Disk fab output pumping up, prices 'to stay high and dry' Demand for hard disk drives will outstrip supply until at least the middle of 2012, analysts at IHS reckon, as a result of the deadly Thai factory floods that dented drive production. Disk assembly rates will creep up during 2012 but prices will remain high. Shipments of hard drives are expected to rise in every quarter, year- …
Prices went up instantly and will be very very slow to come down. Tidy profits for everyone, drinks all round.
Yet oddly undesirable external drives didn't shoot up as much. So I've been buying those and stripping them down. Getting the casing off a Freecom external is trivial and can be done without any tools in under a minute. I only needed 5400rpm models anyway so somehow I managed to save 25% + per disk by the mere act of buying them packaged up in a enclosure!
Complete and total Bollocks!!! Is there a futures market in disk drives now? Is this mythical beast “The markets” speculating on the price of disk drives? Has the EU created a disk drive mountain to keep the price high? No it’s the manufacturers who have put up the price!
A Seagate external drive I bought for €89 3 months ago is now selling for €149. What a bunch of price gouging Alan B'Stard’s they are .
Yes, it’s the law of supply and demand, the manafacturers control the supply and demand whatever price they want. May their arseholes turn square and rot in the corners!
What you are seeing is supply, demand, ignorance and price gouging. Patents have nothing to do with the current prices of HDDs.
If consumers want to see HDD or crude oil prices drop-like-a-rock, all they need to do is stop buying these goods for a few weeks. A barrel of crude isn't worth the barrel it's in if no one will buy it. Same applies to HDDs. If no one buys then the HDD mfg. will have a fire sale like the DDR3 RAM makers have had to do for the past three months to move inventory.
Pure nonsense yourself! There are effectively so few manufacturers that they don't see the need to undercut each other right now, especially with a fairly inelastic demand. It's easier to arrange a 2 way truce than a 10 way truce.
The more vendors you have, the more likely that one will break ranks and start the price war that benefits the consumer. Without that competition, what incentive is there to lower prices? The goodness of their hearts? Too much work printing all those numbers on the box? Fear of [deity] in the afterlife?
Like it or not, once supply comes back up it all comes back to patents again.
"Surely the brand new machines and factories will be next-gen? "
And that's the problem.
My need is for 1.5Gb/s or 3Gb/s jumperable down, 512 byte sector, non-"advanced format" drives to avoid having to replace every single motherboard and NAS box and TiVo into which I already have money sunk.
And not that dodgy "reconditioned" or "refurbished" stuff, either, I want it with the original furbs still intact.
If you've got your tinfoil hats on screaming conspiracy over this one then you could always check the levels of stock for yourselves at www.stockinthechannel.com
I've been monitoring this site for drives for a while and as soon as small amounts appear, they go straight out again by the look of it :(
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