photka - stock.adobe.comNewsFlash drive prices bump along, as SAS HDDs gain mystery bounceFlash drive prices drop again, but slowly, as they bump along after highs in late 2023. Meanwhile, spinning disk HDD prices experience a rare flutter, with SAS cost per gigabyte rising 18%ByAntony Adshead,Storage EditorPublished: 04 Mar 2025 10:33 Solid-state drive (SSD) prices per gigabyte (GB) dropped over the last two quarters since the beginning of September 2024 while SAS hard disk drive (HDD) prices increased over the same period.Flash drive prices (MLC, TLC and QLC) fell from an average of $0.085/GB to just under $0.079/GB. Thats a 7% decrease.At the same time, SAS spinning disk prices per gigabyte rose from $0.041 to $0.049, a rise of 18%. The reason isnt apparent, but there was a flurry of high-capacity HDD drive launches in 2024, including Western Digitals 32TB (terabyte) shingled drive and Toshibas 24TB and 28TB units.Prior to the recent two quarters, flash drive prices had fallen in the first three quarters of 2024 to $0.085/GB. That was a slide of just above 10% since April and followed price-per-gigabyte highs earlier in the year.Flash prices hit a recent ceiling in late 2023 and the early months of 2024 when drive makers slowed production in an attempt to raise prices and boost profitability. SSD prices per gigabyte reached an average of $0.095 by April 2024, which was a rise of 26.67% since autumn 2023.Many at the time believed SSD prices would achieve even greater highs in 2024, but while production increased, customer demand did not, and prices decreased.Meanwhile, average spinning disk (SAS and SATA) hard drive prices have hardly moved, with a rise since September 2024 from $0.039 to $0.041 now. That, however, masks the 18% increase in SAS drive prices over the same period.The figures here result from exclusive analysis by Computer Weekly that gathers drive prices weekly from Amazon.com that are aggregated byDiskprices.com(see graph). Since March 2023, more than 65,000 drive prices and specs have been amassed, with averages calculated every week for TLC, QLC and MLC/unspecified flash drives, as well asSAS and SATA spinning disk.The analysis uses Diskprices.coms collation of new drive prices that it takes from Amazon.com, with an average of more than 500 disk prices and specifications processed each week. Data is then filtered by flash and spinning disk type and average price per gigabyte calculated for each week.While the analysis is based on Amazon.com prices, which are aimed at consumers and SME customers, the volume of data gathered helps to show trends in drive pricing. We use it here as a proxy for drive prices because of the absence of price data from enterprise drive and storage array makers.Price per gigabyte is a major consideration for customers, but total cost of ownership over a drives lifecycle is also important, with purchase cost, energy usage and maintenance costs key among them.Data gathered covers drives that range in capacity from less than 1TB up to 26TB for HDDs and up to 12TB for SSDs, with an average of 3.8TB per drive offered for sale.SSD costs more per drive to buy than spinning disk, but maintenance costs are often lower. Cloud storage provider Backblaze whichpublishes reliability figuresfor the 300,000-plus drives in its estate found its SSDannual failure rate(AFR) to be 0.9% in mid-2023. Theres been no SSD AFR stats for SSDs from Backblaze since, but for HDDs the figure for 2024, reported in February 2025, was 1.57%.Read more about flash and HDDStorage technology explained flash vs HDD: In this guide, we examine the differences between flash storage and HDD, the rise of NVMe and much denser formats such as QLC, and whether or not flash will vanquish HDD in the all-flash datacentre.Flash prices drop as drive production increases but demand lags: Flash prices were high in the early part of this year as a result of manufacturer production squeezes but have since dropped because demand has been slack, with flash now costing just under $0.10 per gigabyte.In The Current Issue:An action plan for net zero compatible with budget constraintsWhat is Dunelm doing for women in tech?Download Current IssueSLM series - IBM: Why smaller AI models unlock value at the edge CW Developer NetworkDigital Disruption, the Future of Work, and the Evolving Role of Print Quocirca InsightsView All Blogs