Hard Drive Prices Up 150% In Less Than Two Months

zyzko writes "The Register reports that hard drive prices (lowest average unit prices) have rocketed 151% from October 1 to November 14th. The worst days have seen over 5% daily price increases. This is commonly attributed to the floods in Thailand, but there are concerns of artificial price fixing and suspicion that retailers or members of the supply channel are taking advantage of the situation." The number varies when you break it down to individual drives, but it seems to be in the right ballpark. Anecdotally, the drive I picked up on Oct. 14th would cost me 135% more today. The flood waters in Thailand have partially receded, but aren't expected to be completely gone until early December. The damage to the country's economy and property is measured in the tens of billions.

Comments

No, no, no

[lightknight]

They aren't up 150%.
They're up 400%.

Never thought 500 GB drives would come back into style...and yet they're what my friends are specc'ing into their machines these days.

Re:No, no, no

[imamac]

That's okay. We just store stuff in the cloud nowadays.

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I read an article last week about how they are on average, 25% more expensive. Looking at many of the online retailers and some local vendors, most are 3x more expensive.

I bought a 2TB WD20EARS in September for $69, they are $299 at every local store now. The WD RE4 and Seagate ES drives are $399 for 2TB, which is only about 2x.

Re:No, no, no

[macwhizkid]

That's okay. We just store stuff in the cloud nowadays.

And what, pray tell, do you imagine the cloud stores data on? Turtles?

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a few 2TB drives over the summer expecting to build up my computer's storage, but I've been so lazy I haven't even used them. I'm really considering selling them now.

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Wooooosh!

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

It is clouds all the way down.

Re:No, no, no

[PolygamousRanchKid]

And what, pray tell, do you imagine the cloud stores data on? Turtles?

It's turtles . . . all the way down.

The trouble with storing stuff in the clouds, is that it falls back to the ground when it rains, and causes floods. But in the case of Thailand, it will get recycled back into new storage, so we will have renewable storage.

Probably.

Does that make it Green?

Re:No, no, no

[macwhizkid]

The trouble with storing stuff in the clouds, is that it falls back to the ground when it rains, and causes floods. But in the case of Thailand, it will get recycled back into new storage, so we will have renewable storage.

Not only that, but with reduced CO2 emissions as a direct result of fewer spinning hard drives drawing power from the electrical grid and the increased albedo from all that data being stored in clouds, we've also solved global warming! Go team!

Re:No, no, no

[mapinguari]

I bought a 3TB Deskstar for $130 on Sept 28. Current price is now $250.

The current price is 192% of the old price.
That's a price increase of 92%. Colloquially, the price is up 92%.

Re:No, no, no

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Yeah, Drop Box dropped my storage 150%!!

Re:No, no, no

[skids]

Back during the flash glut I bought a couple 64G USB sticks. They have to be the only piece of computer equipment I have ever owned that appreciated in value.

Congrats to anyone who bought a large number of drives for a home fileserver before they spiked but never got around to installing them.

Re:No, no, no

[houstonbofh]

Hell... I am considering selling some that I am using!

Re:No, no, no

[houstonbofh]

You do know that there is more than on drive out there, right? Some of the WD2TB drives went from $70 to $200.

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

3TB is high-end, always more expensive than it should be.

Re:No, no, no

[LordLimecat]

Not brick-and-mortar vendors, at least not in the DC area-- theyre about 150-200% normal price.

Re:No, no, no

[broken_chaos]

I bought a bunch of 2TB drives (six Seagate 'green' drives for a NAS) about the same time you did from Newegg. They were $70; the same drives are now $230.

Re:No, no, no

[TheGratefulNet]

clouds.... DOWN?

(are you in australia?)

Re:No, no, no

[ozmanjusri]

No, turtles are more like.

W... o... o... o... s... h... _.

Re:No, no, no

[ozmanjusri]

Does that make it Green?

If it's been under floodwater for months, very likely. Probably wouldn't draw much power either.

Re:No, no, no

[Just Brew It!]

Actually, if it is still underwater it is most likely brown now... or whatever color the mud tends to be over there. Not green.

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just glad I completed my 5 drive (2 TB drives) ZFS machine about two weeks before the prices started to jump.

Re:No, no, no

[DrVomact]

A more serious question occurred to me in response to the joke: Has the price of quantity purchases of hard drives skyrocketed like the retail prices? If Amazon or Google want to build another server farm, will they be paying much more than they would have paid a month ago? —If it's only the retail prices that have increased so drastically, then I'd see that as a sign that someone in the supply chain is just taking advantage of a chance to reap a windfall profit. Big purchasers naturally have more clout with suppliers than do individual buyers; if they thought they were being ripped off, they'd buy from another vendor, and no vendor wants to lose that kind of business—so no sensible vendor would jerk around a major customer by raising prices when they didn't have to. However, wholesale suppliers can't afford to sell huge quantities of drives at a loss, so if there truly is a general shortage of drives, they'd all have to raise prices for even the big buyers. Can anyone involved in purchasing large lots of hard drives supply any insight with regard to this question?

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

rofl 400% where are you shopping mate? Ive seen them at a maximum of 200% higher than normal on a bad day. Ill gladly sell you a hard drive for 400% more though lmao

Re:No, no, no

[__aajfby9338]

clouds.... DOWN?

(are you in australia?)

W... h... o... o... s... h...

Re:No, no, no

[dbIII]

The funny thing SAS drives haven't gone up much at all so I've ended up with a system booting off SSD and storing on SAS which is within about $20 of doing the same thing with all SATA. That sucks in a way because the box with the least important job ends up being the fastest.

Re:No, no, no

[ibsteve2u]

Wouldn't bet on the brown; it would depend upon how deep it is. I remember the pool at the Paradise Hotel in Udorn was variously brown, green, and blue...as was the stuff on the bottom of the pool. And the surface water - particularly in the klongs - can be even more...interesting.

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Just another day in Paradise? :)

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I was at Fry's tonight.

WD Green 500Gb and similar drives were about $150. I bought a half dozen of the (more expensive, at the time) Seagate 500Gb drives at about $50/ea no more than two months ago. The 2Tb Seagate Constellation drives I bought a week before the hard drive shortage became news, which I got (at an inflated price) for $200 or so each? Over $400 now (depending on where you're looking - some vendors are selling them for over $500) - assuming they even have them in stock.

In contrast, I purchased 3 Hitachi 1Tb drives at around $100/ea around 3 years ago.

Like you said, it's not 150% - that's barely anything. It's not 400%, from what I've seen, but it's certainly at least 200%, closer to 300%, and in some cases, almost 400% or more.

Needless to say, first quarter budget planning, with new storage budgeted to fall around this time of the year, isn't going to allow for many projects to happen properly. "Why didn't you spend your budget for last year? No more budget for you, you don't need it!" A low-end storage server would've cost in the $10k ballpark this past summer. Now? At least $15k, and probably more due to taxes/tacked on percentage overhead...

Re:No, no, no

[M8e]

Wooooosh!

I just blew the clouds back i place.

Re:No, no, no

[Hognoxious]

Was that the sound of a toilet flushing? And did you notice which way the water spirals?

Re:No, no, no

[Hognoxious]

I bought a pair of 2TB drives just before the floods. About the only bit of good luck I had this year.

Having said that, they're over half full already.

Re:No, no, no

[rtb61]

The biggest cost of new hard drives, will be rebuilding the hard disk drive plants in regions, with stable weather, low tectonic incidence and politically stable. That the hard disk drive plants were built in flood prone locations means that a group of people need a good butt kicking. Brings to mind things like saved pennies to spend pounds and stupid is as stupid does.

Re:No, no, no

[bemymonkey]

I'm just glad I bought my 1TB laptop drive (Spinpoint M8) right before the floods (lucky coincidence) - ~600 gigs free on that, about 4TB free on the NAS and a bunch of 3.5" drives between 400GB and 1TB laying around for my Quickports (those SATA docks for internal drives - they're awesome!)... so I'm fine just playing the waiting game :)

Hasn't the need for hard drive space more or less plateaued outside of video editing afficionados and HD pirates? With people slapping 80-200GB SSDs in their laptops instead of big hard drives, you'd think that they don't require all too much space... or is it all the Steam games?

Re:No, no, no

[bemymonkey]

Actually, my parents are there (bought a house in outer Bangkok a few years ago for retirement) - the water made it right up to the garden fence before starting to recede, and according to them, it's brown and smells pretty bad.

Re:No, no, no

[rrohbeck]

We buy lots of drives where I work. We have long term purchase agreements and the problem isn't price but availability. That means emergency quals of alternate suppliers, and keeping your fingers crossed that we don't have to stop building systems because we can't get the drives.

Re:No, no, no

[tgeek]

3TB is high-end, always more expensive than it should be.

Not really. Luckily I had just finished purchasing 10 of the 3TB drives for a NAS server before the flooding. The price was about 50% more than 2TB drives - maybe a few points more or less depending on market fluctuations. 6-12 months before that I would've been paying the bleeding-edge premium - which is why I waited until the GB/$ price had come more into line with the 1 and 2 TB drives.

Re:No, no, no

[ibsteve2u]

Guess it depends on what is upstream of ya.

Re:No, no, no

[iggymanz]

on disk arrays supplied by already-purchased inventory and long term support agreements.

Re:No, no, no

[korgitser]

bits have no colour!

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I spoke to EMC corp. about it. They have locked in prices and quantities. That's why the consumer price went crazy... We recently purchased a disk array, 960 drives.. no price change.

Re:No, no, no

[JackieBrown]

Coscto had 2tb external usb3 drives for $70 and 3TB usb 3 drives for $110 just last week.

I bought one of the 3TB ones and love it. I know it is probably a "green" drive inside, but I am just using it for storage anyways. It is fast enough for anything I want to play off of it :)

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a midsized business. As I recall, the drives in the last server we got were twice what they were a few weeks before. And within a few days the prices doubled again.

Re:No, no, no

[rhalstead]

A bit of searching on the net and the major drive manufactures are saying, "It's only going to get worse" with with WD and others saying they will not be producing any drives until some time in the first quarter of 2012. They are forecasting the shortage will last through this coming year. Then they once caught up they still have all the demand that was missed. Also with Windows 8 allegedly coming out in 2012 there will be another spike in demand. Recommendations are: If you buy or build a new computer, use the smallest HD you can get away with. 120G SSDs are still around $200 +/- so it might be a good time too move the system drive to an SSD. Some are saying, buy now while the prices are still cheap? Cheap? and they've gone up between 3 to 4 times.(sigh)

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than reducing CO2, it might increase it. If I decide I need more storage, instead of buying a new drive as a replacement I might add one of my old ones back.

Although, since I've got 2 2TB drives and a 1.5TB drive in my MythTV box, hopefully I'll do what I should have done a while ago set aside some time to deleting a lot of crap I'll probably never have time to watch and maybe archive some stuff I've watched but want to keep.

