It’s incredible how much the prices have fallen and that’s how it should be. Sure, I bought the 960 close to launch but still the difference is staggering.
The 960 Evo still chugs along albeit it’s a new one because a few months after I bought it, I had to RMA it. I guess that’s what happens when you are an early adopter. I lost a few hours of work when the original 960 Evo decided to stop working but it also taught me to be more paranoia with backups.
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Spinny drives are definitely going up in price. Recently did a NAS build (5x16tb in z1), and disks were the biggest cost by far. And then like a couple weeks after I pulled the trigger on the disks, I couldn’t find anything comparable that was anything close to what I paid - easily 20-30% more expensive at best. I’m very glad I bought them when I did!
If I had to guess, consumer-grade PCs are starting to shift to SSDs exclusively now that NVMe can be had dirt cheap for decent quality. I think huge old-school disks are basically being mostly relegated to data centers now, and even then, the demand isn’t what it was before (again, due to far cheaper SSDs across the board, even at the enterprise/DC tier). I would further hypothesize that the recent cliff-like price hike may have been due to retailers burning through available inventory, and now they’re dealing with major HDD manufacturers seriously scaling back production capacity.