News Hard disk supply could take two years to recover

Just did a quick tally and I'm only using 1/5th of my capacity, meaning if my Spinpoint F3 died, I'd still have enough room for what's currently installed on just the 500Gb. I'll just have to do my best to wait out the shortage, download less, and use more USB sticks alongside optical media if the solid state market doesn't seem to be affected.

Have Externals not gone up as far or as fast, just because there's still loads of them around?

 

Bah!

 

My HD failed over the weekend and I nearly had a heart attack when I saw the prices. I got a 1TB drive (Not the one that failed) in Jan for £40 and now they want over 3 times that!

Looks like I will be using an old 400GB IDE drive. No way am I going to pay such extortionate prices!

 

That's more than doubled. I paid £51 for a 2TB a few months ago!

 

I planned to get a 2tb WD green last month but decided not to because it wasn't urgent and I thought I could wait until the last minute and save money. Now my F3 1tb had started making clicking and scraping noises and though it's still under warranty I'll lose all my data if it dies since I haven't got anything to back it up to. Hopefully the increase in demand for SSD's wont raise their prices so I can afford to get a good 120gb boot drive (Ahh, who am I kidding? Of course SSD prices will increase if demand for them does!)

 

Yup, similar situation here. I'm much closer to my capacity, but my spare 500GB spinpoint and my external drive will more than cover my needs; if my 1TB drive pops it's clogs.

It would prompt a much needed clearout too - there's around 200GB of movies on it that I just don't watch all that often. If I get an itch to watch a particular movie, it's only a trip up to the loft to fish out the DVD.

I think I can hold out until prices start to come down.

 

Starting to think my investment in a large stack of bluray writables wasnt so stupid after all.

 

Having planed a purchase of a Synology DS712+ and DX510 loaded with 3TB drives.... I cant believe I did not buy the drives when I had a chance. Still, it happens. Not the first time, wont be the last.

 

No, it was =D

 

A lot of people are getting enclosed hd's from stores like dixons and such and break it open to get the drive out, a lot of them are still sold at lower price.

 

My F3 pretty much kicked the bucket (thank god for multiple partitions) the other week, but I paid circa £80 for it when it was new, so for me the price has basically stayed the same.

The F3 really does seem to have it's problems, not a harddrive for long life!

 

I'm thinking of doing the same. I've seen some going for less than $1 per disc.
Cost per GB bluray discs are a little more than half the price of hard drives. Would be good for making backups

 

This is not going to last 2 years, expect 6 months with a small premium still in place. Media scaremongers are just high on the juice.

 

I'm assuming the fact that stores are stocked up for Christmas explains why externals haven't gone up as much (yet) if they already cost a little more for the enclosure. Anyone that needs a new drive, that might be the way round it - until those stocks also dwindle.

 

Wish I'd bought that 3TB drive now. "£110 is a little much" I said. "Wait a bit longer and get it cheaper" I said. Well look what I got listening to my own advice.
Let that be a lesson to you. Never ever do what I advise

 

fixing one now.. drive looks like it's had it

just better to wait until they get it straitened out.. spinpoint is around 150

 

I added another 1TB drive to my raid5 array last xmas; $42 (£27 inc tax) was too good to resist, so I'm still rockin 1.41TB of free space. I also have a pair of 1.5TB disks in my NAS, but I'm thinkin I may sell those if the price is right.

Edit: Just had a peak at completed listings on ebay, and lots of drives 1TB and up are still going for as little as $50 + ship on this side of the pond.

 

Had a feeling it would take a long time before they get back to nice prices so a possible 2 years, I hope my hdd's hold up well because I don't want to be paying £140 upwards for 2tb hdd when I should have bought a few 2tb drives a couple of months back @ £53 each I very nearly ordered some too .

I imagine in 2 years there will be 5 or even 10tb drives by then anyway.

In all my time on using PC's though I've not had 1 hdd die on me so don't know if it's because I keep them well cooled or because I use diskeepper to keep them always tidy & optimal or both or just plain luck or all the above .

And after saying that I bet they all go & die on me .

 

This is not good, I have 27Tb of storage and wanted to upgrade to 50+ Tb. I guess this might help end the era of electro-mechanical hard drives in favor of SSD and the like.

S*D