Re:No, no, no

[DrVomact]

That seems like a sensible consideration...but it is never a consideration when decisions are made about where to build plants that make anything. It's kind of frightening to think of just how vulnerable we (who live in the U.S. and consume things manufactured elsewhere) are to events in the places where actual manufacturing is done these days. I mean...like China. Suppose China suddenly becomes politically unstable (again). Just about everything we buy will become unobtainable. Consider how many crucial parts that go into consumer goods are built in countries run by military juntas, democracies where a request for an election recount is usually filed with lead projectiles, and countries that are subject to frequent earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, etc. etc. Frightening, isn't it?

But they have cheap labor, so the plants are built there. However, what drives the decision to build factories only in places where labor is cheap? Why, it's our own insistence on buying only goods that have the lowest price. Maybe the manufacturers shouldn't be criticized for applying the same standards we, the U.S. consumer, apply and actually impose on them. The safest place in the world to build factories is probably Nebraska. Far away from tidal waves, not known for its frequent earthquakes, a placid population...but they'd probably want more than $10 an hour. Would you want to buy a hard drive from Nebraska if the same thing is half the price, but imported from Thailand?

Re:No, no, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry guys no time to register...

Remote server storage ( cloud) t may be od limited use for casual users..but in the professional world we simply cannot afford to store anything in remote servers at the mercy of anyone's invasion and theft and technical paralysis; IE: "CLOUDS" . I am a music industry professional, but ALL my IT security experts, some of whom work for the US govt and private enterprise security know that cloud storage is not an option if your data has to be reasonably or highly secure AND if you need reliable access on a daily basis..

What a crock.

[jtownatpunk.net]

I'm too lazy to look it up but the figure I remember seeing is that 25% of the world's hard drive manufacturing capacity has been impacted by the floods so the markup shouldn't be anything like 150%. It's just like the time RAM prices went thru the roof years ago, far higher than should have been caused by whatever problem caused a temporary shortage and they stayed artificially inflated for years. Same thing's going to happen with hard drives. Manufacturers will milk this for years.

Re:What a crock.

[amorsen]

I'm too lazy to look it up but the figure I remember seeing is that 25% of the world's hard drive manufacturing capacity has been impacted by the floods so the markup shouldn't be anything like 150%.

Why not? If demand is sufficiently inelastic, prices could go up 1000% if even 5% of the production capacity disappears.

Re:What a crock.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, this is slashdot. Go spout your economic pseudo-science on zerohedge.

Re:What a crock.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would require some sort of cartel-like behaviour, wouldn't it? And maybe there might be some of that, implicitly, without the major players explicitly forming an illegal cartel...

Anyway, this reminds me of how the petrol stations around here say they have to sell of their buffer first, when they don't lower prices if the price of oil goes down, but when the price of oil goes up they don't seem to have any buffers.

Re:What a crock.

[lightknight]

Not going to happen.

Last I checked, there isn't much overlap for HD / SSD manufacturers. If HD prices remain high, SSD manufacturers will have the advantage.

Which means the HD manufacturers may go the way of the dinosaur in a few years.

Re:What a crock.

[jtownatpunk.net]

Actually, I think demand is very elastic at this point. It spiked like crazy over the last few weeks as people scrambled to buy as many drives as they could lay their hands on before all of the vendors jacked their prices. The high inflation caused a run on the existing supply. Now demand is going to plunge as people who were adding capacity, just because they could, stop buying drives. But I don't expect prices to come down even as the supply recovers. Insurance will pay to rebuild (and relocate if they're smart) the factories but we'll have inflated prices for a long time.

Re:What a crock.

[tlhIngan]

Well, hard drives are commodities, like orange juice, gas, oil, etc.

Prices are inflated now simply because everyone's got the "OMG I NEED A DRIVE NOW!!!" fever. Then again, drives today aren't any more expensive than they were just a year ago.

So if you have no need for a spare hard drive, don't be a sucker and buy now. If you find a sale, great, if not, hold off.

And yes, drive supplies will rebound because of one fact - a 2TB spinning rust costs way less than a 2TB SSD, and since drives are going 3TB+, I don't see SSDs catching up until drive size expansion slows below Moore's law. (SSD's fundamental capacity is driven by Moore's law - double the transistors in 18 months - double the capacity - SLC or MLC).

I'm guessing everyone's in a frenzy, but they'll recover in a few months and if it's been sitting on the shelf the whole time while you "stocked up", you'll look silly.

In short - buy if you really need it (and take notice in that drive prices really aren't sky high - they're just where they were last year or the year before). If you don't, just wait it out.

We thought we'd be stuck with $150 barrels of oil. They dropped under half that a year later.

Re:What a crock.

[Mad Merlin]

Yes and no, some drives have tripled in price while others have seen modest gains. Checking local stores, I see that the WD Caviar Green 2T drive that used to be on sale for $65 every week is now $180. However, the WD Caviar Green 3T drive that used to be in the $220 range is now... *drumroll* ...$250. Now, I'm pretty sure the 2T drive was significantly less than $180 when it was released several years ago.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I guess people are still buying the 2T drives instead of the 3T drives, even though the latter actually is ~10% cheaper per gig now.

I have a sneaking suspicion that once drive prices start falling again they'll fall very slowly and may never reach the levels we saw just a few months ago.

Re:What a crock.

[epine]

I'm too lazy to look it up but the figure I remember seeing is that 25% of the world's hard drive manufacturing capacity has been impacted by the floods so the markup shouldn't be anything like 150%.

You do know that supply and demand is diagrammed with curves don't you? And since we live in a complex world where anything you make has a thousand inputs, the concept of leverage applies here: the other million dollars you spend on your server farm isn't worth much minus all the hard drives. Some people are willing to pay a big premium not to be left out in the cold when so much depends upon a red slider. And retail on the whole is in dire thrall to willingness-to-pay, which by most accounts of capitalism is how it should be.

Fungibility comes into play, but billion dollar facilities don't ramp up and down in the span of a retail hissy fit.

It would have taken you twice as long to figure this out as to spew your complaint, so I understand the latency of comprehension.

I like this first of these (it's low key but interesting about when we shouldn't put a price on things), can't vouch for the second one:

Satz on Markets
Munger on Price Gouging

A few hours of your time, and the world will become oh so much less mysterious.

Re:What a crock.

[mabhatter654]

That's because most stations buy on consignment.when gas takes a steep dip, they still have to sell at the higher price. When gas goes up, they get a brief chance to pad the books until they have to buy the next tank. Here in the US most stations only make about 10-15 cents per gallon net profit. They don't have padding to cover credit card fees by percent, let alone the price changes. Service stations are MLM at its best... That's how the parent companies get rich.

Re:What a crock.

[eulernet]

No, this is the traditional Christmas period.
Prices are artificially inflated at that time of the year, probably to drive sales on SSD.
It's similar on other products.

Prices will decrease after Christmas.

Re:What a crock.

[ultranova]

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I guess people are still buying the 2T drives instead of the 3T drives, even though the latter actually is ~10% cheaper per gig now.

You can't boot from a 3T drive under Windows unless you have EFI instead of the normal PC BIOS, which most systems don't have. So once again, it's all Microsoft's fault.

Re:What a crock.

[QuantumRiff]

Newegg is trying to fight against that, and its rather annoying. They will only sell a single drive per customer. They had no problem selling me motherboards, processors, and superMicro server chassis.. but when I asked for 12 drives (two 6 bay servers) even over the phone.. they said no..

Very annoying.. I wasn't trying to 'stock up' I needed them for a project..

Re:What a crock.

[antifoidulus]

I think the picture is a little more complicated than that. Supplies in certain segments of the hard drive industry may never recover because SSDs do a better job. One such segment is really high performance drives(15k RPM). Given SSDs higher density when compared to 15k rpm drives, the total cost of ownership is already favoring SSDs, so any plant that made parts for the 15k rpm drives may never be rebuilt. The remaining factories will probably only produce enough product to produce spares parts and thus the price will probably never fall back down to pre-flood levels.

Re:What a crock.

[bryan1945]

Would they let you buy them 1 at a time, or do they track customers purchases to limit drive sales? I honestly don't know, and it would be annoying and inefficient to you, but maybe that could be a work-around?

Re:What a crock.

[Dahamma]

It might be elastic if the majority of HDDs were people buying them at Fry's or Newegg. But that's noise compared to the current system integrator/OEM industry (Apple, Dell, HP, etc), that gets first dibs. The current fluctuation is because even with elasticity the supply to that last few percent or discount retailers is severely limited...

Re:What a crock.

[bryan1945]

I generally see prices drop around Christmas time. Lower margin but higher sales. Often just so companies can post a shareholder-friendly quarter. After Christmas it could be just trying to shovel stock out the doors.

Re:What a crock.

[beck24]

and take notice in that drive prices really aren't sky high - they're just where they were last year or the year before

A friend of mine had her hard drive fail last week. I told her to pick up a new one, told her where to get it and that it would be ~$60 as that's what I paid last year for the exact same drive. They're currently selling for $140. So yes, they are sky high.

Re:What a crock.

[Just Brew It!]

Yes, people who don't need a lot of capacity will switch to SSD. But even at the current inflated prices, HDDs still give you a much bigger bang for the buck in terms of price/GB.

Re:What a crock.

[swalve]

That's also why a bag of stale peanuts costs $11.

Re:What a crock.

[swalve]

It depends on how the inventory is moving. Stores have to buy their xmas inventory early, and if it is selling as fast as it is being delivered, the price stays the same. If it sells faster than its delivered, the price goes up. Slower than supply, price goes down.

There is a reason it is called "black friday". Because in many retail operations, it's the first time all year they are actually operating at a profit (or "in the black"). Prices might be lower, but they are higher than they would be if people weren't tearing the doors off trying to get in at midnight.

Re:What a crock.

[muggz1250]

I took delivery of an external 5400 RPM Western Digital from Staples for less than $60, tax and delivery included. So no, I won't go back to paying some of the prices I saw on new ache today even for five year warranty top-of-the-line 7200 RPM drives. I'll get an SSD for OS and apps and use my existing 6 TB to prices come down on 3+ terabyte drives.$250, even for top-of-the-line bare drive – no thanks.

Re:What a crock.

[ratboy666]

Well, I'm lazy too...

So, in the same spirit, I won't bother with a reference.

The motor spindle component manufacturing for hard drives has been almost 100% wiped out.

And, when the floods are under control, it will be time for another monsoon season.

It really doesn't look good -- prices on hard drives are going up, and up, and are staying there for (my guess) two to three years.

It really is time to look at SSDs.

Re:What a crock.

[517714]

There is a difference between partition size and drive size. There is a 2.2 TB partition limit so you will need a device driver to access the second partition as a virtual physical device. But you are right, it is Microsoft's fault. When we run into the 9.4 ZB limits we can blame them again.

Re:What a crock.

[Anonymous Coward]

no the invisible hand of the free market will fix this.

Re:What a crock.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Prices are inflated now simply because everyone's got the "OMG I NEED A DRIVE NOW!!!" fever."

I sure as hell didn't go out and buy a drive when I heard that prices would be affected by a shortage. I doubt that many did.

I find it pretty suspicious that we now have drives that don't store data in a guaranteed physical location, and have an unknown amount of hidden, redundant blocks as "spare" space. Intelligence agencies have been known to manipulate corporate success etc., based on how those companies "cooperate".

