HDD prices rising

thor17usa said:
The problem I noticed on a few of these deals is they will limit the number of hard drives you can purchase at once.
Has anyone run in to this problem yet?
Click to expand...

I wanted to buy 25 Seagate Constellation ES.2 3TB SAS drives but they are stupidly expensive now. So, I have had to accept that it is just too costly to get SAS drives, especially the multipath feautures--I will have to not have multi-head redundancy.

So, I now need to get 27 of these 3TB external drives...and you reckon that isn't hard when you can only buy 2/3 from these bastardly stores :(
 
Beta4Me said:
I wanted to buy 25 Seagate Constellation ES.2 3TB SAS drives but they are stupidly expensive now. So, I have had to accept that it is just too costly to get SAS drives, especially the multipath feautures--I will have to not have multi-head redundancy.

So, I now need to get 27 of these 3TB external drives...and you reckon that isn't hard when you can only buy 2/3 from these bastardly stores :(
Click to expand...

What do you need so much storage for? Personal use or for a business?

I'm just curious I got several 2TB drives from BB while they had them and I'm thinking about setting up a Raid 5 with them but no where near that many drives.

I also got some for future builds if prices stay high.
 
AssMan said:
What do you need so much storage for? Personal use or for a business?

I'm just curious I got several 2TB drives from BB while they had them and I'm thinking about setting up a Raid 5 with them but no where near that many drives.

I also got some for future builds if prices stay high.
Click to expand...

Both: business and personal.
I'll have 4 x 6 drive RAID-Z2 + 2 hot spares for 48TB usable space.
 
until prices become reasonable again.
5.jpg

6.jpg

7.jpg
 
haileris said:
Two conflcting stories on digitimes...

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20111116PD212.html notes that some may start dumping inventory

However, http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20111117PD210.html states that production in Q4 overall will fall short of demand by 33%.
Click to expand...

Trepidati0n said:
Ususally means the answer is somewhere in between.
Click to expand...

There is definitely a supply chain disruption and its effects will be felt. However retailers can enjoy margins they could only dream of in the past, and they are likely to use that opportunity to book profits. Note that this inventory is pre-flood. Going forward the supply will gradually come back but there will still be a shortage. I presume prices are going to take between 6-9 months to come back to pre-flood prices. However, we may have seen a short term peak in prices, as the system stablizes and accepts the new situation.
 
aviat72 said:
There is definitely a supply chain disruption and its effects will be felt. However retailers can enjoy margins they could only dream of in the past, and they are likely to use that opportunity to book profits. Note that this inventory is pre-flood. Going forward the supply will gradually come back but there will still be a shortage. I presume prices are going to take between 6-9 months to come back to pre-flood prices. However, we may have seen a short term peak in prices, as the system stablizes and accepts the new situation.
Click to expand...

That's about what I was thinking myself. I'd bet it's at least a full year before we see deals on drives that we had pre-flood myself that's why I stocked up on what I could get while they were cheap.

Only time will tell how this will play out though. I've been wanting to get some more storage for a while now and this pushed me into it..... and I'm glad it did.... I'd have just put it off otherwise. Now it's time for me to learn about Raid and what kind of storage system I'm gonna setup :).
 
It really chaps my ass that I've spent the past year stocking up on solid state storage and now that I really need some mechanical storage its absurdly expensive.
 
Beta4Me said:
I wanted to buy 25 Seagate Constellation ES.2 3TB SAS drives but they are stupidly expensive now. So, I have had to accept that it is just too costly to get SAS drives, especially the multipath feautures--I will have to not have multi-head redundancy.

So, I now need to get 27 of these 3TB external drives...and you reckon that isn't hard when you can only buy 2/3 from these bastardly stores :(
Click to expand...

If you are running RAID, that's not something I would recommend.

Enterprise drives support TLER, which is important in a business-oriented RAID. Enterprise drives such as the WD Caviar RE or Velociraptor, Samsung F3R, and Seagate Constellation have these kinds of features --your average desktop drives do not
 
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...e-bracing-for-worst-in-thai-floods-tech.html#

Still, Seagate Chief Executive Officer Stephen J. Luczo is forecasting difficult times for the drive industry. Each of the hundreds of thousands of drives Seagate’s Thai factories ship every day contain parts from 130 or so suppliers, many still under three feet of water. The projections by some Wall Street analysts that production will be back to pre-flood levels by summer are nonsense, Luczo says.

