3 years ago
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Prices for 1TB external drives haven’t dropped much over the years, and, in fact, the average price of these drives appears to have returned to the R875 mark after decreasing to around R740 in 2022.
Furthermore, the average price of a 1TB portable drive today is similar to 2012.
MyBroadband asked several hardware distributors and retailers for insight as to why the prices of these drives haven’t declined as one would expect with technological advancements.
Wootware told MyBroadband that it had observed more popularity among higher-capacity drives, with its customers favouring 10TB to 14TB portable drives.
With little demand for the 1TB variations, it is challenging to implement significant price cuts.
“With storage demands forever increasing, we’ve found the bigger capacity drives to be more popular,” Wootware said.
“More specifically, we have found the 10TB to 14TB external drives to be the most popular.”
“At this stage, we do not see much demand for the smaller 1TB external drives, perhaps because 1TB SSDs are getting closer and closer to the same price points,” it added.
Dreamware Tech director Brent Raftopoulos agrees, adding that 1TB portable drives aren’t popular due to their capacity-to-cost ratio.
“The demand for 1TB is not as high as the other capacities purely due to the capacity-to-cost ratio,” he said.
“Most 1TB drives don’t offer as much value to the end user as a 2TB or higher when you calculate how much each MB costs on the unit. I’d say the 1TB (while still having some demand) is our lowest-demand portable drive.”
MyBroadband also asked Axiz and Pinnacle for insight into the price of 1TB external drives over the years, but they had not responded by the time of publication.
The table below tracks the average price of 1TB portable drives from 2012 to 2023.
Average 1TB portable hard drive prices dropped to a low of R738 in 2022 after having been at R881 the year before.
In early 2023, the average price of a 1TB portable drive now sits at R875 — R2 lower than in 2012.
South African consumers saw the price of these drives drop to R789 in 2018 and 2019. However, they rose again to R824 in 2020 and even higher in 2021.
Previously, hardware retailers provided MyBroadband with several possible reasons.
Wootware Computers founder Rory Magee said it could be because demand for physical storage means has declined.
“It could be a variety of factors [such as] faster Internet connections leading to people using streaming services and needing less local storage,” he said.
He added that another possible reason could be that solid-state drives compete with conventional storage.
Another aspect to consider is that portable hard drive manufacturers are constantly enhancing transfer rates and using more advanced USB connections, which likely impacts the cost of producing such equipment.
Raftopoulos explained that the minimum price of portable drives would reach a limit.
“Eventually, they will reach the lowest price possible in order to remain profitable to both the manufacturer and their various distribution channels,” she said.
US cloud storage and data backup company Backblaze agrees. According to a blog post from the company, the prices of 1TB portable drives haven’t dropped significantly over the years, but the average price per gigabyte (GB) has fallen substantially.
Backblaze noted that the rate of decline of the average cost per GB has slowed in recent years. However, this is to be expected as it approaches a minimum.
Looking at larger portable drives — specifically 8TB, 12TB, 14TB, and 16TB drives — Backblaze said the average cost per GB dropped by over 56% between 2017 and November 2022.
“From 2017 to November 2022, the average cost per gigabyte decreased by 56.36% for all of the drives ($0.033 (R0.56) down to $0.0144 (R0.24)),” it said.
“That’s over 9% per year on average across the four drive sizes.”
English (US)