Have you seen how many HD manufacturers are no longer trading for one reason or another?

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers

That's compared with about five still surviving / allowed to prosper:

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PC_hardware_manufacturers#Hard_disk_drive_.28HDD.29

It's quite possible that a conversation like this took place:

NSA: "We'd like your drives to retain at least the last 30% of its data, even if 'erased' as far as the user can see".
HD Manufacturer: "Umm... we'd be... happy? to. But 30% extra capacity would cost more, and there's development of chips/firmware to drive that too."
NSA: "We'd like you to do it. Make it happen, raise your prices to 150%, and we'll make sure everyone pays."
HD Manufacturer: "You will? How?"
NSA: "Because every other HD manufacturer will be doing this too."

Add in the cloud thing, where forcing up prices might push everyone to store online, using the online storage from companies that have ALREADY agreed to let the FBI etc. access their systems through back doors, and it's not looking good.

Somehow, we need to take back control of the HD market's supply vs. demand.

Re:What a crock.

[Anonymous Coward]

About a third of the people I know have gone to SSDs as primary system storage already, or could very well be doing so due to how much data they use.

Another third haven't - they're only using them for system disks. Data storage goes on a secondary drive.

The remaining third is using older equipment.

Re:What a crock.

[hairyfeet]

Sure you can, you just stick in the Win 7 DVD and set the partition size to less than 2.2Tb. why would you want a 3Tb C: drive anyway? What the hell are you installing that you need THAT kind of space for the OS? I personally put 300Gb for Windows 7, 90Gb for WinXP, 2Tb for my data drive and 540 for my video and audio editing drive.

As for TFA you know its bad when Tigerdirect is using SSDs on its $200 barebone kits now. I'm glad i got my drives when they were cheap, along with having a few 200Gb and 320gb for spares in case one of my family's drives goes tits up. This close to Xmas all my new builds are done and sold, now it'll be netbooks and refurbs so little Johnny can have a PC in his room so with any luck I should be good until spring. let us hope they learned from this stupidity and don't put all their eggs in one basket, yes?

Hopefully Google and all the other big drive customers like HP and Dell will put pressure on them to not clump up again like that. I know if I was Google I'd be seriously pushing for a second source that didn't use the same factories, like the way old big blue always insisted on having a second source for all their parts.

Re:What a crock.

[thejynxed]

They are tracking per customer, and they are also doing it with SSD and USB Flash drives, albeit some of those are 2-4 per customer.

Re:What a crock.

[drsmithy]

Which means the HD manufacturers may go the way of the dinosaur in a few years.

No chance. Out in the enterprise, storage requirements volume-wise are accelerating every year. SSDs simply don't have have the capacity at a competitive price.

If I've got 100TB I need to store, and performance requirements are modest, SSDs haven't even got a look in.

Re:What a crock.

[Anonymous Coward]

whatever happened here keep in mind between Seagate and Western Digital they now own ~90% of the market thanks to acquisitions in the last year. Duopoly find ways to raise prices. Luckily spinning drives are doomed in the long term

Re:What a crock.

[zippthorne]

Doesn't windows 7 do filesystems properly now? With a single directory tree, and the ability to mount whatever storage you want wherever on the tree you feel needs it?

Re:What a crock.

[ultranova]

Sure you can, you just stick in the Win 7 DVD and set the partition size to less than 2.2Tb.

At which point it's foolish to get a 3TB drive instead of a 2TB drive, even if a 3TB drive costs less per gigabyte, since it'll cost more overall.

why would you want a 3Tb C: drive anyway? What the hell are you installing that you need THAT kind of space for the OS?

I don't need it for the OS, I need it for the home dir, which Windows insist on keeping in the C: drive. It's simply more convenient to keep all my stuff there.

Re:What a crock.

[Hognoxious]

Sure you can, you just stick in the Win 7 DVD and set the partition size to less than 2.2Tb.

At which point it's foolish to get a 3TB drive instead of a 2TB drive, even if a 3TB drive costs less per gigabyte, since it'll cost more overall.

Depends if you're going to use the extra space. Windows might be a catering pack of arsebiscuits, but every version I've had the pleasure to install can recognize more than one partition.

You do understand the difference between a partition and a drive, right?

I don't need it for the OS, I need it for the home dir, which Windows insist on keeping in the C: drive. It's simply more convenient to keep all my stuff there.

I'm pretty sure I've worked at places that put OS & apps on C: and data on D:, even if it had only one physical drive.

Perhaps the solution is to use a proper OS that supports LVM, or at a minimum symlinks?

Re:What a crock.

[hairyfeet]

You mean like Windows, that has supported Symlinks since Win2K? They use a different name for them of course, they call them junction points, but they are there nonetheless. I use them all the time as I have the D: drive set up to hold the users docs so that if they ever bone the OS I can just do a quick wipe without giving a crap to their data, as nearly all programs just dump everything into my docs nowadays.

And I really don't see why so many in the "other OS" community have such a raging hard on for Windows hate, the Windows 7 works quite good. Its solid, has plenty of useful features for pros as well as noobs, has DEP, ASLR, and file and registry virtualization, pretty much every program on the planet (including FOSS) has a Windows port, it all "just works". Hell it even comes with disc imaging and the native ability to burn ISOs and do video conversion. I think its quite nice and it certainly less of a bug bear to set up and keep running than any modern Linux distro I've tried..

Re:What a crock.

[unitron]

Far be it from me to say anything nice about Microsoft, but you can't use a 3TB drive in a TiVo,either, whereas you can use a 2TB in the S3 HDs and the S4s.

Re:What a crock.

[unitron]

"I took delivery of an external 5400 RPM Western Digital from Staples for less than $60, tax and delivery included."

What capacity and when did you order?

As for comparing 5400rpm drives to 7200rpm drives, well, you shouldn't. They have different attributes that are better fitted to their different purposes.

Re:What a crock.

[Hognoxious]

You mean like Windows, that has supported Symlinks since Win2K? They use a different name for them of course, they call them junction points

Not the same thing at all. A symlink can point to a file, a junction point can only point to a directory.

Re:What a crock.

[hairyfeet]

You mean like this? Its been there for over 5 years, its just Windows doesn't need it as much as junctions because its a more directory based than file based OS. Again no big whoop, easy to use, its just that most simply have no need to link to only a file when the OS is more based on directories than file location.

SSD's will be more attractive now

[TheReaperD]

One advantage of all of this is that SSD drives will start to look more attractive price wise. To me, this is a good thing as people start purchasing SSDs the price will start coming down as the cost of components get more commoditised. I would not mind seeing spindle hard drives being a relic of the past.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[crazypip666]

That is only really true for primary drives. Many people have been buying primary drives which are significantly larger than they need because prices are so low. Now this will push people who are on the fence about which way to go to buy SSDs which are more appropriately sized for a primary drive, but for anyone who wants storage space, the price per GB still makes hard drives the better buy.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[Guspaz]

A combination of the Thailand floods, Black Friday sales, and mail-in rebates created a bizarre situation today... A class of SSDs dropped lower in price per-gig than a class of traditional HDDs...

15K RPM SAS drives aren't cheap, and since the flood, they're over $1 per gig. NewEgg was charging ~$1.44 per gig or more last I checked, for the Cheetah models.

Today, NCIX had Intel 320 SSDs on sale with MIR bringing the 80, 120, and 160GB models down to slightly under $1 per GB after MIR...

Yes, it's comparing the extremes (high end extreme of HDDs and low end extreme of SSDs), but I still didn't expect it to happen, even with sales.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[lightknight]

Not if the price for SSDs keep dropping.

Once prices for 1 TB SSDs drop to something nice, HD will be shown the door.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[bfree]

It's also making BD-R(E) look a lot more appealing. On a 5 year graph I don't expect this event to have much impact on SSD prices, however I do wonder if it might finally bring BD the volume required to get it down to being (at worst) the same price per GB as DVD.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[0123456]

Once prices for 1 TB SSDs drop to something nice, HD will be shown the door.

For most people who don't play games and don't store big video files, current sub-$100 SSDs are good enough; 40-60GB will store the OS and office apps and some documents and pictures. For most people who don't fit in that category, 1TB is not enough.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey genius, how am I suppose to replace my 10 terabyte array (which cost less than $500) with SSD's?

I'm already running out of space too. Video takes up a shit-ton of space.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[lightknight]

Agreed. Which is why we buy multiple 1 TB drives. :-)

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[lightknight]

The short-term answer is you can't replace them all just yet. You'll have to scour Pricewatch and other sites to find HDs at sane prices.

The long-term answer is that you will never have enough space for video.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This isn't going to help, of course; but the high end of HDDs was already being squeezed well before the $/GB numbers said that they should. The 15k RPMs have never been very exciting as a bulk storage option, especially now that you can throw dirt cheap SATA drives onto SAS controllers if you want and they get absolutely destroyed on IOPs/$ compared to SSDs. The SSDs in that class are still pretty pricey; but some of them can displace an entire shelf of 15k drives if IOPs are your primary concern...

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[Gaygirlie]

For most people who don't fit in that category, 1TB is not enough.

Tell me about it! I've got all-in-all about 3.5TB here right now and I'm constantly running out of space!

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[lightknight]

Slightly more than 4 TB here, with a brand new 240 GB SSD patiently waiting for me in the UPS sorting facility several miles from my home...which I will be breaking into later on tonight to get.

UPS takes one day off for Christmas, but two days for Thanksgiving (giving them a four day weekend). Now, I am all for lengthy vacations, but my current 128GB SSD is down to 6 GB of free space, and that's a fair chance that won't last the weekend...

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[Guspaz]

It's getting there, sure, but not quite. SSDs are coming down in costs, but you can't price consumer SSDs based on giant MIRs and black friday sales when you're really in need of enterprise-grade SSDs ;)

But yeah, it's getting closer and closer. Linode uses nothing but 15K RPM SAS drives in RAID10, I figure eventually they'll probably start moving towards SSDs if they don't decide to go SATA.

Throwing dirt cheap SATA drives (well, dirt cheap before the flood) onto SAS controllers is exactly what I do on my home file server. A two-port LSI RAID card can also be used as an 8-port SATA controller, with the right firmware (which they provide on their site easy enough). Combined with a hotswap bay that puts five 3.5" drives in three 5.25" bays, and a case whose entire front behind the door is nine 5.25" bays, and you've got yourself a decent file server. Of course, I really should be putting RE4 greenpower drives in the thing instead of regular greenpower drives...

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[mabhatter654]

But what am I supposed to sync my 64GB iPad to?

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true (as far as the 4 day UPS thanksgiving holiday goes).

I happened to observe the big brown van driving around our office complex today. (This was not the express/next day air truck.)

The driver was trying to find offices that were open, so he could deliver what he had on his truck.

He didn't have much success.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[LordLimecat]

Not until we get that whole "exactly how reliable are SSDs and what is their failure mode" thing worked out, they wont. They will get a lot more popular, but Im keeping my non-IO-bound servers on mechanical drives until we get that figured out. Right now there seems to be way too much uncertainty.

