 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. I wanted to do a quick price comparison just out of curiosity. Well, I was curious about two things actually. Firstly, what is like the biggest hard drive you can currently get if you're looking to archive video data and you want to keep and you're okay with keeping it cold. I'm not going to go into the whole subject of bit rod data rod and why it's better to keep it on and yes, but if your heart is set on keeping it cold for whatever reason, hard drive is definitely a viable option. You do have other media that are used for this purposes like pretty as is pretty well known LTO tape is often used for archiving. But if you just want to go down the HDD aka hard drive route and instead of buying a bunch of them, you wanted to buy the biggest one you could find. Then firstly, how big is the biggest one you can find? So I'm going to try to answer two questions in this video for myself and for anyone else who's crazy enough to be interested. Firstly, how big are the hard drives that you can currently get? How much do they cost? And on a per terabyte basis, how much cheaper does that work out than simply buying normal size gigabyte hard drives? So I'm using new egg as the research research and inverted commas tool for this brief trip down a rabbit hole and I just went on to their page for desktop internal hard drives because I'm a fan of using internal ones with an enclosure for even for archiving stuff. It's pretty easy. And then on the left, they have a capacity filtering tool and it starts off as the smaller ones. Then they have this category called four terabytes and higher and that undocks and it gets all the way down to 20 terabytes. So that's the first question answered. Currently, you can get hard drive storage single hard drives in the 3.5 inch form factor up to 20 terabytes. And you can see there's only 36 of these on the market according to new egg versus more than a thousand and four terabytes. So these are like this is like the very top end of the hard drive world. How much does this cost? So as you can see, there's a C gate product for $510 and the cheapest one I'm going to take for the purposes of this comparison, like the cheapest option basically, just to try and make this as cost effect or you know, as fair as possible. In other words, how cheap can you get your 20 terabytes? How cheap can you get your one gigabyte? Obviously, there's more expensive products. So I'm going to take this product here. Let's do this one C gate EXOS A20. So C gate product is the EXOS A20 capacity is 20 terabytes. And this dude's going to set us back $449.99. I'm going to round up to 450. So in the other screen, I'm just putting this data into us into a spreadsheet. So for $450, we're getting 2020 terabytes. So it's 450 over 20. So this is $22 per terabyte at the 20 terabyte scale. So now let us go back to screen one. I'm playing around this OBS today. So you can see, you can see my two screens simultaneously, which is pretty cool, I think. Let's go back to Newegg here and let us go for a normal capacity hard drive. So there's 500 gigs, but let's just do one terabyte as our comparison. And let's take off the 20 terabytes. And now we need to apply. There are going to be many, many more options here. So what I'm going to do is sort by lowest price. So again, we're comparing the bottom ends of both markets. And we're going to just exclude $22. That seems unfathomably cheap for a terabyte unless these are like restored things. You know what? I'm going to actually take off the lowest price. I'm just going to go for like normal one because I'm going to get so that this is like to me a normal price for a terabyte, like 47 bucks, 50 bucks. Let's take this 37 because I know this one is new. I think I actually own this hard drive. So this is a WD blues terabyte desktop hard drive, 7200 RPM, six gigs a second, 64 megabit cash, blah, blah, blah. So I'm going to put this in to our comparison chart brand name here WD blue. And it's the product name is like no idea what the product name is, but it doesn't really matter. Its capacity is one terabyte and its cost is $37.45. So USD over terabyte is going to be well, that's simple. It's 37.45 because it's one terabyte and you're paying and you're paying 37.4 for that. So it's clearly cheaper. So let's just do the maths equals 37.45 over 22, over 22.5. I'm going to jump again to my screen. Whoops. All right, so this is the answer to my question. Judging taking the cheapest 20 terabyte hard drive on the market, that works out as $22 per terabyte. And not the cheapest, but like a pretty average bottom range, one terabyte capacity HDD from WD blue cost $37.45. So that's obviously the same as a per terabyte rate because it's one terabyte in data. And then what I did here was I divided the higher price, the terabyte by the cheaper price. So basically it's 70% more expensive rounding up here on a per terabyte basis to get that. So you do kind of get a volume discount. Now just one final number would be interested to run would be if, how much would that cost if it was a one terabyte for 20? So it's going to be $37.45 by 20. So that would be $700. If the one terabyte HDD were equivalenced to 20 terabyte capacity, it would cost $749 versus $450 for the Seagate EXOS X20. So that's a cost saving of three. My mathematics are embarrassingly bad. I've mentioned, well, basically $300 with $1 off. So it's $300 cheaper to go for the Seagate. So the answer to this question, the two questions are what's the biggest hard drive you can currently buy in the market? The answer to that is 20 terabytes. The second question I asked was, is it cheaper to buy high capacity HDDs versus buying a bunch of lower capacity? Based on this analysis, at least it seems like the answer is yes. And it's exactly in this case, 70% cheaper to get the 20 terabyte one. It would be $750 versus $450 if the one terabyte were equivalenced up to the capacity of the 20 terabyte one. Hope that's of interest to anyone else crazy about data and storing data. I am thinking of picking up, not maybe 20, but maybe like a 16, because I can't actually find 20 terabyte hard drives in my local market here in Israel, but I can find 18. So I'm thinking that when I fill up my next terabyte hard drive for cold video storage, I'm just going to bite the bullet and pick up an 18 terabyte. And that should give me like a long, long time to work with. I've also heard that bit rot can be mitigated by periodically turning on, simply spinning up the hard drive. So I reckon that if I just have one, it's actually less risky. If I have a bunch of them, a bunch of, if I'm using a bunch of hard drives inevitably, a lot of those are going to sit cold for long periods of time versus one really high capacity disk. It's probably going to be a very, very long time before I fill it up. And therefore, it's going to be less periodic disks to be re-spun up. So I hope this cost comparison was interested, interesting if you're interested in data storage. And until the next video.