hard drive prices going up

So if you're planning on getting a HDD buy it fast :)

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9493b8ce-f...#axzz1bJSNfKuY

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Western Digital, the world’s second-largest maker of computer hard drives by sales, earlier this week suspended its operations in Thailand after rising water penetrated the flood defences of the Bang Pa-in industrial park, inundating its factory there and submerging some equipment. Its other Thailand factory at the Navanakorn industrial park was also threatened by the deluge.

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Seagate, has also been affected by the flooding, but not to the same extent as Western Digital.

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I doubt any significant price changes will occur, they still have to compete with other companies.

Theres been about a 10% rise already.

Some HDDs gone up by £10+ (2TB)

They look basically the same price they were a couple of months ago?

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Originally Posted by Chippiewill

They look basically the same price they were a couple of months ago?

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The prices won't go up immediately. It's likely it will take a few weeks when fears begin to grow about supplies. It might take them ages to get the factory up and working, unless they can off-set their manufacturing operations to other countries, but it depends how rich they are. It's amazing important components like HDDs are being developed and produced in a limited number of places, completing destroying the supply line if something small happens like a flood in one area. Perhaps they may consider creating new operations in key areas across the globe incase it happens again?

First memory becomes pricey after one of the manufacturers goes bankrupt, and now HDDs are being affected. Whatever next? :P

You must not pay much attention :p

For example

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB I bought it a month ago for £45 now its £60.

Staff on another website;

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I am watching the price of drives increase by as much as 10% an hour. Its not a good time at all for those wanting storage

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As pre warned, Mechanical storage is going up in price at an alarming rate.

This is unlikely to change before 2012 with price increases potentially going to increase by even more.

These are dark times on the storage front at the moment with deals none existant for some time to come

You may indeed be able to buy drives much cheaper elsewhere but they WILL run out of stock very quickly so my advice is that you buy where you can as you will not see affordable storage at all as current stocks deplete.

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Prices increase massively yesterday:

This is mainly due to the thai flooding but I am sure that the two remaining HDD vendors will have something to do with the price increase..

This is a picture of Western Digitals factories:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Data...ooding_535.jpg

not good!

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etc.

We will live as mentioned I reckon stocks are in the plenty. Fingers crossed it will be Maxtor next time.

Is maxtor even a large manufacturer?

I've rarely seen them, most drives I see are Samsung, Seagate and WD. (excluding ssd ofc)

Oh and the occasional Hitachi.

Companies are panic buying by the looks of it and price has rose alot.

and nvm Maxtor is Seagate now.

Yeah I'm pretty sure Seagate took over Maxtor sometime ago. I'm sure we will be fine either way, these things happen.

Hopefully this will help facilitate a shift towards SSDs if it is major.

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Originally Posted by Chippiewill

Hopefully this will help facilitate a shift towards SSDs if it is major.

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Not at the current price...

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Originally Posted by Recursion

Not at the current price...

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Agreed, they are still too expensive.

I said help, the shift is inevitable, but this could potentially shave some months off.

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Originally Posted by Chippiewill

I said help, the shift is inevitable, but this could potentially shave some months off.

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Agree with you there. Once I can buy a 320GB+ SSD for about £60 I'll be happy, but for now... ouch

You're lucky to get a 60GB for £60 atm, so it'll be a good few years before 320GB for £60 ;)

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Originally Posted by scottish

You're lucky to get a 60GB for £60 atm, so it'll be a good few years before 320GB for £60 ;)

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That's my point.

Paid £130 for 120GB one, can't complain.

Especially as OCZ have released firmware for the sandforce problems.

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Originally Posted by scottish

Paid £130 for 120GB one, can't complain.

Especially as OCZ have released firmware for the sandforce problems.

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Can very much complain... you paid £1.08 per GB on that SSD, I paid £0.04 per GB on my 1TB drive. The speed of an SSD doesn't justify a price increase like that in my opinion :P

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Originally Posted by Recursion

Can very much complain... you paid £1.08 per GB on that SSD, I paid £0.04 per GB on my 1TB drive. The speed of an SSD doesn't justify a price increase like that in my opinion :P

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That's clearly coming from someone who's never used a SSD as a boot drive ;).

I will never have a desktop PC that doesn't have one again (until there's something better of course).

I doubt they will go up a lot.

I actually just grabbed myself two 3TB 3.0 USB externals off Amazon for 50% or so off. I'm good.

