A 30TB TLC enterprise SSD now costs $22,600, 6.5 times higher than the $3,460 it fetched around this time last year, and an equivalent hard drive costs $1,216, putting flash at 18.6 times the price of disk per terabyte. On those numbers, a 25PB AI storage build comes to $51.60 million all-flash against $12.86 million as a hybrid SSD-plus-HDD system. The figures come from the August update to VDURA's Flash Volatility Index, published by a vendor that sells exactly that kind of hybrid system, and they record a further 5% flash price rise in July with the TLC-to-HDD multiple easing from a 23.2 times peak in Q1.
The hybrid option only works if you can buy the hard drives, though, and Seagate and Western Digital have both told investors their nearline HDD output is sold out through 2027. Anyone without a long-term supply contract is paying spot prices for the disk, not the $1,216 in VDURA's table.