At least with a mechanical drive you have some indication (SMART, bad sectors, slowing motor) that its about to die, and you have some reasonable expectation that it could last 5+ years; the same is not true of SSDs.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[lightknight]

http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/imp_exp/operation.html

UPS 2011 Holiday Schedule
In the United States, UPS observes the following holidays:

Memorial Day - May 30, 2011*
Independence Day - July 4, 2011*
Labor Day - September 5, 2011*
Thanksgiving Day - November 24, 2011*
Day after Thanksgiving - November 25, 2011**
Christmas (observed) - December 26, 2011*
New Year's Day (observed) - January 2, 2012*

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[lightknight]

*UPS Holiday. UPS Express Critical® available.
**UPS Holiday. Delivery and pickup of air and international packages only.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[Anonymous Coward]

Awwwww, well maybe you'll just have to scale back your pirating operations for a little while. It's horrible that you won't be able to hoard every movie torrent as it's released, but everyone has to sacrifice some time in their life.

BTW, you know how I know you're pirating? If you were doing professional video you would easily absorb this price swing as a relatively minor cost of business, but as a pirate you have to whine like a little bitch any time you have to lay out money for your entertainment.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[tepples]

For most people who don't play games and don't store big video files, current sub-$100 SSDs are good enough

I don't see how "games" necessarily need a big drive, seeing as the entire NES collection in the English language will fit in 1 GB. And since the iPhone 4, most smartphones have included a camcorder, making it more likely for people to store big video files even if they don't rip DVDs or BDs, record a lot of TV, or buy a lot of movies on iTunes Store or its competitors.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[jedidiah]

Current sub-$100 SSDs are simply not good enough unless you only use your PC as a glorified web terminal like some sort of iPad. If you have ANY sort of digital media to speak of, those small cheap SSDs quickly become entirely inadequate (just like an iPad).

All it takes is some music and some photos. You don't even have to get into any level of video archiving (nevermind extreme examples).

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[jedidiah]

No. You just ASSume he's a pirate because you're projecting. You can't imagine that anyone would actually BUY that much material. So you just assume that anyone that has that amount of stuff has stolen it.

This really says more about YOU than it does him.

10TB isn't that much really when compared what people pay for things like cable and trips to the cinema. If your stuff is in pristine formats it ads up quick. This is especially true for the HD stuff.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll probably never notice if you compress some of your porn with lossy compression. I assume you're aware that lossy compression doesn't discard the naughty bits.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[Anonymous Coward]

iCloud. You no longer need to keep apps or backups (and Music with iTunes match) on your local PC.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[TheLink]

10TB is not much if you're a HD video creator, you'd need about 20 to 100GB per hour of video depending on what tech/format you use.

You won't use very high compression because you need to edit the stuff, has to be quick enough and not lose too much quality.

And you'd want higher bandwidth and availability, so you'd probably use RAID.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[fa2k]

40 GB is really cutting it short. Windows seems to take up almost 20 GB, and once you add a few restore points and a service pack (these "most people" don't know how to remove those service pack backup files), there's little room for software. There's a good chance that "most people" iwll be handling some video files, and then one really has to micromanage a 40 or 60 GB drive. I also wouldn't be too surprised if by just browsing the web for a year, the HD would fill to 30 GB just because of java updates, a PDF viewer and system updates. This leaves precious little wiggle room for pretty much anything.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[dougmc]

I don't see how "games" necessarily need a big drive, seeing as the entire NES collection in the English language will fit in 1 GB.

While I don't have any reason to doubt your figure, I tend to doubt the relevance.

Most people who play "games" in 2011 aren't playing NES games. And anybody who does have the entire NES collection in the English language on their hard drive probably also has significant portions of some combination of the entire N64, NDS, PSP, Xbox, Xbox 360, Atari 2600, Genesis, Apple ][, Intellivision, arcade ROMs in general, etc. libraries. Some of these are minuscule by 2011 standards, but some are quite large.

All the games I've bought on Steam take up about 500 GB total installed. That wouldn't require a large mechanical drive (by 2011 standards) but any SSD drive would be quite large and expensive.

In any event, I think that most of the space individuals need beyond 300 GB or so is for media -- movies, music, videos they've taken, pictures they've taken, etc. I did say most, not all -- some people will have terabytes of games -- but I don't think they're the norm.

Of course, one area that most people need more space for that they aren't using is for backups ... but that's another matter entirely :)

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[dougmc]

Not until we get that whole "exactly how reliable are SSDs and what is their failure mode" thing worked out, they wont.

If you have proper redundancy and backups, their failure mode isn't terribly important. (Let's assume that they use ECC and checksums and such so that if they do fail they'll throw errors rather than silently give bad data -- if they silently give bad data, then failure modes matter a lot (and such drives should not be trusted), but this is something that the manufacturers would know about, having designed the drives.)

Now, it would be nice if they didn't fail more often than mechanical drives -- as that could get expensive or turn into a real pain in the butt -- but if you've got RAID setups protecting you from the occasional failure of a single drive, and bonafide backups protecting you from human error and the (hopefully rare) more serious hardware failures, it doesn't really matter how much warning your drive gives you before it fails, or how "completely" it fails.

As long as any drives are at all likely to completely fail with no warning -- you need backups and RAID to prevent downtime and lost data. And mechanical drives are already at all likely to do this, so throwing some SSD drives into the mix doesn't require a fundamental change in your planning for it.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[LordLimecat]

What if their failure is predictable after a certain number of hours? Feel like having a whole array go down in one night?

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[Anonymous Coward]

40-60GB will store the OS and office apps and some documents and pictures

Um, with Windows XP or Linux? I take it you're under a rock, because that would maybe be enough for a display kiosk and the pre-bundled "documents and pictures" samples that come on those.

That would likely not even cover your basic HP/Compaq/Dell/Gateway install. Seriously. Windows 7, Office, drivers, and you're already hitting that.

I've got LibreOffice, Putty, VMWare vSphere, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Wireshark, Chrome, Steam Skype, Songbird, and another dozen or so small applications installed on this SSD. The data (including Tbird profiles, etc.) is all stored on a file server or on a secondary drive in teh chassis. I am constantly looking for extra space on this 40Gb SSD, because a couple downloads later and Windows it bitching about insufficient space. I'd not even have room to work if I had MS Office on here.

With Windows 7 and other modern software, I'd say the bare minimum is 80Gb. 128Gb would be reasonable, and would likely ship almost half full from the vendor.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[drinkypoo]

I don't see how "games" necessarily need a big drive, seeing as the entire NES collection in the English language will fit in 1 GB.

here in the real world, a typical modern game might well have a 4GB install, even for something conceptually simple like Civ IV. My Civ IV complete folder is over 5GB because I added some mods. A handful of games and you've filled up a cheap SSD.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[zippthorne]

I don't see why... UPS doesn't take boxes off the trucks every day like Fedex, so they can afford to be lazy about finding the party to deliver to...

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[Anonymous Coward]

You're naive. I'm not touching SSDs for another few years. The three OCZ ssds I've tried ALL had data corruption issues and required a lot of extra steps after Windows 7 installation to make them ready to go.

Why should I have to turn off legitimate Win7 services to make my SSD perform better? Why should I have to do without a page file or without system recovery? All of these things work fine on platter technology disk.

On top of that, price per GB they are still wildly more expensive than even the rocketting HDD prices.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[dgatwood]

For most people who don't play games and don't store big video files, current sub-$100 SSDs are good enough; 40-60GB will store the OS and office apps and some documents and pictures. For most people who don't fit in that category, 1TB is not enough.

Given that the OS uses that 40-60 GB as paging space, sixty gigs will just about handle a serious Photoshop user with no other apps installed, no photos, no music, and no documents. :-D

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[dgatwood]

BRD as a data storage medium is DOA. Nobody exchanges physical media anymore except when selling products, and even if they did, ten dollar flash sticks are a lot more robust, more reusable, and much, much faster.

The only significant remaining reason to consider optical media is for backups, but that requires reasonable parity between the capacity of the optical media and the capacity of the drives they're backing up. Most people can't afford to sit at home for several days to swap new discs into a burner. When you exceed about ten discs per drive, there's just no hope of it ever catching on. After the next hard drive capacity increase, it will be a hundred Blu-Ray discs per drive.

BRD started becoming borderline infeasible as a backup medium when hard drives hit 250 GB. In other words, Blu-Ray was dead as a data medium three or four years before the first Blu-Ray burner hit the market. They dragged their heels for so many years that by the time the first drives hit the market, they already had too small a capacity to be useful. If they had released a shipping product when they announced the standard back in 2000, it would have been perfect. If the first prototypes in 2003 had been consumer burners, it would have been only moderately interesting as a backup medium. By the time the first consumer burner was actually released in 2006, the only people who still cared were pirates and small independent filmmakers. Drives were at 750 GB, and BRD-ROM discs were still single-layer at 25 GB, for a whopping 30 discs per drive.

Stick a fork in it. Blu-Ray is done, at least as far as being anything other than a movie distribution medium is concerned. At this point, the price break on Blu-Ray discs is almost ten years too late, and counting.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[dgatwood]

Err... I meant BD-R, not ROM.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[dougmc]

What if their failure is predictable after a certain number of hours? Feel like having a whole array go down in one night?

Then such a failure would have already been predicted -- it's not like flash memory is a new frontier.

And really, that's not likely. More likely is that they would have X hours of life time ± some percentage. If X is 40,000 (about five years) and the percentage was 1% -- that gives a range of about a month where they would all fail. And really, even if all drives are used in exactly the same way (as they might be in a raid setup) -- the percentage still wouldn't be as small as 1%.

I'm fairly sure that if you actually asked the manufacturers of SSD drives they could give you pretty good details about the expected failure modes.

Re:SSD's will be more attractive now

[unitron]

You don't have to be pirating or doing professional video to fill up big hard drives with video much more quickly than you expected to.

Ask anyone with a TiVo.

Obvious

[roman_mir]

This is the reverse situation to a new product hitting the market. When LCDs or Plasma screens first came out, they were basically unaffordable by anybody except the richest people and companies, now everybody has one.

This is the same situation in reverse - the production capacity fell and the demand needs to recalibrate the prices.

Of-course don't forget that there is a fixed cost associated with rebuilding the factories and all the new equipment and tools now are more expensive, given so few harddrive manufacturers even exist and all of the inflation that's rampant in the world.

If the price holds, it sends a message to rebuild the production and maybe add even more, clearly there is unfulfilled demand at lower prices.

Re:Obvious

[lightknight]

There's no reason to rebuild. The HD market is under assault from the SSD market; hence, investing in HD manufacturing is seen as a losing proposition.

The current HD manufacturers can milk the shortage for all its worth, then their companies will die and be forgotten.

Re:Obvious

[lightknight]

Hmm. Do you have a link to this problem?

Re:Obvious

[Mad Merlin]

The what?

Re:Obvious

[shentino]

Could china's stranglehold on rare earths have prompted any of the present price increases?

Re:Obvious

[FoolishOwl]

It was lost when the database reached 200.1 GB.

Re:Obvious

[lightknight]

Could it have increased the price? Probably.
Could it have increased the price by this much? Unlikely.

