My 8TB Seagate failed a week ago and I was looking into new drives. The cheapest HDD was around 25 EUR per TB (for the 18TB ones) and the cheapest SSD were under 50 EUR per TB. No idea where this "7 times cheaper" comes, maybe from 2015.
I ended up buying a 4TB Crucial MX500 with 4TB for 208 EUR (barely enough for my data, but with some cleanup it will hold a year for sure).
Not only it's faster, it's smaller (fits in the NUC), it's quieter and it consumes much less electricity. I don't think I will ever buy an HDD ever again. Maybe for surveillance recording?
Hamr drives and for data center use. Consumer ssds are made very poorly and even premium drives like a Samsung pro won't hold up in a data center environment. Hard drives on the other hand are basically only data center versions now.
The new ones were on sale for $270 so around $10-15 per TB.
The best I can find is $40-50 per TB for SSD. Certainly not 7times more expensive but more like 3-5.
Yea, you can't compare consumer to business. Very different. Article is talking about datacenters, which don't typically rely on consumer grade products.
Maybe regional differences. I've been looking for 3 days last week and have found anything under 20 EUR per TB, more like 25 for non-sketchy sites. For new drives, I'd never buy a refurbished again. SSDs are similarly priced, around 50 per TB for brand named ones.
Not that many 18TB SSDs available though. Might (and probably will) change in the future, but today, if you want massive amounts of storage, HDDs are your only reasonable solution (ignoring magnetic tape) unless you really require the read & write speeds of an SSD.
Imagine Backblaze trying to replace their 46000 16TB HDDs with a few hundred thousand smaller SSDs in their datacenter.