Slashdot Mirror
CD-R Prices Could Triple This Summer
Suppafly writes: "According to this story at pcworld.com cd-r media prices are going to skyrocket once the surplus of CD-R media is used up and companies return to having a shortage. 'Consumers ... can expect discs to sell for about 35 to 40 cents at retail.' This doesn't sound good for those of us who backup damn near everything to CD-R." Some spares couldn't hurt, either way.
"So, I guess the moral is, if you see any "free after rebate" deals, take advantage of them because they won't be around long. Race you to Best Buy!"
Me: "I'd like to buy this spindle of CD-Rs, please."
Best Buy Cashier: "OK. I see that these have an instant rebate, so the price is only $2 today."
Me: "Cool."
Cashier: "However, with our convenient CD-R protection plan, for the low cost of only $35, we'll provide you with a replacement if your purchase should be found defective for any reason."
Me: "uhm...wait a second..." Cashier: "We also highly recommend these special CD-R cleaning cloths, available for only $19.95...you can't clean CD-R's any other way, you know..." Me: "wha? cleaning cloths? I don't think..." Cashier: "...and don't forget these special CD-R labelling pens, only $7.50, which are guaranteed to work with your new CD-Rs." Me:"Hold on just one second now..." Cashier: "better not to argue, sir. See the cameras? They're watching...ok then, your total comes to $70 after tax...sir? sir?"
Sound of car tires peeling in parking lot...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Dude, you forgot pr0n. ;-)
Between CD-R's at $0.30 each, and gas at three bucks a gallon, it looks like a gloomy summer ahead for Joe American Consumer and Pr0n Hound.
Too expensive to drive to the beach and too expensive to back up all that pr0n. And with cable rates going up... we might have to start talking to each other or something.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
This is, after all, from the same people who successfully predicted the now skyrocketing price of RAM!!! ;)
For reference: In Western Europe we pay:
~$0.75 for a CD-R (DFL 1.75 in NL)
~$4.25 for a gallon of gas (DFL 2.70/liter in NL)
I would die for your American prices...
<grub> Reading
This is great, now all the STORES get slashdotted.
Almost as good as telling everyone that we're going to run out of gas in about three weeks, "GO GET SOME BEFORE ITS GONE KIDS!".
Klowner
watch me get modded down..
I'm not a bit surprised to read about this surplus of CD-Rs - I wondered how they became so cheap between 1999-2000. This tripled price of CD-Rs probably won't affect quantity demanded much.
As a side note, too many people who've never learned economics confuse demand with quantity demanded Demand of these CD-Rs will remain the same if the only factor that changes is the price - the demand curve simply determines how many CD-Rs will be purchased at a given price. My personal opinion is that the demand curve is rather flat (on a quantity vs price graph) around the current price range.
Prices may double, triple, whatever, but I still find a 50 CD-R spindle at $15-25 a bargain. Besides, shouldn't we be saving plastic and backing up on CD-RW anyway? According to the article, CD-RW prices will remain stable - perhaps CD-RWs will become even more common in a year.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
In related news, the price of Clay Pigeons is expected to return to normal. Charlton Heston of the Shotgun Association of America stated at a press conference, "Our recent sources of cheap plastic clay pigeons are expected to dry up. We will be returning to clay clay pigeons."
Keeping
Honestly, 40 cents for a blank CDR is still a good deal. It would only make a difference to the people who buy hordes of CDRs. And to these people, I have a question:
:) What do you guys use your CDR's for? Or did I nail it on the head? The last time I burned a CD was SuSE 7.1 last month. Before that? Probably Slackware sometime in 1942.
What on earth do you use all these CDRs for? Seriously, how can you amass so much data so quickly that you need spindles atop spindles of them? =)
I have some theories:
1) Packrat. This person loves collecting everything. TV episodes, movies, software. Obviously this person doesn't actually do anything with these CDRs other than lend them out to people who make copies and do the same thing.
2) Rampant Windows pirate. This person makes illegal copies of Windows software and carries all the CDs around in a black CD-binder/case thing. Need some outdated version of Photoshop? He's your man.
3) Music Leech. All of this person's blanks go to hold the massive amounts of Napster downloads. Obviously this person does not have a long enough lifespan to listen to all of the audio acquired.
Ok enough jokes
Time to go pick up a whole bunch before the hoarders get to them. Oh, wait...
And even if you do intend to use removable HDDs as your archiving system, they're still a bit more fragile than optical disks. If you drop a CD off of a two story building, unless you're dropping it onto shear granite in Point Barrow, Alaska in the middle of February, odds are it will still work. CDs aren't anywhere near as sensitive to static discharge or EM, either. And even if the info on the platters are still OK, you could still fry a chip on the controller.
Continuing along that thread, hard drives by defintion have more points of failure. It is both the medium and the mechanism to read it; CD and CD-ROM drive in one. Not only do you have to worry about how volatile the information is on the platters, but the fact that every time you power it up, it spins itself closer to mechanical failure. If it moves, it WILL break. The more it moves, the sooner it will break. So sayeth the second law of thermodynamics. If your CD-ROM drive dies, you can get a new one, borrow a friend's, scavenge an old one, et cetera. Your CDs will be fine. If your HDD dies, you're stuck with paying out the ass to a manufacturer or a specialist to get your data out of the drive.
Yes, CD-Rs write a heck of a lot slower than an HDD, but it's not meant to be anywhere near as dynamic as an HDD. The concept is to know what you want to hang on to beforehand, and then put it on the CD where you'll have it for a decade or two. You may change hard drives, you may change computers, but you'll still have the information.
And last but not least, when was the last time you tried moving a hard disk from one computer to another?
At any rate, I think CD-Rs are probably the best option for archiving/backing-up data among all the options available. Everything else you might use (be it magnetic tape, proprieatary magnetic media, or DVD-RAM) require a proprietary drive to read and write. Odds are, you'll be out of luck hardware-wise if you want to read it from another computer. A CD-R, on the other hand, can be read by just about any computer manufactured in the past decade or so. It might as well be a floppy disk it's so universal.