“This is going to take a lot longer than people are assuming, until the end of 2012 at least,” he says. “And by then, demand will have gone up.”
 
This is really unfortunate timing for a drive to fail on my array...and to not have any disks in house to swap out. An idiot is me.
 
LoneWolf said:
If you are running RAID, that's not something I would recommend.

Enterprise drives support TLER, which is important in a business-oriented RAID. Enterprise drives such as the WD Caviar RE or Velociraptor, Samsung F3R, and Seagate Constellation have these kinds of features --your average desktop drives do not
Click to expand...

Don't need/want TLER with ZFS :D
 
I'm actually really surprised with what I just saw. I went looking for the same hdd model I bought in 2009 so that I could create a raid array. I paid $94 for my hdd back then. Today the same hdd is $209 on newegg. Holy Sh$t, never thought I'd see the day where any component doubles in price.

Guess I'll be waiting another year and hoping my storage drive doesn't die in the meantime.
 
danman said:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...e-bracing-for-worst-in-thai-floods-tech.html#

Still, Seagate Chief Executive Officer Stephen J. Luczo is forecasting difficult times for the drive industry. Each of the hundreds of thousands of drives Seagate’s Thai factories ship every day contain parts from 130 or so suppliers, many still under three feet of water. The projections by some Wall Street analysts that production will be back to pre-flood levels by summer are nonsense, Luczo says.

“This is going to take a lot longer than people are assuming, until the end of 2012 at least,” he says. “And by then, demand will have gone up.”
Click to expand...

like i said 4 times already 1-2+ years not 6 months to think it might be fixed in 6 months is a pipe dream perhaps when all the manufactures can get the factories resumed to full production is 6 months but after that it will take alot of production to fill the backorders that will have piled up and get back to a 0 state when the demand can be fufiled. At that point is a year baring more flooding next year and no contamination issues from the current flood if that all goes well by the end of 2012 we will see drives go into freefall and the prices can settle back to a bit higher than they were when the flooding started...
 
Last edited:
I found this on Tom's Hardware:

Seagate has just lowered its shipment forecast for Q4 again.
The impact of the flood in Thailand is much more dramatic than previously estimated. Along with a 10 to 18 percent decrease to 41 to 45 million units, according to a report published by Digitimes, it appears that the HDD industry's shipments will decline by more than 35 percent in the current quarter.
According to Digitimes, WD, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba will ship only about 103 million units in Q4, down from 162 million in Q3. WD may be hit the hardest, with shipments estimated to be in the 22 to 26 million range, down from 58 million in Q3. Hitachi may drop from 32 million to 20 million and Toshiba from 22 million to 12 million.
According to Seagate, the global demand calls for about 180 million drives in Q4."

A shortage of 77M units, that is definitely significant.
 
so it seems that there are cheap 2TB Seagate and other drives that surface once in a while.

I really would like my NAS up and running soon, but I only have 5/10 drives. Should I consider mixing drives to do a 10 drive setup, or should I run a RAIDz1 with 5 drives and wait for drives to come down in price and stick in a 2nd 5-drive pool? Would it be bad to have say 5 Seagate 2TB drives and 5x Samsung 2TB drives?

Ideally I wanted a 10 drive setup of Raidz2 Samsung F4 2TB drives, but I only bought 5 initially. From a reliability standpoint, it's better to have a 10 drive raidz2 setup than a 2x5 drive raidz1 setup.

Ugh dilemma dilemma. If I wait til the end of 2012 to build this NAS, I don't think I'll have enough HD space from other computers to last til then (meaning I need to get this NAS up in the next 3-6 months). On the other hand, newer drives could come out, spoiling my 2TB F4 setup also, and given that Samsung is about to merge, who knows the status of F4 drives production....
 
Unless you really need the space, I would just hold out.

It also seems higher capacity drives are cheaper than lower capacity ones per GB. So if all you need is raw space it's actually cheaper to get like 2 2TB drives and do raid 1 than to get a 4 1TB drives for example. I guess it kind of makes sense. The capacity of drives is not really significant in this shortage. They still all have the same parts.

