. Well, that didn’t quite work out.
Upgrading to bigger drives meant at least double capacity to last another 4 to 5 years. At the time of writing, 20 TB HDDs are now on the market but instead of a drop in price it looks like pricing has remained quite the same per TB. The cheapest external 20 TB HDD with USB 3.0 I could find came at 396 euros. That’s far away from the 150 euros I expected.
Let’s do the maths here. Back in 2020, that 8 TB drive cost 150 euros, which is 18.75 euros per TB. The 20 TB drive I bought in October 2024 cost 396 euros, which is 19.8 euros per terabyte. I then had a look if the 8 TB got a bit cheaper in the last 5 years, which was also not the case, they are still around 150 euros. Quite interesting, because if you query the Internet, it will tell you that the price per terabyte has dropped in the last 4 years. But I can’t see that in the real word. Looks like the AI is hallucinating 🙂