Hard drives use, to the best of my knowledge, only a small amount of rare-earths (I believe the magnets are typically Neodymium). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet

Perhaps a better way of saying this is, the introduction and competition from hybrid vehicles (which use Nd) should have had a more profound impact on the market than a more limited supply from China; have hybrid vehicle prices tripled?

Re:Obvious

[lightknight]

Lol.

But seriously, what is this problem he's speaking of? I've been running a Corsair 128GB SSD for the past several months, haven't had a single problem related to it. Granted, it's not over 200 GBs, but I really want to hear about this problem, as my new SSD IS over 200 GBs.

A brief check on Google mentions a lot of problems with the Intel SSDs, from a while ago. And Wikipedia mentions that MLCs can undergo corruption in certain instances where the power suddenly switches off, but most drives are supposed to come with a super-capacitors to finish the read / write operation so that doesn't happen.

And of course, I have a UPS, which kind of negates the whole power issue anyway...

Re:Obvious

[bryan1945]

On the other hand, older factories that were wiped out can upgrade to current equipment. Helpful for the future. Still going to be a pain for the next few years, though.

Re:Obvious

[bryan1945]

I thought they just found a big mine in Australia that has a nice load or rare earth deposits.

Re:Obvious

[Just Brew It!]

We've got deposits in the US as well. The problem is that it takes a couple of years to bring a refinery online to process the ore.

Re:Obvious

[DarwinSurvivor]

Do you have a link to this issue? I've been considering an SSD for my laptop, but any such issue may affect which type I buy.

Re:Obvious

[dougmc]

The current HD manufacturers can milk the shortage for all its worth, then their companies will die and be forgotten.

Considering how much larger and how much cheaper mechanical hard drives are than than SSD drives, it seems like they've got quite a bit of life left in them.

Maybe at some point SSD drives will become cheaper, larger and more reliable -- at that point just about nobody would buy mechanical drives any more -- but that point is likely many years away. Yes, SSD drives are improving -- but mechanical drives are too.

Re:Obvious

[Anarchduke]

i wish i had mod points for this one +5 funny

Here in Germany

[maweki]

prices are up 300%. I work at a B2B-reseller and the 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green which was 0.05€/GB in September is now up to 0.16€/GB. Other drives are similar. Some drives have even seen 400%.

Re:Here in Germany

[Bill Dimm]

Based on your numbers, prices are up 220%, not 300%. If something costs 3x what it used to, that's a 200% increase, not a 300% increase.

Re:Here in Germany

[swalve]

In other words, .05 going to .15 is a 200% increase over the original price. But .15 is 300% of .05.

Newegg today...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just ordered a 500GB Hitachi on newegg on sale today for $49.99 guh I was so excited to see that price! It's on their email promo page: http://www.newegg.com/emailpromo/

Re:Newegg today...

[iggymanz]

plenty of deals and 0% increased pricing out there for the careful shopper. I pity anyone who paid the 200% more

What is this "average" you speak of?

[macwhizkid]

hard drive prices (lowest average unit prices) have rocketed 151% from October 1 to November 14th... The number varies when you break it down to individual drives, but it seems to be in the right ballpark.

(emphasis mine)

Yes, I'm glad we have rediscovered what it means to find an "average". [facepalm]

Re:What is this "average" you speak of?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rediscover what it means to cluster. Then rediscover sucking dick.

Re:What is this "average" you speak of?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article and couldn't believe it. I just got a 3TB drive for $80 or about 2.6 cents per GB.

Would not be surprised

[billcopc]

Price fixing is nothing new in the manufacturing world. I would not be surprised one bit. In my case, I've made a very simple and rash decision: I'm not buying any hard drives until prices come back down to normal. A SAS expander I built two months ago for $15k would now cost $30k. My clients aren't going for that, so I'm waiting it out.

The manufacturers knew what they were getting into, when they built their factories on flood plains. The burden for that mistake should not be born by the customer.

Re:Would not be surprised

[0123456]

The manufacturers knew what they were getting into, when they built their factories on flood plains. The burden for that mistake should not be born by the customer.

There aren't enough hard drives.

You basically have two choices:

1. Keep prices the same, so when you have an urgent need for a drive to keep your company's servers operating there won't be any available to buy because they were all sold to people who want to download more movie torrents.
2. Increase prices so people who don't really need a drive right now don't buy it and you'll be able to buy your urgently-needed drive for twice the price it would have been a few months ago.

Lefties prefer option 1, where they keep prices artificially low and then complain when there's nothing available to buy. Sane people prefer option 2.

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Price fixing will be shown when the HDD companies do not lower their prices.

We need to revisit this in the second quarter or the months between April and June. If the prices are not down by then a new company needs to be formed out side of the Asia Pacific region.

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally someone who isn't an economic ignoramus in 0123456.

As for billcopc's comment that those who built their factories on flood plains should bear the cost, it is incredible to me that he thinks they aren't bearing a cost for the destruction of their factories and property. Also, they obviously built their factories there for a reason, undoubtedly having to do with costs; consumers have been reaping the benefits of that in lower prices.

Re:Would not be surprised

[wringles]

The manufacturers knew what they were getting into, when they built their factories on flood plains.

Stupid HD manufacturers, everybody knows you should build an irrigated field or a trading post on flood plains.

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure HDD production was only a tiny bit better than product demand.
So, assuming manufacturers had keep prices:
- WD can't supply demand.
- WD customers have to get thier disks somewhere else.
- Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, etc can't supply their own users and WD's customers.
- HDDs have to be rationed by everybody.
- So people have to start buying 2nd hand, where the price would skyrocket (which is what we were trying to avoid).

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Lefties prefer option 1, where they keep prices artificially low and then complain when there's nothing available to buy. Sane people prefer option 2.

I was with you up until that gem. Your economic statement is sound, but your generalization falls somewhere short of enlightened thought.

I don't hate gay people and think abstinence-only education is a terrible idea. That typically makes me one of the "lefties." Believe it or not, I still own and operate a successful small business and am supportive of the free market in most contexts.

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Lefties prefer option 1, where they keep prices artificially low and then complain when there's nothing available to buy. Sane people prefer option 2.

I dunno, I am pretty left (I vote 'greens' in Australia) and I like idea 2. a lot better.

I think if we were talking about health care, or education, then it's in society's (and the economy's) long term interest to keep things available to everybody.

Hard disks however are a lot more important to people who can pay more for them (not the same as health and education), so it's fine to let the market sort itself out.

Re:Would not be surprised

[icebraining]

The Lefties just understand that what will really happen is that the rich kid will buy his second porn drive while the ramen eating student will be unable to afford a replacement for his main drive.

A Leftie would also claim that the best solution would be for the govt. to implement a rationing policy to ensure the drives go to who really needs them.

Personally, considering their just hard drives, I agree that supply and demand are the least bad strategy for allocation, but let's not kid ourselves: it's far from optimal.

Re:Would not be surprised

[rubypossum]

Someone please mod this up.

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

A Leftie would also claim that the best solution would be for the govt. to implement a rationing policy to ensure the drives go to who really needs them.

Ha-ha. You're right, we'd all be better off if we had to beg the government to be allowed to buy a hard drive, rather than paying twice as much for it.

All rationing does is ensure that there will be a lack of hard drives for important uses because the government will let their cronies buy them up for pr0n.

"So, Mr Google. If we let you buy a thousand hard drives, what do we get in return?"

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should this be modded up?

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you try making useful comments and earning your own damn mod points?

Re:Would not be surprised

[lightknight]

Just out of curiosity, I wonder how much it would cost to build a concrete sea-wall with a ramp around the factory.

Re:Would not be surprised

[lightknight]

Who, in their right mind, builds a factory without excess capacity to trounce the competition in a moment of weakness?

That's just poor planning...

Re:Would not be surprised

[icebraining]

Maybe if you had bothered to read the whole post you'd see I don't agree with that part, but reading three lines in a row is hard, right? You might get dizzy.

Re:Would not be surprised

[ultranova]

It is interesting that you contrast "lefties" with "sane people" when the option you associate with said sane people is planned economy.

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps they do have excess capacity and now get to sell their product at 4x the price regardless... Poor planning, or pure evil genius..

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Lefties believe in {foo} vs Sane people? are you fucking kidding me Mr Tr. Strawman?

grow up and stop trying to attribute ideas into other peoples heads, and then ragging them for those same [imagined] ideas.

Re:Would not be surprised

[lightknight]

Hmm, tempting, but fruitless.

They have a chance to give their competition a black-eye, without having to resort to any trickery (Fate / the Universe / Diety of choice has given them this one for free), and instead they're going to waste it. This is an excellent time to strong-arm the competition into licensing them some intellectual property gems they'd never get access to normally, or to displace every other HD manufacturer on the market for the next several months. Drop the price, and make it impossible for your competitors to raise enough capital to rebuild their factories. Play the marketing game, and get PC manufacturers to place a "Seagate Inside" sticker on their machines for the next several months in return for preferential pricing.

Instead, you're going to do the money soak for a year, then be punished when the other manufacturers get their sh*t together. You have a royal flush, and decide to trade it in for a pair. Not smart.

Re:Would not be surprised

[tepples]

My account's karma has been Excellent for years and I've never had mod points. What am I missing?

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

then be punished when the other manufacturers get their sh*t together

For values of "punished" being "business as usual" except that you don't have the capital expenditure of rebuilding plants, and you've built up a huge profit for the executives' next quarterly bonus. Wow. What a bad deal.

Re:Would not be surprised

[uncqual]

Excess capacity costs money. Money is borrowed directly or indirectly. Those who loan it expect a return on investment (if borrowed from a bank, they expect interest, if borrowed from shareholders indirectly, they want ROI).

Since "excess" capacity has negative ROI, a company would rarely choose to implement it intentionally. Usually excess capacity arises from bad planning.

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, unless there's luxury or strategic resources there!

Re:Would not be surprised

[baegucb]

I usually have 15 mod points, and I get so busy modding, I can't comment when I want to. So look on the bright side. By the way, I heard Cowboy Neil doesn't like you ;)

Re:Would not be surprised

[baegucb]

Oh, and on-topic, not going for a funny mod. We just decomm'd a SAN this week. Hundreds of 320 GB hard drives were wiped, and being sent away for nothing. They are a couple years old but I think it's time for an email to management. Routine for surplus equipment, but this article makes times not routine. Odd the storage folks didn't mention it.

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

You were doing SO well, until this part:

Lefties prefer option 1, where they keep prices artificially low and then complain when there's nothing available to buy. Sane people prefer option 2.

Then, like a typical "righty" you spewed poo from your mouth (aka keyboard) and spoilt it.

Good job, retard.

Now, go listen to Rush for your next talking point / thought.

Re:Would not be surprised

[lightknight]

Depends how you design your factories, the best design, of course, being demand-limited, not resource limited.

Something about the thought of someone building a factory that can put out 1,000 widgets a month, but 1,001 being impossible, appeals to my humor gland.

Re:Would not be surprised

[sjames]

Or 3, gouge the crap out of people knowing fully well that other than the brief demand spike based on fears you'd choose option 3, the shortage isn't that bad. Keep in mind that it's quite unlikely the plants were all at 100% production before the floods. The remaining ones should be now if they aren't. Righties prefer option 3 but call it option 2 so they won't look so repugnant.

