Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information 01-May-2019

[farmerpling2]

Would it be possible to do a pdf version or something of this resource because I don't have Excel and LibreOffice doesn't understand all of the columns and gives errors to the formulas...

Here is a PDF for a trial run. You will have to do FIT TO PAGE" for your printer.
If this is helpful to others, please let me know. Ericloewe's suggestion to use online excel is a good one, except I could not get it to sign in for me. Stupid live account problems... That's another story.

 

[Jatrabari]

Excel online should also work and it's free (mostly).

I tried with Excel Online before already and it didn't work because of unsupported features (Watch Window) in the free version...

EDIT: With Google Sheets the table works fine and it seems also the comments on the columns.

 

[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

07-Nov-2017

I posted a PDF of the spreadsheet printout to see if anyone found it useful. If it is helpful, let me know, otherwise, I will not make any in the future.

1. Starting to add hyperlink for where I found pricing, so people can see where it came from. This will never be perfect, but will be a best possible...
2. Updated some pricing for new drives
3. Updated some characteristics for various drives (i.e. power, etc.). As always if it is blank i was not able to find the information...

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

14-Nov-2017

OK, sports fans... Here is the latest, so far...

1. Removed 4 drives that are not commonly priced. Mainly 5TB drives.
   
2. Updated a bunch of drive prices and added hyperlinks to where the prices came from. You can just click on the price and see where it came from. The prices can still be different as the prices I post were the ones I had at that time. They could be higher or lower the next day.
   This is a pain in the rear, but helps people to find a good price or information...

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[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

25-Nov-2017

Nothing earth shaking

• Updated pricing
• Put Seagate Archive SMR drives back in so people would have comparison points with other SMR drives.
• Added conditional formatting for lowest 20 for $/TB/warranty normalized section.
• Still adding more hyperlinks for pricing, brand and even PDF files that provide additional information for statistics. These will slowly keep being added. At this time I have not been checking to see if all of the hyperlinks are staying valid. Down the...

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[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

11-Dec-2017

• Updated prices/specs on many drives
• Added more drives.
• Toshiba has 14TB CMR drive! This is the first non-SMR disk drive at 14TB. 9 Platters. No idea on price or many other specs on this drive yet. Was just announced Dec 7, 2017.
  
• Added some more 2.5" enterprise drives for those who might be interested in high performance non-SSD drives.

Prices in general do not seem anything special. I am keeping an eye out for some great NAS drive specials, though.

Have a...

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[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

20-Dec-2071

• Updated various pricing
• Added Toshiba 2.4TB 2.5" disk drive
• Updated some specs on new data I came across. There are still holes in data from manufacturers. It surprises me how hard it is to find specs. Usually it is things that the manufacturer does not want shared because it would not look good. Buyer beware!
• I was looking at adding WD Green drives, but noticed that they are not listed on the wdc.com website. Guess I was sleeping and missed them being removed from...

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[Chris Moore]

The news I heard was that the greens had been merged with the blue line.

 

[Johnnie Black]

The news I heard was that the greens had been merged with the blue line.

Correct, greens were replaced by blues over a year ago.

 

[farmerpling2]

OK. Thanks for the confirmation!

 

[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

24-Dec-2017

• Prices updated
• Added 2 columns dealing with acoustic noise. Will add more data to the columns as time goes on.

Merry Christmas!

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[farmerpling2]

There are a couple prices that are currently blank. An example is HGST Hs14. I have yet to find anyone list a price, even MSRP would be better than nothing. If you see any pricing, or for that matter, any data that will fill in a blank field, let me know and I will fill it in. You can ignore acoustics for the time being, since I just started to fill it in...

Have a Happy New Year!

 

[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

3-Jan-2017

Happy New Year to all!!

• Added some new pricing.
• Working on acoustics tabulation. This is not easy. Some manufacturers to do not provide the data at all, or just idle values. IMHO, this is a sign that the numbers that do not provide are likely subpar.
  Also, the values are either expressed in decibel (db) or in bels. As such, not everyone is on the same page. I have to look into converting bels to db, but will do so in the future.

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[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

13-Jan-2017

A Happy New Year to all!

• Updated prices
• Adding more acoustic information. Will show all values in dB. For those companies who use bel's, I will convert to dB's.
  This will take some time, so keep an eye out as I add more specs.
• Added a couple more drives.
• Still looking for a couple drives prices. They are currently blank. If you happen to see a price for them, please pass the URL for the site.

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[dir_d]

Thank You for this, i just stumbled upon it.

 

[farmerpling2]

Thank You for this, i just stumbled upon it.

No Problem! Glad to hear you find it helpful.

If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

 

[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

17-Jan-2018

• Slowly adding more acoustic information.
• Added Toshiba's 2.5" L200 drive. Another manufacturer adding 2.5" drive... Still some2.5" life out there.
  
• As expected, updated many prices.
• Still trying to fill in holes that have no prices.
• Modified colors for energy usage to bright red - worst to dark green best. This tends to make the columns more useful as the colors are more distinct than before.
• Moved 2.5" drives in front of 3.5" of same model.

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[Stilez]

This is a really useful resource for many users. I've used "price per TB-warranty-year" as my own metric for many years, on the basis that if the drive dies shortly after the warranty expires, that's my actual cost.

I have some suggestions:

1. Better date prominence - Ensure the "as at" date is a bit more prominent, putting it in the spreadsheet header (so it shows in the preview on the dl page) and on the download page itself just below the preview.
   
2. Price data scraping - While technical data is stable, the prices aren't. If you aren't already using some kind of automated scraper to get price data, consider it? If you are, then maybe have it include original/current/low/high prices from time to time, and prices in US/EU. The first because it gives a good idea to a user on a budget what is "out there", the second because EU and US are very different on pricing.
   
   A way to get a wide range of price data easily is to scrape "well known" price data sites. I don't know where you are, geographically, but in the EU for example I can use the (English language) German website skinflint.co.uk, feed it a bunch of device IDs in a pre-formed URL, and it'll return a standard page from which one can scrape original, current, low and high prices and current cheapest vendors, across the whole of the EU.
   
   To show how easy it is, here's a typical example URL for Seagate's ST6000NM0024, a typical enterprise 6TB 7200 HDD: https://skinflint.co.uk/?phist=1099786&age=9999. So it could be pretty easy - I think just note the ID for each device, substitute the ID, script an http downloader and feed it the IDs, and regex the HTML to get the price data for that device.
   
   Another similar site is pricespy.co.uk. There are bound to be similar sites for the US.
   
3. Add, if possible, drive data from the hard drive reliability database - If there is a way to do it (sorry to suggest more effort; think of it as the reward for a good job done! :D) then you might want to scrape a summary of the disk reliability survey data against each drive from storage review's long-running reliability database.

 

[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

27-Jan-2018

• Researched and updated prices, Db, watts used, etc., for drives that were without data. Lots of digging around manufacturers manuals.
• Prices also on various drives also updated

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[farmerpling2]

farmerpling2 updated Disk Price/Performance Analysis Buying Information with a new update entry:

7-Feb-2017

• Toshiba is active in adding new drives for consumer and enterprise. They are putting on the full court press in 2.5" with speed and 3.5" in size. Still working on getting prices for some of these newer drives.
• Generally, prices have been holding pretty steady. I would expect to see some price drops this year, as the competition heats up.

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