10TB Hard Drives To Possibly Cost $100 By 2025

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For over a decade, Backblaze has been managing hard disks for its cloud storage and data backups. The company has collected and recorded information on the 265,332 HDDs it has purchased since 2009, providing a clear picture of the cost per gigabyte. In 2009, the average cost of a gigabyte of storage was $0.11. By 2017, when Backblaze began to purchase 16TB HDD units, that cost had dropped to $0.03 per gigabyte.

Today, the cost has dropped to a remarkable $0.014 per gigabyte. NAND flash-based SSDs have become the preferred choice for consumer technology, yet magnetic disks remain popular in data centers and enterprise environments. Hard disks are still evolving and the numbers provided by Backblaze show that they remain a convenient and affordable option compared to the largest SSD models on the market. As the cost of HDD storage continues to decrease, it’s likely that magnetic disks will remain a popular choice for the foreseeable future.

From 2009 to November 2022, magnetic storage costs have dropped an astounding 87.4 percent per terabyte. But the biggest reduction has been seen in the past five years, with a 56.36 percent decrease in the cost per gigabyte of all drives–equating to a 0.52 percent decrease per month since January 2009. Manufacturers are continuously finding new ways to fit more platters into the same 3.5″ form factor, increasing storage density while also improving energy consumption and production costs. When will this bottomless race to cheaper HDD prices come to an end? Backblaze claims that mid-2025 will bring the next milestone, with the expectation of the average cost of 22TB and 24TB drives being just $0.01 per gigabyte. And this is a stable street price, not a sale price, the company adds.