Thank you for understanding what I was posting about, that was my point. Unfortunately someone immediately responded with a bad attitude at my post and attacked me…
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Other SSD Prices for our older Macs...WTF!!!!
- Thread starter DouglasCarroll
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
CPU and motherboards are starting or will start to increase too.
MarkC426
macrumors 601
I have an app by Micromat (makers of TechTool Pro) called Lifespan which does this.
Lifespan 2 - Micromat
Version 2 Buy Now New in Lifespan 2 Lifespan Widgets Keep the life remaining on your SSDs even more accessible. Lifespan now includes a widget for Macs running macOS 11 ‘Big Sur’ and newer. In macOS 14 ‘Sonoma’ and newer, place the widget on your desktop to keep closer tabs on your SSDs. Drives...
www.micromat.com
fatTribble
macrumors 68030
With these prices I’m tempted to go back to floppy disks 🤭
TheShortTimer
macrumors 68040
I've got a tape unit somewhere for my VIC-20…
M.Brane
macrumors regular
I can remember paying over $400 for 128 MB of RAM, and nearly as much for an 18GB HDD that did a whopping 20 MBPS if you had a SCSI bus that fast. Most at the time were 10.
No. The point is that the statement "prices are always going to end up trending upwards over time" has always been incorrect in the world of tech. Every year for 40+ years we have gotten more value every year.
Especially in memory the constantly dropping prices have been extreme. In the past I paid ~$1k to add 4 MB of third party RAM to a Macbook, and today it costs me the same $1k to add +80 GB of Apple RAM to a Macbook Pro.
It is a huge deal for RAM prices to suddenly be increasing by 200+ % after always routinely decreasing for 40+ years.
LOL. You say you “don’t care” about the price but then complain about the price. Why are you are looking at super high-priced drives from OWC, when your stated goal is to extend the useful life of an old Mac? $400 is not the going price for a 1TB SATA SSD you would use for that.
Here's a 1 TB Crucial SATA SSD that would totally get the job done for $129. And if you don't like that one, here's a good 1 TB Samsung SATA SSD for $40 more. Both from reputable manufacturers, both with warranties.
Last edited:
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
Yeah, and people used to use punch cards before that, on mainframes that cost more than a house and would be outclassed by a Furby. Not sure what your point is.
It’s not just about SSDs. this happens with overall PCs build up too. Last month I planned to build a custom desktop for personal use with reasonable but solid specs: something like an Intel Core i7-14700K, 16 GB DDR5 RAM, a GIGABYTE RTX 3060 WindForce OC 12 GB graphics card, a 1 TB NVMe SSD , a decent Z790 motherboard, quality 750 W PSU, and a good case + cooler. When I first priced everything with local builders and online vendors, the total was around ₹110,000-₹115,000 INR, which looked fair for that hardware.
Fast forward a few weeks, and the exact same spec list was coming out around ₹130,000-₹135,000 INR-more than a 15 % jump in cost without any change in parts. That matches what you see with complete systems in India too: gaming laptops with a 13th Gen i7, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and mid-range RTX GPU are often selling around ₹1.1 lakh to ₹1.5 lakh or more depending on discount and model.
I’m still hesitant to delay the build because prices for RAM, SSDs, and GPUs have been so volatile due to ongoing global chip shortages and supply issues-everything keeps creeping up. For what you’re getting, that price shouldn’t feel so unstable or painful, but unfortunately that’s where the market is right now. It’s honestly unbelievable how much component prices fluctuate.
Last edited:
Bustycat
macrumors 65816
brew install smartmontools and then smartctl -a disk0 on Terminal.(Assumed that you have Homebrew and you referred to your internal storage)
Just read the value of "Wear_Leveling_Count".
Last edited:
DankeBrutus
macrumors regular
Unfortunately, with macOS this only works with internal or PCIe (Thunderbolt) disks by default. You need to lower the security model and install a kernel extension to get SMART info for USB drives.
DankeBrutus
macrumors regular
OWC is my go-to website for Thunderbolt and external accessories, but their standalone drives are not worth it in my opinion.
DankeBrutus
macrumors regular
I bought a HGST refurbished enterprise drive off ebay a couple of years ago and it has been great, and 12TB for $145 CAD (shipping & tax included) is hard to argue with. I checked the same seller and those same 12TB drives are now closer to $300 CAD before tax. Maybe the supply is running low or maybe it is "AI" making storage and memory prohibitively expensive. The last drive I bought was a 1TB SSD from Teamgroup on Amazon for $65. That same drive is now $165.
Plutonius
macrumors G4
It makes it more cost effective to buy a new Mac rather than keeping an old computer alive.
Or now more than ever it makes sense to pull components out of machines heading to the recycle bin and reuse them for upgrades in other machines!!
🙂👍
eyoungren
macrumors Nehalem
I try and find used drives on eBay from private vendors or vendors that seem to be selling in bulk. I have an 8TB drive I got used off eBay for $146 in August 2024. That's a HD of course, not the topic of this thread and 1.5 years ago. But as a used drive, they couldn't charge as much as a new drive. And that drive has been solid.
For my boot drives I try and stick with new.
BeerDrinkerDan
macrumors regular
Chocolate would fall into that category. Basic supermarket 100g own label bars have gone from 33p to 75p after about at decade hovering at the lower price. Even Covid barely made a dent. You can blame two disasterous harvests in the largest cocoa growing regions for that.
I seem to remember Raspberry Pi boards went stratospheric for a year or two when Covid disrupted their supply chains and retail availability ground to a halt. These sort of market blips happen every now and then.
Non-Euclidean
macrumors 6502a
SSDs have jumped 100% in price over the last 2-3 months. If you didn't know this, you weren't paying attention. Its driven by AI datacenter demand.
Yes, prices of computer components have historically gone downwards basically since computers were invented, but that isn't typically what you would see of my goods from an economical sense. The price of everything trends upwards longterm, and this was almost inevitable in my opinion, especially when you consider things like resource scarsity. The only thing the AI boom is doing is accelerating these trends.
Interesting, do you know what data the application is pulling to calculate a % lifespan?I have an app by Micromat (makers of TechTool Pro) called Lifespan which does this.
Lifespan 2 - Micromat
Version 2 Buy Now New in Lifespan 2 Lifespan Widgets Keep the life remaining on your SSDs even more accessible. Lifespan now includes a widget for Macs running macOS 11 ‘Big Sur’ and newer. In macOS 14 ‘Sonoma’ and newer, place the widget on your desktop to keep closer tabs on your SSDs. Drives...
MacInTO
macrumors 68000
There are different reasons for why certain things go up in price. With SSDs and memory chips it is demand from AI companies that are willing to overpay. However in the specific case of cacao, there was a bad harvest and a crop disease leading to a shortage of the commodity leading to a dramatic (4x) price increase in 2024. It's come back down but it's still double from 2023. I do not buy chocolate, but I do but cacao beans and they have doubled in price for me in recent years.
For soda pop/soft drinks in the United States, I bet the price is due to the cost of importing aluminum because the US has imposed tariffs on imported Aluminium. It's probably also companies pushing up the price due to greed and blaming other factors. People are addicted to fizzy drinks so they likely buy regardless of price. Regardless of the aluminium tariffs, the price of soda in bottles should be constant, but I bet greed pushed up the price there also.