One thing that I think is also not being considered is the time it will take to rebuild the factories and all the equipment after the flood. I'm sure all that stuff will be rusted out and need to be completely replaced. All the drywall/other building materials will need to be ripped out and rebuilt. Support collumns may need to be inspected/reinforced/approved etc. So not only does the building itself need to be rebuilt, but then the equipment needs tob e obtained/built, installed, tested, and calibrated... yeah my guess is once the flood is gone and they can start the repair process, it will probably be a year or so before drives come out of there. At least that's my guess. I could be way off here.

Oh and ebay seems to have lot of drives too. That's an option as well if anyone needs some.

ex:
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Western-Digi...716?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_2&hash=item19cac667bc

That's actually a good deal, even before the flood.
 
Can anyone confirm whether the Seagate Expansion external drives contain Barracuda XTs like the GoFlex Desktops?

I'm looking at:
Seagate Expansion 2TB
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Seagate-..._Components&hash=item564710b0bf#ht_2881wt_905
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/NEW-Seag...Components&hash=item336eb05932#ht_2881wt_1163
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/NEW-Seag...Components&hash=item56473e8048#ht_2881wt_1163
Seagate Expansion 3TB
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220893585535#ht_2396wt_808
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370562190829#ht_2881wt_808
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220896023378#ht_2929wt_1163
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220896661289#ht_2929wt_1163

They are ripper deals and I'm going to get 20 of one of them (2TB/3TB) if they contain desktop-grade drives.
 
Doing a bit of research, it seems like these 'Expansion' drives contain Barracuda LPs :(

I'm hoping that's not true and someone can confirm? :D
 
Someone is selling the GoFlex 1tb drive for $60 on craigslist... says its NIB.. Seems like a good price, right??

Gotta go thru my stuff and see what I have. I just got a new drive not too long ago, but it was to replace some smaller drives rather then add to them.

Wish I haven't been living under a rock. lol Didn't know any of this was going on until today when I was looking for a new drive.
 
Beta4Me said:
Doing a bit of research, it seems like these 'Expansion' drives contain Barracuda LPs :(

I'm hoping that's not true and someone can confirm? :D
Click to expand...

I have some Hitachi XL3000s, they come with SATA 6 7200rpm 3TB drives :) picked up 4 a few weeks ago.
 
I'm so glad someone convinced me to get the 1 platter 1tb hdd before the price hike. It is now over double what I payed it for a couple weeks ago and pretty sweet! Thanks everyone for enlightening us!
 
Kinda sad that it was cheaper for me to buy the hard drive I wanted at Best Buy than at NewEgg.
 
HARD DISK DRIVE (HDD) prices have more than doubled in the six weeks between 1 October and 14 November after the floods in Thailand.

According to data from price comparison web site Idealo.co.uk, average selling prices increased by 151 per cent during the time period. In monetary terms, this was an increase from £43.29 to £109.78 and it equated to a price increase of 5.4 per cent per day.

Dating back to May 2011, prices for the most popular hard drives remained "extremely consistent", Idealo said, with the average lowest price coming in at around £44.

However, beginning in late October and peaking in early November, the web site said there has been a dramatic increase in the prices offered by online stores on Idealo's British, French, German and Italian comparison portals.

International Data Corporation (IDC) recently reported that as of early November, half of Thailand's production capacity was directly impacted by the flooding. Thailand accounted for 40 to 45 per cent of worldwide HDD production in the first half of 2011. µ

Source: The Inquirer
 
151%? granted that's a avrage, but some of the drives I've seen are going for 200-250% more then they were a few months ago :eek:
 
The price is well over the $1/Gb line at Newegg, even on Black Friday. This has seriously wrecked my plans of building a backup server..
 
I knew the prices went up but didn't know why. I'm glad I purchased (4) 1TB WD black drives for $69 each before the price spike!
 
Perfect. Just as one of my caviar blacks seems to be ready to crap out (dropped from my array earlier. Rebuilt array with seemingly no issues, but I'm probably on borrowed time). Guess I'll have to hope I can convince WD to send me another TLER capable drive if/when this thing craps out and I warranty it.
 
TerraPhantm said:
Perfect. Just as one of my caviar blacks seems to be ready to crap out (dropped from my array earlier. Rebuilt array with seemingly no issues, but I'm probably on borrowed time). Guess I'll have to hope I can convince WD to send me another TLER capable drive if/when this thing craps out and I warranty it.
Click to expand...
Can you scan it with a SMART utility?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top