In other words, the capacity loss isn't bad enough to justify prices rising as much as they have.

Re:Would not be surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, he's right. You're a liberal, who realizes that government shouldn't mess with either marriage or the economy. Doesn't make you either left or right; that distinction is used to label people by what they think government should do.

The fundamental sane idea behind liberalism is of course that people in groups don't act as rationally as they do when caring for their own interests. True, we need a government to make sure that people don't push that self-interest to the point where they harm others, but not that much more.

Re:Would not be surprised

[zippthorne]

How is "allow the prices to rise to market-clearing levels" a "planned economy"? The other option was, "Fix the price by legislation and put up with the shortages."

Re:Would not be surprised

[ultranova]

How is "allow the prices to rise to market-clearing levels" a "planned economy"?

It wouldn't be. However, it's not what the GP said. What the he said was: "Increase prices so people who don't really need a drive right now don't buy it and you'll be able to buy your urgently-needed drive for twice the price it would have been a few months ago." Rising prices to reduce demand so supplies can be used for something else seems like planned economy to me.

That's why I'm confused - the GP was comparing one planned economy plan against another, then continued as if he'd been talked about market economy versus (badly) planned economy.

Re:Would not be surprised

[unitron]

"We need to revisit this in the second quarter or the months between April and June."

Rather pointless since they won't have manufacturing capability restored until June.

Re:Would not be surprised

[Hognoxious]

He never said who should raise the prices. You think it implied government. I think, taking into account the context, that it implied the manufacturers or the market.

Yes, it would have been clearer if he'd written "Allow prices to increase" instead of "Increase prices", but not everyone is clear and eloquent at writing like what me is. Satisfied?

Re:Would not be surprised

[Hognoxious]

the best design, of course, being demand-limited, not resource limited.

Not quite sure what that's supposed to mean, but you clearly didn't understand GP's point. I don't know how something can operate that isn't limited by some resource, whether it be storage space, manpower or the fermentation rate of unicorn shit.

Something about the thought of someone building a factory that can put out 1,000 widgets a month, but 1,001 being impossible, appeals to my humor gland.

Why? We're talking highly specialized equipment that can do precisely one job. Things can only move so fast without breaking. Ultimately, the laws of physics dictate that there must be a maximum throughput. If you have 4 lines, typical uptime is 87% and each one running flat out can produce 30% of what you normally sell you're fine. Why would you spend a shedload of money adding a fifth that's going to stand around collecting dust most of the time? You seriously think that big companies don't have folks with spreadsheets who work all this shit out?

And before you say that it would be used, my answer to that will be a quote from Niels Bohr and something about Monday morning quarterbacks.

It's not like a kitchen where if you haven't got enough frying pans to do all the sausages you can bring a casserole dish into play or partially cook them in the oven.

Re:Would not be surprised

[LocalH]

Lucky ass. I only get 5 points when I get them. I think the lower your UID, the more points you generally get.

Re:Would not be surprised

[billcopc]

How does that explain the rapidly plummeting prices then?

If they were barely covering demand, they probably wouldn't have been running weekly discounts on their most popular products all the goddamned time. The last two years of hard drive sales have been a pure dumping operation. To then lose a quarter of your manufacturing ability, and triple prices overnight, I'm no economist but that seems very disproportionate to me.

They drove consumption with absurdly low prices for a very long time, and now that everyone's hooked on their raid arrays of 2TB drives, they jack them back up to gouge the client. This is my interpretation. A 25% drop in manufacturing, when everything was running smoothly a month ago, should not result in immediate panic and skyrocketing prices. If I were to lose a quarter of my work hours, I would not suddenly shit the bed, default on all my bills, set my hair on fire and blame it all on supply and demand. Sane business owners don't run their business without some sort of contingency plan, whether that's excess capacity/inventory, or a partner that can help with overload, maybe even a redundant site to cope with natural disasters. I mean, these guys sell hard drives - what do you do with a hard drive ? You back it up.

Re:Would not be surprised

[billcopc]

You seriously think that big companies don't have folks with spreadsheets who work all this shit out?

You put too much faith in the developing world. Here's how it usually goes:

1. Units are manufactured to fill the order.
2. Any leftover time and materials go to manufacture black-market units
3. If black-market demand exceeds supply, the "official" order gets delayed

Money is king over there, and law enforcement is virtually non-existent. What is the buyer going to do, stop employing cheap asian labour ? No. So they put up with it. The asians know they are too cheap to replace, and they exploit that position whenever they can. Can't really blame them, we gave them that power in the first place.

RE:

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason is because of the floods at WD, the only major supplier of heads is Seagate in Derry. They are pushing up their prices to the makers because they can because demand is higher on them. A temporary blip because WD will be back up and running soon (i.e. by the end of 2012). Still, SSD's don't have the reliability nor will the increased price of HDD's scare people off, SSD's are still expensive.

Prices have been crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Newegg is running deals today, but the other day I saw that they had 160GB SATA drives going for almost $90. These were like $35 + shipping two months ago. It's insane. Depending what size drives you're looking at, it is high.

Consider that they have 60GB SSDs for around $50 with rebates and you see the problem.

Economics 101

[jamesl]

... but there are concerns of artificial price fixing and suspicion that retailers or members of the supply channel are taking advantage of the situation.

Falling supply in the face of unchanging demand will cause the market clearing price to rise. There is no such thing as artificial price fixing. And of course every one in the supply chain will raise their prices. That's the way it works.

This way, there is product always available for emergencies -- your drive died and you need a replacement no matter the cost. The alternative is no drives, no where, no matter what.

Re:Economics 101

[JMZero]

There is no such thing as artificial price fixing.

If there's a limited number of suppliers in a market, they can (and do, often) collude to keep prices at a certain level. It's perfectly natural to call that "artificial price fixing". In a perfect market, they would be replaced by a competitor whose price was closer to the marginal cost of production - but that's not how actually economies work.

I suppose to an extent, your interpretation IS what's taught in Econ 101 (assuming Econ 101 is "General Microeconomics" at your school, and focuses on theory), but that isn't the end truth or something. Price fixing is a concern in real market economies - and often it's shortages like this that effectively give cover for companies to try it (you see this all the time with oil/gasoline prices).

Re:Economics 101

[Kjella]

Yes. It's important in that economics 101 course to know that "perfect competition" means zero profit. Reality is that competitors are typically in a prisoner's dilemma, if all hold high prices they all profit very much, if all hold low prices they profit very little. Even if they don't collude in an illegal way, all sides may know that any attempt to undercut the others will lead to a price war where nobody would gain any market share and the margins would go way down.

200 GB is enough for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm happy with my 200 GB hard drive from 2004. All I need to do is to avoid installing bloated software. Newer versions of programs like Nero take 500 MB because of localization files and skins. I don't need skins for a program for CD burning nor I need Russian and Farsi translations if I don't speak those languages.

Re:200 GB is enough for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can just get ImgBurn and dump Nero all together.

Every copy of that crapware Nero should've been deleted by 2005.

Re:200 GB is enough for me

[jones_supa]

Even the integrated disc burner in Windows is very good and simple (and can burn images too).

seagate 2TB 5900rpm

[HeavyDDuty]

seagate 2TB 5900rpm was down to CAN$64.99 at local store, then the flood/gouging hit and today it's $169.99 (jumped from 3.5/GB to 8.5/GB). at newegg was CAN$89.99, now $229.99 (jumped from 4.5/GB to 11.5/GB).

Re:seagate 2TB 5900rpm

[lightknight]

Wait. Is it legal to sell 5900 RPM HDs? ^_^

Re:seagate 2TB 5900rpm

[Anonymous Coward]

For a media server, yup. For your OS drive, it should be illegal.

Re:seagate 2TB 5900rpm

[Osgeld]

for your average home use I doubt you could really tell the difference without sitting down and measuring it

Re:seagate 2TB 5900rpm

[lightknight]

Oh baby, I CAN tell the difference. Every time I sit down to fix someone's machine, it takes all of several moments to realize that the machine has a 'value' hard drive in it. I don't even need to crack the case to take a look at it. I just hit the power button, and wait more than a minute for the OS to get to a logon screen. In a machine with a dual-core processor and 4 GBs of ram.

If I have time to check the specs on your machine while the OS is booting, I can almost guarantee that it has a 'value' hard drive. And the sad part is, these people do not understand that upgrading to a faster video card or faster processor will not make the OS load faster (or in general, be more responsive).

Re:seagate 2TB 5900rpm

[lightknight]

Mmmmmmm. I'm thinking not even for the media server. If you want to run bit torrent on it, and be able to stream movies, 7200 RPMs barely cut it.

Re:seagate 2TB 5900rpm

[evilviper]

Not only is it quite legal, I (and many others) swear by WD's "Green" hard drives. They're at least as fast as my previous 7200RPM hard drive, and run damn near silent, and very, very cool, even without any attmept to cool them. Unlike Seagate drives, WD HDDs also support acoustic noise management, dropping the already damn quite drives down another few decibles.

They're not just perfect for DVRs, either. If your primary drive is an SSD, you likelydon't need crazy seek time on your secondary bulk storage, and low power, longevity, and nearly no noise is a great feature.

Better than stocks

[danbob999]

I should have bought more hard drives instead of losing it buying stocks.

Re:Better than stocks

[couchslug]

Wake me when the hard drive pays annual dividends.

Statistics?

[zAPPzAPP]

How does the average price per unit say anything about hdd prices in general? What kind of units?
Maybe they just sold fewer, but more expensive hdds, instead of many cheap ones?
One expensive, big hdd entering the top 10 sold (which they used as a basis) can easily alter this statistic by this margin.

I can't see how APU says anything, unless you also average the GB per hdd. In which case a simple $/GB number would should be used.

Re:Statistics?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

One major issue, that makes $/GB a bit less relevant, is the huge number of corporate typing boxes and generic consumer desktop/laptop units moved.

Depending on the buyer, the exact 'floor size' that they absolutely won't go below varies(80 or 160GB seems pretty common); but the buyer's interest in more space than that is zero. They'll take it, if it's free; but they won't pay any extra.

This makes for a very large number of HDD sales where an HDD is absolutely required(can't ship the box without a boot drive); but there is no willingness to pay any premium for a larger size. Especially if any of the shortages are in things like heads, signal processing components, or mechanical assemblies(rather than in premium, high-density platters) this market will behave rather differently than the bulk storage HDD market...

Re:Statistics?

[lightknight]

My floor size is as the size of the last, largest hard drive I purchased.

Which means if they aren't selling 1.5 TB hard drives, I am not interested. What I am interested in is 2 TB or 3 TB hard drives -> 3 of them, to be exact, just for my home machine. 6 of them, if they are inexpensive enough.

But at today's prices and capacities, hell no. I have older drives (that I replaced with those 1.5 TB drives with) that are equal to what they want to sell me today. If I am feeling particularly desperate for a 500 GB hard drive, I'll walk over to my shelf, and retrieve an old 500 GB drive (rather than buying one off of Newegg, for crap prices).

better hope that apple does lock in high prices fo

[Anonymous Coward]

better hope that apple does lock in high prices for a year + on there new systems and maybe a year to a year and half on the 2012 mac pro.

