I bought a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB about a year ago for less than £50. Now wherever I look, I can't get the exact same HDD for less than £80.

Aren't things supposed to get cheaper and cheaper? I know my GPU and RAM sticks are cheaper now than when I bought them, why the jump in price for the HDD?

I was hoping to get one for my son's computer, but no way am I paying DOUBLE for the same HDD knowing I got one for less!!!

flooding in taiwan, there was an article about this somewhere...

Edit:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-wd-hard-disk-drive-thailand-flood,13802.html

You gotta be kidding me. Just my luck as well...

So, do you think I'd be good buying one now or waiting? The article mentions "a few quarters" so that's easily one year of inflated HDD prices, no?

I dunno, I may have to move all my stuff from my drives, and consolidate, so when I build My New System, I can format my 1TB drive, or run off a flash.

But im sure they arent gonna go down anytime soon.

One of those things that a US company could open a factory here, give some more americans jobs, and make them here, and they'll prolly be cheaper.

It's from recent flooding in Thailand.

Western Digital's factory is about 6 feet under water, as are many of the component suppliers. WD does about 50M drives per quarter and their products are mostly geared to consumers. 60% of their production comes out of their Thailand factory.


Most all of the component suppliers are in Asia, that is why you don't have the disc drive manufacturing in the United States.


WC

Lol, at the rates the HDD prices are going, I might just get my hands on a 60GB SSD for gaming purposes, and transfer my 1TB HDD to my son's PC. Better value-for-money I would think.

Bummer, seems like a new HDD is a year away then. Should've bought a new HDD a month ago. Grrr....

Wow!

Hadn't checked Hard Drive prices in a few weeks or so because I have enough HDs. Have five in my current system -- all 1.5 and 2.0TB 64MB SATA6.0. I have a few older 1TB on shelf to use in secondary or "gift" computers.

Glad I overstocked on HD. I thought I might be over doing it. Now I don't feel so silly that I was hitting the relatively recent sales like an HD addict. This is one of the few times prices dramatically increased on an IT item.

Of course, I waste so much money in other aspects of my life that saving money on HDs is insignificant -- just fun to have gotten one thing right -- even if by accident

Fry's still has very good prices on hard drives.

Looks like price jumped a third on the low price. High price stores are asking 50% more:

2TB WD as an example:

Our distributors here in Canada have clamped down on drives.

I just jacked up prices on our drives, and may increase them again because we're not getting more.

I typically buy drives in the hundreds and now I'm capped to 5 per order if I'm lucky to get any at all.

Hmmm... any idea how long for, joe? I need to get a general idea in order to properly formulate a backup plan.

My son's PC is making-do with 40GB HDD, which is not enough for today's programs/games. I got two HDDs on my system a 500GB and a 1TB Samsung, I wonder if I can just give him the 1TB drive for now, but I don't want to go through all the reformat and OS install if I'm getting a new drive after Christmas or so.

If you give him the drive that doesn't have the OS on it and install it as a D-drive on you son's system for games? Later on (half a year?) you can buy him a bigger OS drive, or SSD?

I've been told until Q1 2012

I finally ordered a new computer (after ten years) ...and this happens. It doesn't look like the supplier will assemble the machine unless I amend the cheque with additional money.

Maybe I should just cancel and reinstall EarthSiegeII, Tie Fighter and Flight Unlimited?

He took your order and your cheque, but has now told you he needs another 25% of the original HD price? That's bad service.

You could consider waiting for Intel's Ivy Bridge. Is "Black Friday" also a Canadian thing? Might be good deals around by then.

One other thing to consider: SSD prices are stable, so it might be an option? As a boot drive they are great and have room for a couple of important programmes and games. One can add old HDs and add bigger/newer HDs later on as needed.

when i go SSD, it will contain the O/S only. as everything else would have normal load times.

putting everything on a SSD will kill the write life quicker.

Then you might consider moving your swap and also deactivate hibernate altogether, as these are written to every day. Large programmes that take a long time to load should be considered. Games like Arma2 and other games that do rest heavily on texture loading are also good candidates for residing on the SSD. It's not like they do a lot of writing, besides caching in MP and some minor writing activity (right?). IMHO you should be more worried about failure rates than write-life and make a backup of the SSD. (which I still need to do myself )

2x SSDs in RAID :p

That's planned for the next system upgrade.

