HDD oligopoly to keep post-flood prices high till 2014 Hard disk drive prices are unlikely to return to pre-flood levels until 2014 despite rising production levels, thanks to surging demand, vendor lock-in and a market dominated by just two suppliers, according to analysts. IHS iSuppli’s latest Memory & Storage Market Brief report revealed that the average selling price (ASP) for …
Warranty periods cut (so clearly they know they're rubbish), and so many more failures post 'infant death' than before.
Yet nobody to run to, because they're both as bad as each other.
SSDs appear to have more suppliers, but remain rather expensive and still have rather variable reliability.
The truth here is that the manufacturers found that despite the shortage of hard disks during the floods there were still plenty of people willing to pay over the odds for them.
Once production got going again, instead of the price coming down it is being kept artificially high, firstly by saying there is still a shortage, and secondly, because they found out that people will still buy them at the higher cost.
If they can sell them at that price, why bring the price down.
Call me cynical, but there is not a shortage of computers on the market, so how can there be a shortage of had disks?
I just got some new 3tb 7200rpm seagate barracuda drives from a newish egg place for $149. That's pretty close to pre-flood prices... though it was during a $10 off sale, plus a $20 off per drive coupon code. So $450 for 3 of those drives wasn't so bad....
Even the new 4tb drive prices have been steadily declining, but they're not yet cost effective for me.
That's because you was paying too much before the floods! I was picking up 1Tb Samsung drives for a touch over £40 delivered. Nowhere is selling quality drives for anywhere near that right now. I'm also gutted that Samsung have stopped making drives, because they were the best drives available imo.
I'm not saying cartel is incorrect, but oligopoly is perfectly fine. An oligopoly is a market that is dominated by a small number of sellers. Because of the small number of sellers, each seller can anticipate and be aware of the other sellers actions, and act appropriately for their business.
A cartel on the other hand implies collusion between sellers in order to achieve a more favourable market for members of the cartel.
While spinning storage prices remain high, SSD prices are following the traditional hardware trends downwards. At some point, a lot of domestic users will realise that the 1TB disk that came with their (pre-flood) machine is still 90% unused. Commercial users (who are more driven by TPS rates than GB capacity) will wake up to the fact that a mirrored pair of SSDs can outperform a much costlier disk array. More importantly, vendors and disti's will get higher margins from SSDs and therefore promote them instead of traditional solutions.
So although there is a post-flood "catch-up" as people who deferred purchases earlier are now buying again, it's not guaranteed that this will continue. After those needs have been fulfilled, I expect that either the disk manufacturers will "blink" or their markets will remain in a somewhat shrivelled state (long time immersion in water has that effect) as the SSD makers slowly cruise past them, gesticulating as they go.
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