Hard Drive Pricing going up at an alarming rate!!!!

woohoo just got a 2tb seagate 7200rpm external for £80 from a well known online catalogue shop :)


edit picked up my reserved drive and its actually £80 but with a £10 store voucher back so £70 madness
 
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Foxtrot26 said:
woohoo just got a 2tb seagate 7200rpm external for £80 from a well known online catalogue shop :)


edit picked up my reserved drive and its actually £80 but with a £10 store voucher back so £70 madness
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I agree it has gone totally bonkers , despite having bought 6 tb's of spare disks a few weeks ago I hve just picked up a 3 tb external for £119 thats £40 a terabyte
It looks as if this will be more than a blip the way stock is being up priced and supply held back. With the Xmas demand I would be suprised if it did not increase even further.
Just seen a Caviar Black 2tbs ( of which i hve 2 in system) at £378 from a well known PC pro award winning supplier .....they hve really been stacking up prices over the last few days ..........
I am sure a lot of the younger techy enthusiasts will be really cheesed off
if they've been saving for an upgrade to storage. :mad:
 
RabbitHutch said:
Below is a list of Nidec's production plants. The ones in bold are in Thailand. The one in green and in bold is in Thailand, but is in production.
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You do know that NIDEC makes a vast array of products, of which hard drive motors are just one? The majority of the plants you list make items that have nothing to do with hard drives at all, and re-tooling them to make drive motors would take months at best.

(Incidentally, the last update I saw from NIDEC indicated they have six plants in Thailand making HD-related parts, of which only two are still in production. three are described as 'innundated', which suggests production won't be resuming any time soon.)

Ultimately, given that 25% of hard drive production is located in Thailand, in basic terms there could be a 25% in availability - (in end construction alone at least). However, this figure assumes that;
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Even if we assume your figures are accurate, there a couple of points you're missing here.

- there is very little extra manufacturing capacity in the hard drive industry, because it's a low-margin business. I'm sure you've noticed how drive prices have been at rock bottom for a couple of years now and losses have forced the industry to consolidate until there are now only two manufacturers of 3.5" drives left. Spare capacity costs money, so output is very precisely tied to expected demand. Boosting output is possible, but not quick or cheap.

- the hard drive market is not very flexible when it comes to tolerating reduced supply. The vast bulk of drives are used in production of new PCs, servers and laptops, and the cost of the hard drive is just a small part of the overall cost of the machine. Say Dell or HP pays £25 for a drive: triple the price and you're talking about the customer paying £50 extra. That's not going to impact demand to any real degree. I don't know anyone who can predict the figures with any certainty, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say a 10% drop in drive demand from OEMs would require a 5-6x rise in hard drive costs. There is some scope for reduced demand because because of people deferring purchases of external backup drives, media servers and the like. But it's pretty small beer overall.

It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out, but I do firmly believe there will be serious shortages starting as soon as next month and lasting well into 2012.
 
are ssd prices increasing as well?

i am looking to buy 2x 60gb in raid and i dont have sufficient funds atm. Would the prices increase if i left it longer or is it just hard drives
 
I wish I'd picked up the 2tb drive I seen last month. I held off because I thought thinking I'd wait until I got my new PC.

Hopefully, there are still some good deals out there.
 
I have an empty micro server because i can't justify paying more for 1 2tb drive than for the cost of the server :(
 
Solomon23 said:
Just seen a Caviar Black 2tbs ( of which i hve 2 in system) at £378 from a well known PC pro award winning supplier .....they hve really been stacking up prices over the last few days ..........
I am sure a lot of the younger techy enthusiasts will be really cheesed off
if they've been saving for an upgrade to storage. :mad:
Click to expand...

To be honest these drives going for silly money (£300+) I think will just sit unsold, if people absolutely must buy more storage they will just get a smaller drive. Realistically very very few people actually *NEED* 2TB extra storage in the short term, for the majority of people an extra 1TB will suffice for a few months.

Again just to make the point and I know I keep beating the same drum here a bit, the idea of buying a medium-big sized drive for over £100 shouldn't be that alien to people, that was the actual going rate in years gone by. It hasn't suddenly got massively more difficult to get storage than the historical trend, and if you take system build costs as a whole the crash in DDR3 prices offsets it. You can buy the 'standard' RAM kit out of 8GB for £40 now and even the extravagance of 16GB (or fast 8GB) is under £100. A £200 budget for RAM+HD is still not too bad.
 
I read this when the thread was first post up.
I thought it was just one of those things where it goes up by a little bit......

Then I checked the store prices... :eek::eek:!
Prices are insane! I had to double check I was looking at the right thing!
That much shortage to have it go up 2.5 times the original price??

Price of the 160GB drive is more than what I bought a Samsung 2TB drive just 2 months ago!

When do you reckon the prices will go back down to how it was?
 
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Seems prices have stabilised a little, 1TB Seagate is now £95 instead of £100 (correct me if I'm wrong).
 
Just got a 3tb seagate barracuda xt as an external drive with a free 4gb flash drive and a £20 gift voucher at a large retail shop for £100. Had a bit of a faff getting all the layers working after ripping case off (was only reading 750gb but sorted it in computer management) and installing it but working great now
 
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Mate has an external HD 2.5 but when he opened up the enclosure the USB connection was attached the hard drive!! How do you read that if the USB bit is borked?
 
koolpc said:
Mate has an external HD 2.5 but when he opened up the enclosure the USB connection was attached the hard drive!! How do you read that if the USB bit is borked?
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Sounds weird, usually they pull apart.
 
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