Have hard drive prices gone back to pre-flooding pricing?

N

Nocturnal

Gawd
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Jul 20, 2006
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Is it pretty close? I noticed quite a few 3TB drives from Seagate at Newegg relatively inexpensive compared to a few months ago. I tried looking up Camelegg but they only have data from December of 2011.
 
Seagate was the least impacted by Thailand flood so their prices haven't been as high as the rest.

Personally I stay away from Seagate in their new era of 1-year gotcha warranties but that's just me.
 
Before the floods a 2tb 5400 rpm drive from Hitachi/Samsung/Seagate went for $59.99.

Now almost a year after the "crisis" the prices have "stabilized" around 119.99-129.99.
 
maxm said:
Before the floods a 2tb 5400 rpm drive from Hitachi/Samsung/Seagate went for $59.99.

Now almost a year after the "crisis" the prices have "stabilized" around 119.99-129.99.
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Thanks for the info! I was going off of Camelegg but it seems like they lost their data.
 
They still cost about 2x as much pre-floods. Which smells of price fixing to me, it's not like HDD's are out of stock anywhere.
 
I think it is time we face the fact. HDD manufacturers now know that people would still buy HDD even if the price double in price. The pre-flooding prices are gone forever.
 
CubanBlood said:
I think it is time we face the fact. HDD manufacturers now know that people would still buy HDD even if the price double in price. The pre-flooding prices are gone forever.
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That's highly pessimistic and also not realistic. Seagate has announced tech that they believe will scale to 60TB. In the days of 60TB HD's do you believe a 4TB drive will still cost $229? All prices of all technology over time will drop. If not from increases in innovation, then it will be from competition.

Prices skyrocketed because HD's because a commodity. Clearly it cannot stay at rare commodity pricing forever.
 
Sure gave SSD's a little time to catch up a bit. If they don't start getting prices lower SSD's might really start taking a chunk out of their sales. I now only buy SSD's for the primary hard drive, soon it'll make sense for having some space for a little storage as well.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Prices skyrocketed because HD's because a commodity. Clearly it cannot stay at rare commodity pricing forever.
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No, they didn't skyrocket because HDDs became a rare commodity. Prices soared because vendors feared there would be a shortage of HDDs....I don't recall seeing any of the HDDs on NewEgg or any other major going out of stock in the last year any more than usual. Lots of industries have done this kind of crap. As a cyclist, back when gasoline and fuel prices skyrocketed a few summers back ALL the vendors hiked their prices blaming shipping costs by a factor of 2x to 3x. Oil and fuel prices tumbled a while later, and guess what-the prices were and still are exactly at the same elevated levels and higher. The industries find people will buy the same amount of something at a much higher price...guess what, they';ll sell it at a higher price because they can.

To quote the Wizard's First Rule: "People are stupid, they will believe something because they want it to be true; or because they're afraid it might be true."

Prices on HDDs will not come down. They'll stay exactly where they are at at the various storage/performance tiers. Capacity will improve in future generations, but $100+ for an HDD is here to stay. The flood "disaster" was used simply as an industry cover to jack prices.
 
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There are effectively two companies selling internal disks. High prices are here to stay. The flood is irrelevant.
 
A month before the flood I bought a bunch of Samsung F4 2TB's for $75, which was the pretty standard price, now it's at $129 and probably not going lower. Can't complain too much, my first hard drive I could afford new was a 4GB that was $399.
 
tdg said:
A month before the flood I bought a bunch of Samsung F4 2TB's for $75, which was the pretty standard price, now it's at $129 and probably not going lower. Can't complain too much, my first hard drive I could afford new was a 4GB that was $399.
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The day of the flood (or one should say the day the news came out that the flood would affect hard drive prices) I picked up 8 2TB Hitachi 5K3000's at Compusa for $59 each. :cool:

I went back a day later in hopes of grabbing some more and they already raised the prices to $100+ and limit 1 per customer.
 
Skripka said:
No, they didn't skyrocket because HDDs became a rare commodity. Prices soared because vendors feared there would be a shortage of HDDs....I don't recall seeing any of the HDDs on NewEgg or any other major going out of stock in the last year any more than usual. Lots of industries have done this kind of crap. As a cyclist, back when gasoline and fuel prices skyrocketed a few summers back ALL the vendors hiked their prices blaming shipping costs by a factor of 2x to 3x. Oil and fuel prices tumbled a while later, and guess what-the prices were and still are exactly at the same elevated levels and higher. The industries find people will buy the same amount of something at a much higher price...guess what, they';ll sell it at a higher price because they can.

To quote the Wizard's First Rule: "People are stupid, they will believe something because they want it to be true; or because they're afraid it might be true."