So in 2013 apple will still have a 1tb to 2tb upgrade at $250

Only 150%?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Seagate reseller in Canada, our cost on the most popular model we sell is up 191% (roughly triple). Seagate didn't even have a factory in the flood. WD (who did) is typically even higher, and many models simply can't be bought anywhere for any price.

Re:Only 150%?

[unitron]

Seagate may not have had a factory in the flood, but chances are one or more of their suppliers did.

Re:Maybe

[icebraining]

Yeah, and instead of paying +150% for months, we could pay +300% always.

Re:Maybe

[lightknight]

Parent is a troll, but I'll answer this anyway (I'm bored).

Maybe you dumb US fuckers will stop shipping all your manufacturing away. -> Perhaps, when other countries stop bending over backwards to get jobs for their people. Simply put, their country wants these jobs more than ours do.

Why are these not manufactured in the US? -> Because, in all likelihood, it's cost prohibitive.

Why does the destruction of one plant cause this much harm? -> Because it accounted for 25% of the market. That's actually fairly large; however, most techs would argue that 25% of the market going under does not justify a 400% price increase. It is possible, but something seems kind of...off about the situation. We'll revisit the problem in a few months, and see what the fallout is. Personally, I'm finding it difficult to believe that large HD manufacturers do not have capacity to spare. But then, Seagate merged with Maxtor, so bad decisions abound.

Because you're all fucking shortsighted idiots. -> Natural disasters tend to hit everyone, at some point or another. Why, a little while back, there was this Hurricane called Katrina that...

No Harddrives for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to get a couple backplates and some drives to fill them, looks like I might need to wait it out a little to see if they get back to normal.

Could probably put that towards getting an SSD for speed reasons though. That's an upside.

bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

The hard disk bubble is here.!

Re:bubble

[swalve]

A bubble is when prices, demand and supply all rise at the same time. Prices going up when supply is reduced with demand staying the same or dropping slightly is just how a marketplace works.

Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"?

[denzacar]

Or by March 2012, tops.

Personally, I'd rather take the estimates of people doing their best to fix the problem...

Plant managers at Nidec Corp. (6594), which makes motors for disk drives and also has a factory at Rajana, decided not to wait for the water to subside at its seven flooded factories. According to company spokesman Masashiro Nagayasu, they cut a hole in the roof of the Rajana factory, sent divers into the toxin-laden waters to unbolt some heavy equipment, and lifted it onto waiting boats. Some of the equipment is now being used in Nidec factories in China and the Philippines.

...than of CEOs like Seagate's Stephen Luczo who are gleefully rubbing their hands together at the price hike, predicting a year-long shortage of hard-drives.

"People are going to appreciate the complexity of this business," he says.

Re:Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Jesus Christ. If that ain't the gold-standard of examples for why american business is fucked I don't know what is - productivity vs rent-seeking.

Re:Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"?

[citylivin]

Yes we should force our employees to swim through toxic water so that production doesn't slip this quarter. THAT is the kind of society that we should be trying to create. Hopefully the west can work smarter, and not just more dangerously as you seem to be advocating.

Im sure they have wonderful medical plans to deal with the employee getting sick as well.

Re:Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"?

[lightknight]

Just out of curiosity, toxic water?

Re:Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Yes we should force our employees to swim through toxic water so that production doesn't slip this quarter.

Get a grip. It's called a drysuit.

Re:Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"?

[dbIII]

I doubt they used drysuits since it would be hard to get them in due to the flood. On the other hand everything toxic is probably diluted to what you'd find in a typical harbour anyway and overflowed sewerage is probably the worst stuff in there at low concentrations. I don't know much about diving but I'd say there's a few ways to prevent swallowing the stuff.
Floods suck. I went through a much smaller one in January and it put smelly mud everywhere.

Re:Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt they used drysuits since it would be hard to get them in due to the flood.

Yeah, they are salvaging machinery worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit and then shipping the hardware to entirely different countries, but they are going to make local assembly-line workers free-dive instead of bringing in an experienced and equipped salvage crew. The cost of screwing up the salvage of just one machine would probably be 2x the cost of a decent crew.

Re:Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"?

[zippthorne]

I somehow doubt that a hard drive manufacturer is maintaining an industrial dive team on the regular payroll. I'm sure that work is contracted out, hopefully to companies who take the proper precautions, and almost certainly to companies who regular dive in contaminated water...

Re:Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"?

[JDG1980]

According to company spokesman Masashiro Nagayasu, they cut a hole in the roof of the Rajana factory, sent divers into the toxin-laden waters to unbolt some heavy equipment, and lifted it onto waiting boats. Some of the equipment is now being used in Nidec factories in China and the Philippines.

Is it just me, or does this sound like the recipe for some serious QC problems coming up? I'd be very leery of trusting the output from machines that had been through all of that.

Re:Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"?

[janimal]

Usually complex equipment requires very robust service and calibration. I suspect it's not like taking a car engine out of water and starting it up after letting it dry for a few days. The machines are going to be rebuilt to good-as-new condition fairly quickly.

Re:Maybe

[couchslug]

If we made it here we couldn't afford it.

The reason we have such vast numbers of PCs is the components are made in places like Thailand.

A trivial price increase now and then doesn't matter.

Even a blind squirrel./.

[Tangential]

For some reason, when the STAN500100 appeared in Sept for $99 I jumped on it.

For once I am on the right side of a price change. The $99 with free shipping I got is looking pretty good now.

Welcome to capitalism...

[Genda]

Is any of this surprising??? A caribou in Alaska passes gas and ALL gas prices jump forty cents in the US (of course there's no price fixing or collusion going on.) In 2000 Enron screwed with the supply of electricity to the western US, precipitating the Dot Com crash (the tech bubble sustained the collapse, but it was the rolling black outs that started massive business failures.) Enron's affiliates were able to bump prices to mind numbing levels, then got caught with internal memos laughing about how they reamed California for billions. An article comes out that oat bran reduces cholesterol and suddenly a bag of granola needs to be stored in a bank deposit box.

We are haunted daily by "Whatever the market will bear...", which is just code for "The piggies are at the trough and if I don't gouge out a piece for myself I'll miss out on the feeding frenzy." Sadly it has become the norm. Our society has put profit ahead of everything, ahead of dignity, compassion, even sanity. We've been caught in a terrible race to the bottom. This is why we debate about the sane limits to gutting economies and ecosystems. Because somebody, somewhere isn't yet done raping what remains of some vital resource.

Perhaps its time we acknowledged the darker aspects of primate behavior and started designing our society to limit the damage they can do. Checks and balances were expressly designed into our government to limit the dangers of concentrated power. Sadly we've allowed power to concentrate elsewhere and the wisdom of our founding fathers now ring louder than ever before. Corporation is the failure and its time to put things right. The price of drives is just a blip on a landscape of unbridled greed and avarice destroying the very things that make life worth living.

Re:Welcome to capitalism...

[lightknight]

*facepalms*

This isn't profit. It's a basic inability to do math. Like 2nd grade level math.

And while I am loathe to be dragged into this kind of conversation, I will attempt to put the beast to rest as follows: checks and balances were designed into our government to limit the dangers of concentrated power; they've failed.

Re:Welcome to capitalism...

[MSTCrow5429]

You didn't read the uber-parent post, or its first link. As the Reg states, "The simple laws of economics – supply and demand – dictate that prices will rise in times of scarcity." It then follows with "[C]learly some resellers need to convince customers that movements are legit." Clearly, this is impossible when a misanthrope refuses to read the uber-parent post and its links, or learn the most basic law of economics. You want the drives for free, the OEMs want to sell them for infinity, and supply and demand results in a price, prices being the most important things of all, that set maximum production for maximum utility. But an anti-social person doesn't want people to have nice things, or any things, as they're just fueled by rage and jealously at not being successful, at not being useful by society's judgment. So you have to attack and destroy it.

Re:Welcome to capitalism...

[equivocal]

Speaking of bears... ...a large culture decides that bear gall bladders will make them horny. Before ya know it, the last known bear dies at the hands of someone who bribed its zookeeper. Everybody wins (unless you were a bear).

Damn straight they are up

[future assassin]

Best Buy Canada I bought a Seagate Expansion 500G for $69.99 about three months ago. Its $99 now., the 1TB was $99 and now is $139.99

Re:Maybe

[mabhatter654]

Tell the truth, that's a bit of a lie though. Those people in those factories are paid nearly US wages, more so if you compensate for them wasting manpower 2-3x what US companies do.

The bigger issue is investment dollars. They got to build these plant for pennies on the dollar with little to no oversight and the governments picking up a huge part of the tab. It was about investors chasing that quick 20% turnaround. Of course now the money-losing part of the industry is moved so its cheaper to build where factories are already at.

The US isn't that much more expensive. At my company, we beat our Brazillian counterparts in $$/worker that more than accounts for wages. Of course the bigger costs are energy and materials... Which of course are barely subsidized (and hijaked buy the same investors that move things out) there versus other countries.

Re:better hope that apple does lock in high prices

[mabhatter654]

Considering they have been moving to SSD for a while they might end up being cheaper .... I mean more profitable...

Did anyone notice? No Hard Drives in Sales Adverts

[The Optimizer]

Something I noticed for the last three weeks was the absence of hard drives specials or sales in the weekly adverts from retailers like Fry's electronics.

When newegg sent out their "November Madness" and "Black Friday" emails to subscribes, there was *not a single* hard drive to be found in the sales.

Normally I'd try for a witty or insightful comment here, but I just don't have much more to say as I don't know if it more due to profit taking on the retailer's part, or if they are more concerned about running short/out of supply in the near future.

Re:Maybe

[lightknight]

Bullsh*t. The US is ridiculously more expensive for most industries, especially if you don't 'Rent-A-Senator' like most of the major companies do.

But, more importantly, if I am getting my rare-earths from China, and the hard drive case manufacturer is in Malaysia, and the hard drive controller manufacturer is in Vietnam, the platter manufacturer in India, and final assembly in Thailand, why do I want to spend good money shipping everything to the US and back? Do it on site, then ship it out, like any sane person.

Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocations

[rsmith-mac]

Just to add to the parent, you also have to factor in contractually obligated allocations. Western Digital and Seagate already signed contracts with OEMs for Q4 (if not beyond) - at this point they're locked into selling a specific number of drives at a specific price. Short of going bankrupt, breach of contract is rarely the better option.

So while there may be a 25% shortage overall, what we're really looking at is supplies and prices in the retail market (anyone selling "retail" drives), and the spot market (OEMs, white box builders, and e-tailers like Amazon that sell "OEM" drives), the two of which are for all intents and purposes the open market. The result of those OEM contracts means that the entire 25% shortage needs to be absorbed by the open market. And since most hard drives are sold on contract to OEMs in the first place, the actual shortage in the open market is easily 50% if not more.

This compounded with the portion of drive sales that are inelastic, and some dealer panic/greed are what has driven up prices so high. 150% in these circumstances is quite high (and there's no getting around that), but it's completely rational for such a major shortage.

