Storage Are hard drive prices ever going to go down?

Hi Guys

Title pretty much says it but for any of you not in the know here's the 411 Because of recent floods in Taiwan hard drive production has either halted or drastically got less. this has caused prices to rocket in to the stratosphere.

Will the prices go down any time soon? A few months ago I could have bought a 1TB hard drive for just over £30 but I put it off cause I didn't think it would change. Now this has happened and I'm rapidly running out of space.

Any ideas?

 

Not in the near future no, they are more likely to go up in price.

 

Its only been about 5-6 weeks. Half the country went under water, getting HDD manufacturing back up to speed isnt their top priority right now. Im sure prices will slowly creep down, although WD may stay higher for longer as it was completely knocked out.

 

Same here, I'm starting to delete things...

 

I wasn't trying to be insensitive btw, just getting concerned by the red bar slowly creeping up in My Computer

 

Yea it's called making space... you know delete stuff you don't watch anymore, uninstall completed games or don't plan on playing any time soon.

I can live perfectly with a 160GB HDD (no external HDD). I honestly do not see how people consume more where they actually need more than 500GB of storage (I assume a lot of video's they want to keep absolutely and a large music collection). The only reason why I have a 1TB HDD is for the high disk intensity, so greater performance.

 

all of my music is in FLAC. nuff said. and no I wont be deleting any of that.

 

I have 1 500GB drive with my music and steam and backups on. thats that chocka block (only 20 GB free) and then another 500GB drive with windows, progs, sample libraries such as symphobia etc. I have about 80GBs free on that one. I know 100GB is nothing to shun but I'm just getting a bit concerned that that space will very shortly be gone.

 

I'm in the same boat as you OP. About 80gigs left on my F3, all my music is in FLAC which isn't going anywhere (though I have uninstalled plenty of Steam games). On top of that it's been making scraping noises for the past 3 months whenever data is read / written. I guess I'll have to man up at some point and get a new HDD but I was hoping to upgrade my CPU/Graphics/PSU so that I can play Battlefield 3 properly. Still, it could be worse Also, I'm sure prices will drop again at some point but not noticeably until we're a good way into 2012 I'd imagine.

 

Anyone who needs a new drive is going to have to pay for it sadly!

 

FTFY

 

Good lord, how much music do you have? I have around 8,000 tracks, all with a compression level of 0 and it only takes up around 200 gigs.

 

He might just listen to prog rock where every song is a good 100MB in FLAC cause they're so damn long lol.

 

There's good HDD deals popping up in the Hardware bargains thread from time to time, just keep an eye on it.

 

@Goodbytes 160gb is well and good if all you do is interwebs and the odd game, I have a massive collection or raw photos, not to mention all the HD video I shoot. I'll easily fill a 16gb sd on most shoots, sometimes 2 or 3. Granted not all of that needs kept but it very quickly eats up an F3. Both of mine are very nearly full...

 

@October.. heuuu no.
Excluding games, I have over 35 programs, where several of these program are large like Visual Studio 2010, XP Mode, Office 2010 (of course), and others. By keeping installed games I play only, or plan to replay, I have 4-5 games avg. 20GB+ pictures (ok granted it's not RAW, like yours nor big as 20x my apt building in size), and music (granted Zune pass helps), plus reserved free space for defrag, future updates, future Windows Service Pack. I can safely live under a 250GB HDD. Add DVD backups, for instant play and access, ISO backups from my MSDNAA license, I am still under 500GB.

Look I am not saying that everyone is me or anything like that.

But in most cases, people have PLENTY of space they can clear up:
-> Empty the never cleared up Temp dir
-> Delete old TV shows or old DVD backups that you won't watch again
-> You need to backup the internet
-> Old music that you don't listen often, put it on an external HDD
-> Uninstall games that you finished playing
-> It's useless to keep as backup downloaded software, they'll be obsolete in a few months (unless it's large downloads, of course)
-> Backups on the same HDD is useless
-> Uninstall software that you don't use anymore.
-> Clean up your documents, duplicated music/video/downloads if any.
for starters

I encounters countless people with 'out of space issues", and without touching their personal data, I freed up over ~100GB. And let them, and kinda force them, to clear up or move to DVD's old personal data... that's over another ~100GB freed. And that was with no effort.

 

Thank you!





This has been a public service announcement.

 

I don't think that the prices will go down....once the price raised they will always try to maintain it.

 

the prices will never be go down, once it raised then they go higher.

 

Maybe backups is code for something else

I only said Taiwan cause I thought that was where the floods were, not that I got the two confused. I know they are very different places, but they both produce computer hardware and I skim read the article about the floods (all I saw was floods.......no hard drives for ages..... end) so I apologise for any confusion.