Prices on HDDs will not come down. They'll stay exactly where they are at at the various storage/performance tiers. Capacity will improve in future generations, but $100+ for an HDD is here to stay. The flood "disaster" was used simply as an industry cover to jack prices.
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6 months later and HDD prices are about 1/2 of what it was late Oct '11, the analogy with Oil prices are not the same with HDD cause storage usage increases all the time while it's only gonna be increasing encouraged to the mass public to decrease Oil usage. Your're right when you say $100+ HDD are here to stay... maybe for a 4TB+ one soon enough, unless storage consumption remain the same, developers while coded their new and improved application at the same time optimize their size, companies stop developing bigger storage sizes and there was zero competition, prices will lower eventually
 
Salanmon said:
6 months later and HDD prices are about 1/2 of what it was late Oct '11, the analogy with Oil prices are not the same with HDD cause storage usage increases all the time while it's only gonna be increasing encouraged to the mass public to decrease Oil usage. Your're right when you say $100+ HDD are here to stay... maybe for a 4TB+ one soon enough, unless storage consumption remain the same, developers while coded their new and improved application at the same time optimize their size, companies stop developing bigger storage sizes and there was zero competition, prices will lower eventually
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The other thing about Gas prices is that EVERYONE need Gas on a daily bases to survive, Not everyone need to purchase a 2TB Harddrive on a daily or weekly bases. But it nice to see the prices has come down, but has quality been brought back?
 
midnkight said:
The other thing about Gas prices is that EVERYONE need Gas on a daily bases to survive, Not everyone need to purchase a 2TB Harddrive on a daily or weekly bases. But it nice to see the prices has come down, but has quality been brought back?
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And everyone needs HDDs to sell computers. The entire consumer base of OCN, Tom's, [H], Anand, and eVGA buys fewer HDDs pre- or post-flooding than Dell or HP install OEM in a day I'd bet. And people like Dell have lots of computers they always need to be building on a daily basis.

So, yes. Those buying the bulk of the HDDs made DO in fact need HDDs to survive. And guess what? The HDD makers have discovered they'll keep buying drives even when consumer prices are 2x and 3x their old retail for the exact same drive. As a CEO interested in getting the most from people's wallets, you'd be stupid to let HDD prices slack back down to where they were.
 
Except, if you are talking about 3.5" HDDs, then there are three companies selling them: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. As part of the conditions WD agreed to in acquiring Hitachi GST, they must divest IP and manufacturing capability sufficient to allow a third party to continue manufacturing 3.5" HDDs approximately equal to Hitachi GST's 3.5" HDD capabilities. WD's recent conference call said that the divestiture should be complete at the end of May.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/07/wd_hitachi_gst_ftc/

http://www.computerworld.com.au/art..._western_digital_sell_off_assets_acquisition/

http://ftc.gov/opa/2012/03/westerndigital.shtm
 
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The people who suckered WD into buying Hitachi were smart. The era for mechanical drives is nearing its end and WD pretty much bought a Yugo.
 
no, mechanical hard drives will be required for a long time. nothing else is as reasonably fast (and accessible for random r/w data), super dense, and as cost effective.

SSDs are awesome, i just bought 16 800GB SAS drives though ... twerent cheap though.
 
You seem to be missing the part where there are lots of players in the non-mechanical space and not so many in the mechanical space. I said it's 'nearing its end' not that it ended. You can't deny the next handful of years is going to see rapid growth in the non-mechanical space and a whole new era of 'we've got the mostest for the leastest' is already beginning.
 
no, actually the cost of SSDs has held fairly steady at about $1 per GB.

you're never going to store your movie collection on SSD. only a fool would suggest such a thing.
 
madrebel said:
no, actually the cost of SSDs has held fairly steady at about $1 per GB.

you're never going to store your movie collection on SSD. only a fool would suggest such a thing.
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You sir, are mad! A rebel even! LOL.

"never" huh? That's a loooooooong time.

You must be too young to remember PC's with 4 MB of RAM and just the RAM alone costing thousands. I was deliberately specific not to say 'SSD'. But since you brought it up 'SSD's' are still recouping their initial R&D.