That can be said for any hard drive, SSD or mechanical.

Rumor of the day:



Hard drives might become even more expensive before they become cheaper.

There might still be a way to get relatively cheap HDs and that is by looking at external drives.

Meanwhile DDR2/3 DRAM Prices are dropping like a rock,

Lol, yeah, just saw an ad for 16GB DDR3 9-9-9-24 (or something like those timings) for about £40. Insane!

DDR2 going down too? I don't think it went down nearly as much as it did when I loaded up my desktop with a full 8 GB of RAM (four 2 GB sticks)...

Anyway, these hard drive prices are definitely ridiculous. Good thing I picked up a 2 TB drive for $70 earlier when I was feeling the itch for more space.

As for SSDs...I'm waiting for the prices to come down on those some more. I don't need a particularly large drive, just one big enough to hold the OS; if I wanted to keep my games on it too, I'd need one in the 1 TB range to be truly comfortable, at least until my game collection grows to the point where even that isn't enough.

(My plan is to upgrade the SSD in my 2730p to a 160 GB X-18M and put the existing 80 GB X-18M in my desktop as a boot drive, but the 160 GB G2 drives are still around $300 on eBay. Ridiculous! Are there any other decent 1.8" microSATA SSDs out there?)

Hmmm, at it's lowest point in a year, without showing much change. AFAIK DDR2 production will be wound down in favour of DDR3, so we could expect rising prices in 2012.

If anything, the rise in HDD prices made me seriously consider an SSD. And for anything but desktop use, a 160GB SSD is the minimum for a gaming platform. The OS alone takes up 20-30GB and the DCS A10 install is 7-8GB...

So SSDs for in-use games and applications, and HDDs for general storage or run-of-the-mill stuff.

The DDR3 kit i bought for my brother's system in February was 47.99, is now 29.99

not going down anytime soon.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Seagate-HD-Stephen-Luczo-Toshiba-Western-Digital,14039.html

I saw a Seagate 1TB 7200.12 for $45 at NCIX USA on sale about a month ago. I was thinking of getting it, but figured I'd rather not at the moment. Now I wish I did... same drive is $190-200 at newegg now.

something tells me on my new build this spring, I may be consolidating my current drives and wiping one to be a drive in my new system.

with ram being so cheap, im surprised we havent seen the upcoming "RAM DRIVES" PCI-E Cards w/ Ram slots, that show up in Windows As DRIVES.

According to a "price search", HD prices have doubled to tripled -- yup, an HD I bought for about $50 can now be had for $150 from the same source.

HDD Prices 2x to 3x

Jaw dropping

Office Depot has Seagate LP internal 2Tb drives on black Friday for 69 bucks.

Might Pick up a few for storage..

I even saw the Seagate 2Tb USB 3.0 hard drive at WM for 89 bucks a couple of days ago. Might want to see if they have any sitting on their shelves as the Seagate 1Tb USB 3.0 drives were 129. I guess they don't mark up old stock.

The cool thing about these USB 3.0 Seagates is the power and USB connection is at the bottom and just unplugs. I use it with my old 320Gb bare drives for quick backups. USB 3.0 is at least twice as fast as USB 2.0 on my system.

The SeagateFree Agent USB 3.0 drive, you should be able to unplug the header and mount it internally using the SATA/SATAPOWER connectors.

ah so i see why the prices inflated here,funny though how even those in stock cost more huh.

I was in WM yesterday and that old stock 2Tb Seagate was marked up from 89 to 129. Wow.

Western Digital also just lost a court arbitration, and was supposed to pay 525 Mill. to Seagate.

Well that's the nature of VALUE: the scarcity is now known, and whether you have it in stock or not, people know that there are very few of them relative to demand...so the value of such a product, whether it's in stock or not, has gone up.

