News Hard disk supply could take two years to recover

I didn't think prices rose that much. I looked on newegg, I bought 2 F4EG for $70 each about 2-3 months ago. I just checked $230, that's triple the price and then some

 

I was planning on building a NAS box as a Christmas present to myself, this blew all of that out of the water. With only a single terabyte of storage I'm almost guaranteed to fill that up within a year, let alone two. Due to this I've been seriously considering buying an additional SSD. Gives that slightest bit more storage and lets me have an SSD for Windows, an SSD for Steam and a mechanical for the rest. Or, when prices get back down to $100 per terabyte or so I may shell out for a little more storage.

 

This will probably do more for SSD sales than anything else they could have come up with short of drastic price cutting.

I'll probably get a 2nd SSD (a 128MB or so size will more then suffice for my personal Steam/games needs) and keep the current small 64MB SSD I have just for windows instead of jamming a game or two on there as well.

The 1.5TB mechanical storage I currently use will simply have to be enough until prices come back to more realistic levels, simple as that. No way am I spending that much $$$ on a hard drive, I would rather store data online instead.

 

I was planning on buying another f3, then I saw the price at £60 and thought better of it. I'd sooner be saving for an SSD at those prices.

 

My Steam games hard drive, a Seagate Barracuda, died over the weekend forcing me to buy another drive and I was shocked at the prices as I had no idea that the flooding in Thailand had affected the prices so badly. My previous Samsung Spinpoint F3 drive cost me £50 two years ago but the new one was £95! : O

 

Hey Im not having a pop at anyone.And I agree that if anyone deserves the extra profit.It is the people of Thailand and not our Uk based companies. I am just saying you dont know how much you can or will change things unless you try. If we all have a "we can beat them attitude" and not a "lets give up before we start" attitude. (Glass half empty).Then how will you or anyone ever know. Facts figures and stats mean nothing. People have the power not Dell not HP and certainly not any uk based pc retailer. You and I have the last say. Stop being sheep guys and girls and stand up for youself.

 

Many of you guys keep bring up SSD as a fix but the fact of the matter is that the largest SSD is only 1TB and cost $500. That's way more than a 3Tb drive selling for $260 which is the capacity that most of us want/need. Unless SSD get bigger and cheaper really fast mechanical drives are still the way to go even at these tear inducing prices

 

I don't think anyone's meant them as a way to fix the problem, more as a stop-gap or alternative. For those who have already been considering them such as myself this increase in HDD prices has just made them a lot more appealling. On the balance of speed, cost and capacity mechanical hard drives often won out due to low cost and high capacity. Now they're not so competitive on cost while SSDs just keep gaining speed. Unless you actually need multiple terabytes it's becoming more appealling to trim down to 128-256GB and get a speed boost instead.

128GB Crucal M4 for $218, 150GB WD VelociRaptor for $199, or for comparison 73GB Seagate Cheetah for $269. If you want speed SSDs are the place to go, the VelociRaptor can't keep on speed and now its price isn't significantly lower while drives like the Cheetah are actually less cost effective.

 

Thankfully I got a 2TB NAs box set up earlier this year.
On the down side, I won't be getting that portable HDD I was after now.

 

SSD's will of course also go up in price as their demand increases in response to rising HDD prices.

Hey, just pay the extra for the HDDs and see it as a charity donation towards helping a disaster-stricken economy get back on its feet.

 

Was going to buy quite a few hdd's for my new build but this happened on the same day :/, guess it's time to get some SSD's before the price raises.

 

Hopefully, the demand for SSDs will accelerate cheaper prices due to scale of economies.

Paying the extra for HDDs will likely to go into the greedy hands of the distribution channels. Better to donate direct to Red Cross instead.

 

Hmm, if there's one price for the corporates and another price for the small guys then I'd rather not buy the product at all just for the principle of the matter.

 

Well that's my 2x2TB RAID mirror out of the window. On the plus side, OCZ Vertex 120GB, here I come!

 

In my NAS boxes I have 4 2TB hard drives. To achieve the same amount of storage with SSDs, I'd need to spend something like £2000.

I totally expect retailers to put their prices up - if they don't know how many of an item they'll be able to get in the future because supply has effectively stopped, then of course they'll put their prices up - it's simple supply and demand. For exactly the same reason, prices fluctuate massively week on week due to the wholesale price. I bet you weren't complaining when the memory and hard drive prices were dropping every week...

If the worldwide supply of hard drives drops by 30% (which it has been estimated to) then it won't be Dell and HP without hard drives - it'll be the standalone ones we buy.

Supply drops, price goes up.

 

I started planning a 10TB RAID5 media server about 2-3 weeks before the flooding, and started pricing it almost right after it happened. Now when I'm ready to buy the prices (as we all know full well) have gone up 2x and totally killed that dream. On top of that all my internal PC storage is filling up at a rate that makes me nervous...

On the grander scale though its really hard for me to justify complaining though. Here I am talking about my storage issues and bitching about price increases, when all the people in Thailand are the ones really dealing with the problem. My heart goes out to every soul who has been effected by any of the recent natural disasters. Every time I feel like I'm getting the short end of the stick these days I try to consider how trivial my ******** is in comparison. At least my house is intact and my family is safe.

 

oops, double post

 

correct

high price = rationing.

everyone here is saying how they won't buy HDD's because the price is to high. that means only the people that really need them will buy hard disks everyone else will make do. This is the only way of maintaining stock during the dry spell ( bad choice of words but U know what I mean )

kinda proving Hopelessness's point.

I still p*****d off. I was going to buy 4 2tb drives and noticed the price had gone from around £50 to around £60 and thought they were raising in the run up to the holidays so thought I'd wait it out. ... look s like I've got a loooong wait on my hands.

also won't manufacturer's have long term contracts with oems they will have to honour first?

 

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20111107PD219.html

digitimes update - HDD supply gap to narrow as Nidec resumes some production

reccommended reading - IF i've read it correctly the philipines and china plants are going to increase output ( ie my guess more over time/ night shifts ) and some of the thia plants are ready to come back on line however production of motors will still be down to 100 million from 140 million. article doesn't discuss manufacturing of other hard drive components. check it our for yourself.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20111107PD219.html