Love this conversation.
If you are doing what a lot of folks are doing and just dumping some movie files and personal documents and pictures, and later just reading those files back throughout the day? If that's you, buy some QLC NAND instead of spinning rust. I kid. I kid. It's not that easy yet.
In fairness to hard drives, a brand new 2TB hard drive in 2023 only exists to service niche legacy enterprise systems, with some trickle down into retail. According to my good friend, Mr Edward Betts,
https://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/
The going rate for best price per TB is about $15.00 right now for hard drives, which is interesting given the mix of sizes, SKUs and that follow up to about $18.
My same dear friend reports on pricing for SSDs as well, so we can compare apples-to-apples for how pricing was sourced.
The going rate for a good deal on SATA SSDs? $30 a TB. NVME? $32 a TB.
So based on pricing and relative performance to size ratio, we can pretty much conclude that SATA SSDs for this market are basically a waste of money relative to NVME pricing. Obviously platform restrictions apply, good reasons exist, caveat exemptor.
But we can also conclude that HDD is still king in
price/TB. It's up to you if relative performance is a factor,
price/TB/insert_relative_permormance_rating ?
In other words, the price per TB is approximately 2x right now, which is actually very good if we consider how much faster NVME is. It's not that long ago that "
Ryan's Law" of $0.10/GB was the standard to be judged.
$65 / 2048 GB = $0.03173828125/GB
So the cost per GB is less than $0.10/GB, which means we have indeed met Ryan's Law according to current NVME pricing. Thanks PCPer.