Say I wanted to buy one this month, and saw the price was just $89, I might wait for some reason, be the same low price later, right? But then i read this thread, and I think "holy carps! If I wait 'till next week, there might not even be one for sale, might have to wait months for a new ___". Not only would I rush to the store, but I'd likely be willing to pay more in order to get what I might not be able to get at all for some time. HOW MUCH more would depend on me, and the price increase.

Some might call that gouging. Others would point out that when supply outstrips demand, the price is lower than it really should be for a business to pay it's people, pay its rent and make a profit for it's investors. But they carry them anyway, perhaps because it's expected part of the store's market, maybe they make decent money on volume (like Walmart does), or they just pray that you'll buy something else while you are there.

In practical terms though, the company HQ sees there's gonna be fewer of them, so they raise the prices, the store raises the prices right away, not caring one whit that they have some in stock, because that's irrelevant. What's relevant is overall supply, overall demand.

Several years ago I had a elderly customer come into an auto parts store I worked at with a 30lb container of R12 Freon. He mentioned that he paid $50 for it several years before that but heard it was now worth big bucks and wondered what we'd give him for it.

(In case you guys didn't know it became illegal to produce or import R12 Freon after 1994 so as supplies diminished it got a LOT more expensive. A lot of the rare stock we find of it today is actually illegally imported from Mexico!)

The tank still had the original seals on it so I unsealed it and tested it. Sure enough it came out as pure R12 Freon so we offered him $600 for that tank. The poor old man almost had a heart attack! He was ecstatic! We gave him six crisp $100 bills and he walked away just as happy as can be!

The next day we had a Classic Car shop call frantically looking for a source for R12 Freon and we just happened to have the last 30lb container in stock. They paid us $1600 for it and we ecstatic! Retail on that container at the time was about $2000.

It's all about supply and demand folks!

1.5 TB for $69.99 on the Egg...

Seagate Barracuda Green ST1500DL003 1.5TB 5900 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...le-_-22-148-725

Quit #%&*$# when we first started out 100mb hard drives were 300+ dollars

I remember $299 for 4.3 GB ATA/33 MMR (Multimedia Ready) Seagate for my either my 586 or Pentium 200MMX

Heck I remember paying $299 for a 320MB hard drive (I upgraded from a 10MB). Back then $1/MB was unheard of!

Analysts figure that the world is short about 50,000,000 hard drives because of the tsunami. They indicate mid 2012 before things catch up. Of course, it could take longer.

Thus, expensive hard drives are here to stay for a while. Thing is, once they have folks conditioned to pay, they may not be eager to drop prices -- even when the supply and demand are back to normal.

Maybe we should decouple HDDs from supply and demand by making them tradable commodities on the stock exchange? I love paying more for gas despite there being plenty of gas and low demand just because investors are looking for a better place to put their $$ than in a declining dollar. It's AWESOME!!!



The Jedi Master

HDDs will be the same as gas/oil.

Gas Spiked from like $1.15/Gallon to $4.00+/Gallon when the pipeline was damaged, and 10 years later havent been back down to the price it was at, now the excuses is the price per drum of oil.

(Supposedly the price hike was to pay for the repair of the pipelin, But do you really think the oil companies didnt have that shiz insured?, they pocketed that #%&*$#, and when they realized everyone was dependant on gas and continued to pay $3.00+/Gallon they kept it that way.)

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for SSD manufacturers to step in and take over the market. It's getting to where the price difference isn't so great anymore!

like i said, ram chips are getting DIRT CHEAP, i wouldnt be surprised if we see PCIe Addon Cards for RAMDRIVES.

Almost bought something similar on Black Friday, the only reason I didn't is all my slots are covered up with crossfire:
OCZ RevoDrive 230GB PCIe X4 Sandforce SF-1200 SSD Solid State Disk Flash Drive

WTF is a solid state disk flash drive? Is it like a hard drive? Is it like an SSD?

instead of mounting it via SATA/2.5 HDD

it mounts into the PCIe Slot, w/ the SATA Controller built onto the card, and the Flash memory modules on the same card.

SSD = Solid State Disk, flash drive is superfluous.

This "Revo Drive" is also an SSD, but having it on a PCIe card has the benefit of a straight connection to the chipset, without a SATA controller as a bottleneck.

