Hard Drive Prices Hitting New Lows

Lucas123 writes "The average price of notebook hard drives tumbled to $53 in the third quarter of 2007, from $86 in the same period during the previous year, according to a survey by a market research firm. The price drop can be accredited to competition among six vendors, enormous demand for PCs and consumer electronics as well as evolving flash memory drives. 'Lower-capacity notebook drives showed smaller price drops, while newer high-capacity drives saw massive price drops ... Notebook drives with 320GB of storage will drop as a result of the addition of new features, while prices will stabilize on lower-capacity notebook storage devices like 80GB hard drives.'"

Comments

Breaking news

[Stormwatch]

This news just in: technology advances and gets cheaper. Film at eleven.

Re:Breaking news

[Sloppy]

It sort of is news. My experience up to now is that bang-per-buck increases, but the price of a widget didn't necessarily change much, even if this year's widget was 50x bigger/faster/more_reliable/prettier than the widget of ten years ago.

In 2000, I bought a video card (Matrox G400MAX, which I'm still using) for about $160, I think. What does a video card cost today? It's hard to say, since there's a lot of variety. But speaking very generally, a video card costs about the same.

Re:Breaking news

[desmodromic]

um, hello? that's exactly what the "not insightful" parent was saying.

Re:Enormous demand equals lower prices?

[Kopiok]

It could be that the enormous demand is making mass production more profitable, and also leading to cheaper manufacture methods.

Also, Loss Leaders

[Glowing Fish]

I am assuming that a lot of this comes from pressures from customers, or retail stores, to keep prices down. At least on flashy equipment that customers will go for. I've noticed that RAM and hard drive prices are getting ridiculously cheap.

Some things, however, seem to be way overpriced. Go to bestbuy.com (for example), and do a search for items like parallel, power, USB, VGA or DVI cables. A parallel cable, for example (a fancy gold one, true) costs $29. A six foot USB cable costs $35. Even a power cable costs $12.

Hard drives have lots of moving parts, and chips and electronics. Cables are, more or less, lengths of wire, with probably around 50 cents worth of copper in most of them. I am assuming that stores are keeping down prices on flashy items so they can then get customers to pay way too much for utility items.

Re:Enormous demand equals lower prices?

[JonathanR]

No. Economics doesn't work that way. What it is is enormous investment in captial equipment combined with the lag between initial investement and full scale procution eventually leads to market oversupply, which is why the prices are reducing. Prices are lowered, margins get tighter, so production is ramped up to compensate.

Unless there is an opportunity to continue introducing 'premium' products (i.e. large capacity, or new features) using the same production technologies, then the margins get so tight that the weakest producer goes bust and/or is bought out by one of the stronger players.

Someone should tell Microsoft

[angle_slam]

Microsoft is selling the 120 GB hard drive for the Xbox 360 for $180. For the same price, you could get a 750 GB hard drive for your PC. Or, you could buy a 160 GB hard drive for $50.

Re:Enormous demand equals lower prices?

[billcopc]

If I were manufacturing the cheapest junk ever build, I'd want to coax my suckers into buying big too, because the same client won't be coming back, ever!

Seriously, we need to turn this garbage culture back around. Things are being designed to the very limit of human tolerance. I don't need gadgets that break every six months, I already own a f**king car.

Re:Free market?

[TheRaven64]

A free market depends on an informed buyer. Any situation in which the seller has more information than the buyer is not a true free market (as such, free markets are about as common as invisible pink unicorns).