Emerging computer technologies drop in price. Competition drives more for less. It's been that way since the dawn of desktop pc's. This is just the latest cycle in the evolution.
 
no, they really aren't recouping anything. they found people are willing to pay ~$1/GB for premium 'desktop' performance so that is what they charge.

btw, the SSD market is as bad as mechanical. apart from sandforce you have indilinix and intel controllers. not sure if intel white labels their controller but indilinix is now owned by ocz who likely wont whitelabel it so basically in the consumer market everyone is using sandforce controllers.

great competitive market right?

oh wait, i forgot about marvell ... makers of wonderful mass storage chipsets and even more wonderful network chips ....

spinners will be around until some sort of 3d optical storage that hits petabyte sizes supplant them. you can't get enough flash into the same space as platters and worse still flash is going to get worse as it gets smaller. higher latency, worse wear, just pretty shitty.

memristors, those have promise but are brand new tech. flash isn't new, flash has been around for years. look how long it took for flash to really catch on for large/fast mass storage. i don't expect meristors to have the same densities as flash for at least a generation or two.

spinner tech isn't stagnant either. we'll see 10TB per drive in 2-3 years. performance will still suck but you just can't do downplay how incredibly good they are at packing in the bits.
 
madrebel said:
oh wait, i forgot about marvell ... makers of wonderful mass storage chipsets and even more wonderful network chips ....
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You say that sarcastically, but Marvell SSD controller chips are very good. You can find them in the excellent Plextor SSDs, as well as Crucial SSDs.

You also forgot Samsung, which makes their own SSD controller chips, flash, and SSDs.
 
I think what has happened is that there has been so much consolidation in the hard drive industry that now the competition just isn't there anymore. And yes, to me this smells of a bit of price fixing as well.
 
I tihnk what happened is people are missing the other multi-page thread on this topic that lets a bit more light in on what happened. But this thread is more fun for the tin-foil hat crowd. Nice that we can have threads for rational people and the tin-foils.
 
Trepidati0n said:
I tihnk what happened is people are missing the other multi-page thread on this topic that lets a bit more light in on what happened. But this thread is more fun for the tin-foil hat crowd. Nice that we can have threads for rational people and the tin-foils.
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Ha! Well said.
 
madrebel said:
no, they really aren't recouping anything. they found people are willing to pay ~$1/GB for premium 'desktop' performance so that is what they charge.

btw, the SSD market is as bad as mechanical. apart from sandforce you have indilinix and intel controllers. not sure if intel white labels their controller but indilinix is now owned by ocz who likely wont whitelabel it so basically in the consumer market everyone is using sandforce controllers.

great competitive market right?

oh wait, i forgot about marvell ... makers of wonderful mass storage chipsets and even more wonderful network chips ....

spinners will be around until some sort of 3d optical storage that hits petabyte sizes supplant them. you can't get enough flash into the same space as platters and worse still flash is going to get worse as it gets smaller. higher latency, worse wear, just pretty shitty.

memristors, those have promise but are brand new tech. flash isn't new, flash has been around for years. look how long it took for flash to really catch on for large/fast mass storage. i don't expect meristors to have the same densities as flash for at least a generation or two.

spinner tech isn't stagnant either. we'll see 10TB per drive in 2-3 years. performance will still suck but you just can't do downplay how incredibly good they are at packing in the bits.
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Actually, SAMSUNG makes their own controllers (MAX and MCX) and they are *not* a SF licensee. (However, they don't sell controllers for SSDs to anyone else,) There are three companies (four if you count Intel itself) that make and resell controllers - none of them (again, discounting Intel, but also SAMSUNG) also make SSDs - Indilinx, Sandforce, and Marvell. With Indilinx owned by the OCZ Technology Group (a subsidiary, not a division - same status *enjoyed* by PC Power and Cooling), that is why you are seeing Indilinx controllers used by companies that compete with OCZ (such as Crucial). Sandforce itself is a *fabless* company - they design, but not produce, the controllers (much like AMD and nVidia do with GPUs). Sandforce also has a large *white label* OEM/reseller business (at least for the controllers - MicroCenter is a big customer).

When the Thai floods happened, we also saw more companies jump into the SSD market (that was when SAMSUNG emerged as a major player, in fact); however, SAMSUNG was a player in HDDs (and still is), unlike Intel. Intel, however, has been one of the more pervasive, yet least-discussed, players in areas of the PC business unrelated to mechanical drives - Intel, for example, is the only independent remaining of Ethernet's "old men".

Lastly, with the Thai floods effects on HDD production receding, the mechanical drive will get back the reason why it will remain relevant for some time to come - the sheer cheapness aspect. (Even the Crucial m4 128GB SSD is still about $1.00/GB - even at current MicroCenter pricing - while mechanical HDDs are one-third that and declining.)
While SSDs win the performance battle vs. mechanical drives, mechanical drives - even at the height of the HDD shortfall - still cost less per gigabyte of storage than even the porkiest SSDs. Where mechanical drives are in trouble are at the low end of their capacity ranges (and especially the sub-500GB range), as their cost advantage vs. SSDs is a great deal smaller than at the larger (1TB and above) sizes.
 
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