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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.'"
Something like 512GB makes it obvious that's 512GiB. And I obviously want 512GiB in my laptop.
Obviously things get better and cheaper as time goes on - but you spend the same. One year you get a 20GB drive for $100, the next year you get a 40GB for $100, the next year 80GB for $100, etc. What's happening now is that people are getting bigger drives for much cheaper than the previous year.
I have exactly one terabyte of HD space - that much was unimaginable to me only a few short years ago. Remember when Windows 95 only used somewhere around the neighborhood of 50MB? With todays OS storage requirements sitting around one GB it's not unimaginable anymore that someday the OS alone will be a terabyte (although I can't imagine what it would contain) and overall hard drives will be truly unimaginable sizes by todays standards.
Shh.
I just found out that more than half of the things in my computer are really 'garbage'. Maybe I should not be keeping it in the first place. it just made looking for the right things so hard. But then storage is so cheap.... that sometimes in the same hard drive, I could find myself having three copies of the same data.
Wilson Ng What matters is what you can, and cannot do.... Captain Jack Sparrow
Well, you picked a place that sells way overpriced stuff. Especially cables. People keep telling me how HDMI cables cost $100, and if you're trying to buy them at Best Buy, you do find them at that price (although, I'm now finding "cheaper" cables. $49.99 is the cheapest I've found there. It says it's an "xbox hdmi cable", I assume microsoft doesn't have a proprietary plug and that's just a regular hdmi cable. If it's not a regular hdmi cable, then the cheapest is a $79.99 4' cable instead. On the other hand, if you do a simple google search, you'll easily find 6' cables for $6.99. Same for most other cables.
The lesson...stuff is getting cheaper, but you need to shop around before you buy. These days, with the convenience of the 'net, you have no excuse not to.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I'm not so sure about those trends. At least in the U.S., my experience has been that the average drive is slowly getting cheaper, but only if you pay full retail. What I'm seeing in my purchasing is a greater and greater reluctance by merchants to deeply discount hard drives. Where once we had $80-100 mail-in rebates, we now have $30 mail-in rebates or no rebates at all. The actual cost from what I'm seeing is staying roughly the same at the sweet spot. The only difference is that now I pay $100 at the register instead of paying $160 and getting a $60 rebate check after several months. Don't get me wrong---I much prefer not having to deal with the rebate B.S., but you can't ignore that comparing raw prices is something of an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Your mileage may vary, of course. I haven't looked back at register receipts or anything, and it probably doesn't help that I've sworn off Western Digital after a long string of premature drive failures. The brand limitations and the departure of several manufacturers from the market makes any useful tracking a bit harder for me. That said, I'm not perceiving prices (at the sweet spot) as being significantly lower than they were five years ago.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
In the long run it seems to be going down. But what about years 94, 95, and 98? We could be in store for another spike. Those spikes are not really predictable, nor is their duration.
:o)
Did you guess I'm a pessimistic person?