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.
This is how hardware should work! Overtime what was bleeding edge is now the norm and as such should be priced accordingly..... Looking at you Nvidia
nVidia GPUs:
970GTX was 329$ in 2014
1070GTX was 379$ in 2016
2070RTX was 499$ in 2018
3070RTX was 499$ in 2020
4070RTX is 599$ in 2023
Probably, the 5070 in 2025-6 will be 650-700.
Then ya got the 8800GTX in 2006, with a MSRP at a cool FIVE HUNDRED NINETY NINE US DOLLARS, or 900USD in now-money.
Granted, that was an outlier at the time, but still!
I opted for 2x7900GT cards in SLI in my first self-built monster machine, for Crysis. 330USD each. That thing was a monster. Ran Crysis at 40-50FPS!
…bought an Athlon 64x2 4400+ for some 460USD… it dropped to like 200 just a month or so later when Intel’s Core series was a smash hit.
$109 for an 840 EVO 250 GB in November 2014. Still rocking it to this day. Was absolutely thrilled to get it then. People don't fully grasp the paradigm shift that SSDs brought in terms of boot times. For practically the first time in personal computing the average user had a quantifiable metric to judge a PC's speed. It's arguably the largest leap in terms of technology advancement to speed advancement in PCs.
I'll be making the leap to SSD in the near future. I picked up a couple m.2s a couple months ago and just haven't gotten around to adding them. Well, turns out it'll just be one because adding the second nukes all but 2 of my SATA ports and my 4x pcie apparently... At least the second one won't go to waste in my laptop.
I had a 2010 Macbook Pro that I was about to throw away a couple of years ago because it was unusable - beach ball of death constantly. I bought a 500GB SSD for around $70 AUD, went on YouTube and about an hour later booted up; it was like a new laptop. I eventually chucked it earlier this year because the battery had it and I didn't want to spend any more on it.
You young fellas sit back, I'mma tell you about the time in '96 that I bought a 1GB hard drive for a thousand doll-hairs. And then later that year got 64MB of RAM for another thousand doll-hairs, and the next month the price dropped in half. I could run two java programs AT THE SAME TIME!
My father went a bit nuts and bought our first family computer some time around '85. It was an 8088 Turbo XT with a 10MB hard drive. It was something like a $3,000 computer (which would be similar to $8,500 today, with inflation). That hard drive was so big, we thought we'd never fill it. The biggest game we had at the time, Star Flight took up two 360KB floppies, and both my brother and I could each have our own copies on the hard drive, without worrying about space. It was amazing.
But, tech moves on and what was once "bleeding edge" becomes old hat. I'm pretty sure there are calculators which can emulate that entire 8088. And, 10MB is a rounding error on modern drives. I also have little doubt that, 40 years from now we'll look back at 1TB hard drives and think "oh, how quaint".
I bought a Pentium 75 in 1995. It had a 1GB hdd and 16MB of ram with Windows 3.11 and 28.8k modem. It cost me $5000. In 1995 dollars that's $9,977.92 which seems insane.
Our first family computer they offered to double the HDD space to 20mb for an extra $500. "You'll never fill it up!" they claimed. My dad, being a practical guy, couldn't figure out why he would want to pay extra for something he'd never use.
No joke though, in the 90s you could buy a HDD with a size advertised on the box and get it home to find that the drive was actually bigger than advertised. They were making advances so fast in the manufacturing that they literally didn't have the time (or it wasn't worth the cost) to keep up with updating the boxes.
It's amazing seeing 2TB M.2 NVME drives being sold for less than what I bought my original 120GB SATA SSD for.
On a side note I bought 5x4TB Seagate Iron Wolf drives in 2018.
They were cheaper then, than now.
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.
It's about time. SSD prices stagnated for years!
Here are my purchases over the past years:
Today the Samsung 970 EVO+ NVME 2TB is $109. The 870 EVO 4TB SATA is $170. Each about half the price as one year ago.
I ordered a 870 EVO 4TB since all the time spent on self hosted has been eating up my NAS storage.
It's been this way continuously since computer memory was thought up.
Here's a chart of memory price change since 1957
I plan on building a new desktop sometime around black friday. Here's hoping we'll get some great deals like this then, too?
Don't wait for black Friday, get the parts in pieces as you find them on sale.
Black Friday is when companies dump subpar parts to low prices just to get rid of them. Don't bank it all on that sale.
Good call, and good idea! Duly noted.
Set your build goals now (check !buildapc@lemmy.world ) and use alerts/price trackers to see good deals. There are some good deals on Black Friday but many are bogus, its to better to check every now and then for deals.
Even internal hard drives are falling in price every few months. A WD Red Pro 18 TB is cheaper than a 16TB two months ago. I guess the strategy is to wait until the last moment before you buy storage now.
Amazing to see!
By this point do USB sticks make sense anymore as opposed to a super fast SSD inside an enclosure? It seems like the former hasn't seen any technical progress in years either
I usually have one USB stick tied to my keys, just in case. I can't imagine carrying an enclosed SSD everywhere with me.
They can be failry small though, no? The NVME form factor allows for something that is maybe two times longer than a usual USB stick, so it's still reasonably small and a tad harder to lose
Pretty sure Apple still charges £300 😂
My first job was in a computer store in 1994 and a 4MB stick of RAM for a PC was $140.
Those were very important 4MB RAM sticks, you needed at least 4MB and recommended 8MB of RAM to play the just released Doom!
For over a decade I've been waiting for HDD prices to fall to 10 € per TB. Guess I'll see that in SSDs first.
You should note that the 960 is the one where Samsung got caught swapping in sub par bad performance parts into the same name. That's part why it got THAT cheap rather than it being a natural evolution.
It's incredible how much the price of flash storage has fallen lately. I had to replace a 1tb 2.5' drive lately and an SSD was €5 more than a mechanical drive.
I'm picking up a 2TB 980 Pro for $99 on Prime Day today, it's ridiculous and wild.
I bought 4TB Crucial ssd, MX500 for 87€, brand new. It was on huge sale. And 2y ago i paid almost 60€ for 512 gb same model... so yeah
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