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Originally Posted by N!ck

That's clearly coming from someone who's never used a SSD as a boot drive ;).

I will never have a desktop PC that doesn't have one again (until there's something better of course).

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You would be correct ;) As it stands though, storage is more important than read/write speed in my view :P

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Originally Posted by Recursion

You would be correct ;) As it stands though, storage is more important than read/write speed in my view :P

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It's not about the continuous read/write speeds. It's all about the random i/o and access times.

Almost £100 per 1TB now, lmao.

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Originally Posted by scottish

Almost £100 per 1TB now, lmao.

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This man, isn't ********ing.

Link for people to see: http://www.ebuyer.com/173804-samsung...-cache-hd103sj

Just wow, I have two of those and they certainly didn't cost that much.

Cheapest 1TB 7200RPM;

Overclockers.co.uk - Seagate Barracuda - £91.99 (I paid just under £45 just over a month ago)
Aria.co.uk - WD Caviar Blue - £100
Scan.co.uk - Hitachi - £82.80
Microdirect - Seagate - £90
Dabs.com - Hitachi Deskstar - £79.99

Some double the price of earlier this month, others over double.

Gah, should have bought a new 2 TB storage drive when I had the chance @ £60 :(.

Edit: Just grabbed one at £85 :P.

I might be wrong but there looks like a lot of profiteering going on here by technology firms. Prices on eBay look barely unchanged, suggesting no real shortage yet.

It's distributors

They put the price up like mad, so e-tailers need to put their price up to reflect this (otherwise for example, ebuyer will buy all of arias stock @ £45 for 1TB then aria needs to buy more stock from dist at a much higher price

But yeah they'll be profiting a good bit as well from their existing stock


@Nick, Aria was selling 20 of their 2TB drives earlier at £65, but was only for last 20 so doubt theres any left now :p

---------- Post added 26-10-2011 at 07:05 PM ----------

http://files.upit.me/1319749584.jpg
http://techgage.com/images/news/west...ood_102511.jpg

Not cool....

It's interesting to see people panic buying hard drives - it makes a change to bread, butter and milk :P It seems many are slowly becoming out of stock, so any price hikes are just going to reflect the demand and importance of restocking, ebuyer has got to make a profit and somehow manage to get some more in seeing as people seem to be panicking all of a sudden :P

mhm

Apparently when next Seagate drives are finished production they're going to ship them in bulk by air instead of boat to restore supply faster

So wonder if they'll actually manage to calm down the panic buyers, or if we'll be paying £150/TB by xmas :p

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Originally Posted by scottish

@Nick, Aria was selling 20 of their 2TB drives earlier at £65, but was only for last 20 so doubt theres any left now :p


Not cool....

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Yeah, I know I looked a few days ago. Aria is my standard place to shop since it is in walking distance meaning no postage costs and I get my stuff instantly :).

This increase is shocking.

Blatantly profiteering, the hdd's on sale would have been brought by companies such as eBuyer way before this.

Suddenly SSD's look slightly better value.

http://regmedia.co.uk/2011/10/27/wd_lake_1.jpg


http://www.channelregister.co.uk/201...ive_economics/

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Originally Posted by N!ck

That's clearly coming from someone who's never used a SSD as a boot drive ;).

I will never have a desktop PC that doesn't have one again (until there's something better of course).

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Or you could just use Ubuntu and boot in 7 seconds :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by Jutnux

Or you could just use Ubuntu and boot in 7 seconds :rolleyes:

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But we don't want to use Ubuntu..

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Originally Posted by Jutnux

Or you could just use Ubuntu and boot in 7 seconds :rolleyes:

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Ubuntu doesn't boot in 7 seconds.

Ubuntu takes longer to boot on an SSD than Windows 7 does for me.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/201.../hdd_flooding/

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So far Acer has confirmed price rises on the next batch of shipments and rival ASUS revealed yesterday it will run out of disk drives by the end of this month. Other PC vendors have noted the challenges in securing HDDs but have not commented further.

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DRAM is likely to feel the strain of a slowing mobile PC market as "any reduction in PC sales due to supply constraints will further depress the already oversupplied DRAM market", said iSuppli.

Some camera makers – including Sony, Nikon and Canon – have been disrupted by the natural disaster in the Far East as have car makers, with Ford, Mazda, Hino, Honda, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, Nissan and Toyota suspending production in Thailand. ®

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