Disk prices double after flood - and could 'double again' Hard disk prices doubled in the past fortnight following the severe flooding in Thailand and could potentially rise by the same amount again, channel sources have warned. The world's second largest producer of drives behind China, Thailand, is dealing with the aftermath of flooding that has killed 380 people, inundated 14,000 …
Seems to me that it's about time that we started making the switch over to SSD. Sounds like a great time for companies with flash fabs to release a cheaper consumer model with 128gigs that will be cheaper than a laptop drive of comparable size with the current market conditions.
A quick look on Ebuyer shows that a 2TB SATA drive can still be had for less than a 120GB SSD SATA drive, a 1TB SATA is at the £100 mark and a 600GB PCI-E SSD is over £2,400!
I would love to be able to buy SSD drives for as little as SATA drives, even at todays prices.
apples and oranges. You are comparing price of generic HDD against Fusion IO which is highly specialized and expensive piece of kit. Look down to Kingston V100 and likes, you may find something which is actually affordable if not as main storage, then at least as a fast boot drive.
We've seen earlier examples of natural disasters leading to component shortages. (Anyone remember many years ago when RAM prices shot up?). The good news is that shortages don't last, and when they do resolve, it usually leads to a glut from overproduction, when all the manufacturers respond to the high prices by increasing production.
However, these days shortages are also prime targets for speculators to make a quick wad. Sadly, by doing so they exacerbate the problem by buying up the scarce commodity, even though they have no intention of using it themselves. We also see bona-fide manufacturers placing multiple orders, as they realise that they will be rationed. So instead of simply ordering the 10,000 pieces they will expect to need, they order 20,000 in the knowledge that the suppliers will ration sales and only partly fulfill the orders they get.
Of course in the mean time, it's a brilliant excuse for retailers to jack up the price of techy toys, just in time for christmas.
I missed the first warning (floods in Thailand, yawn)
I missed the second warning (floods in Thailand, WD hdd factory, hmm...)
I woke up to the third warning (pricing could go up, oh shiiiit....)
and...
no, I didn't buy 1 mln of them to sell off at inflated prices, as one should. Just one hdd, am I not clever...
on a serious note, it would be interesting to see, if the SSD pricing goes down - or up. Probably up, as the price gap between hdd and ssd shrinks, briefly, and more people will decide to take a leap and catch the ssd production supply chain with the pants down. This should crank up the production though and (flooding permitted) when the hdd prices go down again, ssd should follow. But right now, while many people grind their teeth at the hdd price hike, many others, like the SSD industry - rejoice. And yes, in volatile times there is always a chance to increase margins. Production, say, down by 20%, pricing say, up by 57.5%. Which punter will know how much the hike is due to flooding and how much to the opportunistic increase in margins?
Ironically, the last place to have good prices here in the States is the place many would avoid --a big box store like Best Buy, who has not reacted to price changes yet.
I bought three 1TB five-year-warranty Seagate drives (7200rpm, 32MB cache) on sale for $66.49US (plus tax) each yesterday. Meanwhile, online the same drive with a two year warranty is $139.99US.
The store had three more on the shelf; I am tempted to pick them up as well at the end of the day today, on the reported possibility that production will be affected through Q2 of 2012. I have customers, and drives fail. I'd spare myself and them the pain of doubled prices if I can.
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