So is it faster?

You still have to deal with the controller, The controller is on the card :p.
Your installing the Card which contains the PCIe interface, the Controller Chip, and the Flash Array, The Controller is custom made for the Revo Though.
Which is basically seen in windows as a Controller Card, then from there windows will detect the flash array attached to the controller.

But using PCIE 2.0 4x (4 2-Way lanes) gives you more bandwidth (20Gbps/1.6GBps) compared to SATA3 ( 6Gbps/600MBps)

I believe the Revo drives have internal Raid-0 so you can split it to 2 partitions and double the speed (while cutting space in half).

The main reason REVO Drives exist was before SATA-III/6 Gbps was fully deployed, SSDs would Saturate the entire SATA-II bandwidth.

I'm sorry, but I'm confused. The way I read your post, you seem to be saying that these things are 3x faster than SSDs. If so, why even bother with an SSD?

Revo Drives are faster than SSD on a SerialATA-II/3Gbps interface (which was limited to 275Mb/sec).

Revo Drives might be faster or equal to SSD on SerialATA-III/6Gbps interface.

The whole reason they built the Revo Line was to Bypass the 275Mb Bandwidth Ceiling of the SATA-II/3Gbps interface.

Yeah the other thing to look out for with RevoDrives is that some MB BIOS don't play well with them, there is a list on the manufacturer site that lists which ones do and some that need specific BIOS settings.

There were some amazing black friday deals on the Intel SSDs, so I stuck with a normal SSD SATA2 drive which will work out fine for me and my aging motherboard, but it is good to know that there are some PCIE options out there too.

One (Small) Step Closer...
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Western-Digital-WD-Thailand-BPI-Flooding,14150.html

Walmart Here still has 1.5 TB Seagate 7200/64MB Cache drives for $99.

however, they get max shipment of 2 per/month. and most of the time they dont get more than 1 a month, and the store i used to work at has a lot of geeks, so they buy them before they hit the floor and ebay them for twice the price.

Hitachi has just put a 4TB drive on the market. I wonder what the price curve will look like in a year? High entry price, tureen a fast decline as the other sizes start shipping in numbers again.

On a slightly related note:




Disk Price Fixing Admitted


Wonder if Japanese tsunami was not the whole reason for price rises -- but rather used as an "excuse" to fix higher prices on Hard Drives. Don't claim to know

as many HDD's they claim to pump out a day, i cant image that consumer's have bought all of them, or even half of them.

i think they just followed the oil companies.

"Oh, natural Disaster, our facilities are damaged and underwater, lets hike prices because of supply and demand and to pay for damage."


(the oil companies hiked gas through the roof to pay for damage to the pipeline that was covered under insurance.
prices have never gone down, and every time they creep down they jump back up using the excuse that the mid-east is to blame.)

An online retailer has a Samsung F4 2TB drive up for £99. Sounds like a good deal.

A friend just had a HD failure. Imagine my surprise when I check HD prices for him. The Western Digital 1TB drive he bought for $80 in August is now $240, both prices from NewEgg.

For A while I was saying Check WalMart.

They werent changing their in store prices, so the 1TB Seagate 7200/32MB Cache could still be $99-$119, but they are 90% of the time out of stock, and when they get shipments in, they rarely make it to the floor.
(2 or 3 units a month, and employees buy them before they get to the floor w/ their employee 10% discount, then turn around and re-sell on ebay.).

as of Jan. 1st, all stores are required to make in store SKUs are a required price (so 1tb drives went from 99 to 179.)

Got a New Egg Email:

2TB Seagate SATA-3 w/ 64MB Cache, $139.99 w/ Promo Code: EMCNJJH35

New Egg Link

Now, From what I've read, Seagate Drives arent what they used to be, the 1TB i have now Suffer's from slow responses and Skipping (?).
The Reviews Reviews seems to confirm that.

I bought a 640Gb 2.5 Seagate portable for 59 bucks at WM a couple of weeks ago. They were 99 today.

Well, a couple of weeks ago was holiday pricing. Not a great barometer of what the normal prices would be.



The Jedi Master