If it makes you feel any better, the OEMs will be getting screwed when they start their new contracts. At that point the OEM and open markets will be back in equilibrium - OEMs won't be able to suck up drives for cheap - and the shortage will be better shared by both parties. Drives will still be expensive, but they shouldn't be quite as expensive as they are now.

clearance windfalls

[harvey the nerd]

What a windfall for those mom and pop stores with unsaleable old stock in the corner, like 20-30-40 GB HDs. Jr can have a home build for Xmas, just that disk drive #2 is going to have to wait awhile.

Re:clearance windfalls

[lightknight]

Or he can have a refurbished 1 TB drive, and save mom and dad the re-install of the OS later. Or, since prices are actually nice enough, he can get an upgrade to a 128GB SSD.

3TB drive

[jbrodkin]

I bought a 3TB drive from Best Buy for $150 or so. By the time I received it in the mail, about 3 or 4 days later, the price was already up to $250. Glad I bought when I did.

Re:Did anyone notice? No Hard Drives in Sales Adve

[lightknight]

Me thinks it's a combination of a number of factors, resulting in a 'perfect storm.'

Western currencies aren't doing so hot compared to Eastern currencies. That hurts.
China has cut back on exporting of rare-earths. That hurts.
Gas prices have probably increased the demand for hybrid vehicles, which use Nd, a typical element also used by HD manufacturers. More competition for limited resources. That probably doesn't help.
Floods have occurred in Thailand, knocking out 25% of the manufacturing capacity for HDs. That hurts.
SSDs are slowly displacing HDs, so long-term investment in the HD market may not be worth the money. That hurts.
Tariffs for imported electronics may or may not be increasing.
Seagate merged with Maxtor, who may or may not have held over some executives who desperately needed to be fired, and whose thinking has probably infected Seagate. This is not unlike the Compaq / HP merger, where anyone with any intelligence could see the merger between a sick company (Compaq) and HP (a relatively healthy company) would result in HP getting sick. One need only think back to the retracted announcement the other day regarding HP getting out of the computer hardware business to see that "the inmates are running the asylum."
And just for giggles -> technology companies aren't innovating anymore. Their inventions, as of late, do not compare in quality or impact, to those from several years ago. Marketing has ousted the techs from their own companies, and you can see the effect.They believe glitz is more important than quality (the customer is an idiot, and will buy whatever we place in front of them). Google doesn't care about its own search engine anymore, Microsoft doesn't care about its OS anymore, and IBM....that these HD manufacturers have the balls to sell us crap inventory, at wildly inflated prices...

The tech industry is sick.

Self-fufilling?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many tech-savvy people, upon initially hearing of the flooding and possible shortage of drives, stocked up in anticipation of major price inflation? The production capacity, already compromised, could not keep up with the surge in demand and prices accordingly skyrocketed.

Re:Self-fufilling?

[lightknight]

Hmm. From what I read, several days ago, it's more like computer manufacturers were buying up the stock, not the tech enthusiasts.

Re:Self-fufilling?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I imagine computer manufacturer are tech-savvy consumers, so...

newegg example

[MadCow42]

I bought four 2TB Samsung drives from Newegg, just a couple days after the floods started. They had been a few dollars cheaper still, but I got them for $80 each. Since then, they peaked at $249 each, but are back down to $199 now.

Madcow

Re:Maybe

[houstonbofh]

Tell the truth, that's a bit of a lie though. Those people in those factories are paid nearly US wages, more so if you compensate for them wasting manpower 2-3x what US companies do.

The bigger issue is investment dollars. They got to build these plant for pennies on the dollar with little to no oversight and the governments picking up a huge part of the tab. It was about investors chasing that quick 20% turnaround. Of course now the money-losing part of the industry is moved so its cheaper to build where factories are already at.

The US isn't that much more expensive. At my company, we beat our Brazillian counterparts in $$/worker that more than accounts for wages. Of course the bigger costs are energy and materials... Which of course are barely subsidized (and hijaked buy the same investors that move things out) there versus other countries.

You forgot to factor in attorney costs, and insurance. Oh, and conflicting regulatory compliance. But to be honest, government is not near the hindrance to business that lawyers are.

Re:Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocation

[msauve]

Western Digital and Seagate already signed contracts with OEMs for Q4 (if not beyond) - at this point they're locked into selling a specific number of drives at a specific price. Short of going bankrupt, breach of contract is rarely the better option.

Although I don't have the specific knowledge of WDC and Seagate contracts you profess, many/most contracts have "outs" for act-of-god situations, which would apply here.

Re:Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocation

[Anonymous Coward]

You're repeating yourself, you know that?

Re:Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocation

[bryan1945]

This is off topic of the article, but you post made me wonder something.
I wonder if contracts still use the phrase "acts of God" in their terminology. Both here and in the world, there are many individuals & groups that have no belief in God. Not being a contact lawyer, if a contact has that phrase, but you (singular or plural) do not believe in God, does that make it a disputable clause? Maybe it is spelled as specifics (tsunamis, monsoons, earthquakes, etc)?

Don't hold your breath...

[xlsior]

Expect it to take a long time for prices to come down to the 'old' levels again: We're down to just three harddrive manufacturers in the world now, and only two of those make 3.5" drives.

- Western digital (which just got the greenlight to acquire the Hitatchi HDD division)
- Seagate (which took took over the samsung HDD division)
- Toshiba (which only makes 2.5" HDDs)

The only real pressure to drop prices again would come from competition with SSDs, and those can't compete at all in in TB-range

Now, if you are in the market for a new HDD, your current best bet is to look at the brick and mortar department stores: Much of their remaining on-the-shelf stock hasn't caught up to the rapidly raises prices yet, which currently makes them a lot cheaper than online vendors... Provided you can still find them. Earlier today I saw a bunch of 1.5TB western digital elements drives on the shelf in Target for $79, while Amazon.com wants $129 for the same drive. 2TB for $89, instead of $159. But with the christmas shopping season starting, I'm sure that the department stores will run out of their cheap stock pretty soon.

Re:Don't hold your breath...

[Just Brew It!]

Now, if you are in the market for a new HDD, your current best bet is to look at the brick and mortar department stores: Much of their remaining on-the-shelf stock hasn't caught up to the rapidly raises prices yet, which currently makes them a lot cheaper than online vendors... Provided you can still find them.

Yup. I managed to snag a couple of 1TB Seagates at Best Buy a couple of weeks ago at "pre-flood" prices; last two they had in stock. Hopefully that will hold me until things return to semi-normal.

I wonder if prices on other components like CPUs and RAM will drop because OEMs aren't able to move as many systems due to the HDD shortage?

Re:Don't hold your breath...

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot about Hitachi

Re:Don't hold your breath...

[jawtheshark]

Now, if you are in the market for a new HDD, your current best bet is to look at the brick and mortar department stores: Much of their remaining on-the-shelf stock hasn't caught up to the rapidly raises prices yet, which currently makes them a lot cheaper than online vendors... Provided you can still find them.

True... Today, I bought 1TB Western Digital external drive for 49€. I didn't need it, I bought it for someone else. I'm just fine with 1TB in my server and 320GB in my desktop (Which is basically empty except for the OS. I could easily do with a 32GB or 16GB SSD)

Re:Maybe

[uncqual]

But to be honest, government is not near the hindrance to business that lawyers are.

But the lawyers are exploiting a legal system created by a government run by lawyers so it's hard to distance the two.

on a flood plain. seriously?

[strack]

who the hell builds their extremely expensive hdd component manufacturing facility on a fucking flood plain? is space really at that much of a premium? if you really must, then put it on some stilts or something.

Re:on a flood plain. seriously?

[dbIII]

who the hell builds their extremely expensive hdd component manufacturing facility on a fucking flood plain?

Just about everybody it seems :(

Re:on a flood plain. seriously?

[hoppo]

who the hell builds their extremely expensive hdd component manufacturing facility on a fucking flood plain? is space really at that much of a premium? if you really must, then put it on some stilts or something.

You've invented a new pastime: armchair industrialism.

Re:Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocation

[Kjella]

Although I don't have the specific knowledge of WDC and Seagate contracts you profess, many/most contracts have "outs" for act-of-god situations, which would apply here.

Yes, but to invoke "force majeure" - as I know it best - you must be truly unable to supply. You can't just bail on your OEM contracts because it'd be more profitable to sell them on the open market, so the open market has to absorb the whole shortage first and only then, if you're still unable to supply the OEM market can you invoke it. The OEMs would probably also have rights to a delayed fulfillment so any backlog must be cleared first before they can supply the rest of the market. So while what you say is true, it doesn't really change anything the GP said. It really only shields the HDD manufacturers from liability due to breach of contract.

Re:Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocation

[flonker]

"Act of God" is a legal term. It has a very specific definition, which oddly enough, does not take into account God's actions as part of the definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God

An act of God is an unforeseeable natural phenomenon. Explained by Lord Hobhouse in Transco plc v Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council as describing events;

        (i) which involve no human agency
        (ii) which is not realistically possible to guard against
        (iii) which is due directly and exclusively to natural causes and
        (iv) which could not have been prevented by any amount of foresight, plans, and care.

Inflation is not equal to demand.

[triclipse]

When prices rise because demand increases, that is not inflation; that is supply and demand at work.

Inflation is when there is an increase in the money supply. Prices rise because the currency is weaker.

Re:Inflation is not equal to demand.

[osu-neko]

When prices rise because demand increases, that is not inflation; that is supply and demand at work.

Inflation is when there is an increase in the money supply. Prices rise because the currency is weaker.

Actually, inflation is when there is a rise in the general level of prices. It may be caused by an increase in the money supply, but that's not what it is, that's just the cause. It can also be caused by other things, including decreases in supply or increases in demand, although since it's a generalized measure, it's hard for anything more than small amounts of inflation or deflation to occur due to this. It does happen, though, particularly when things like "national mood" lead to changes in spending behavior more or less across the board.

Re:Inflation is not equal to demand.

[triclipse]

No, you are wrong. Inflation is, by definition, an increase in the money supply. An increase in the money supply tends to lead to an uneven rise in prices throughout the markets.

Re:Inflation is not equal to demand.

[amorsen]

Inflation is, by definition, an increase in the money supply.

No, the GP is right.

Inflation due to us running out of natural resources is just as much inflation as if it is due to central banks printing money.

Re:Inflation is not equal to demand.

[Hognoxious]

The term "inflation" originally referred to increases in the amount of money in circulation, and some economists still use the word in this way. However, most economists today use the term "inflation" to refer to a rise in the price level.

You might be wearing knee breeches, stockings, a powdered wig and a tricorne hat (not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with that).

I'm not.

Re:Inflation is not equal to demand.

[triclipse]

No, that is wrong. A decrease in natural resources leads to a decrease in supply. Decrease in supply equals an increase in demand. Prices rise due to supply and demand in that case, not inflation.

Re:Inflation is not equal to demand.

[amorsen]

No, that is wrong. A decrease in natural resources leads to a decrease in supply. Decrease in supply equals an increase in demand. Prices rise due to supply and demand in that case, not inflation.

I have no idea where you get this from. Common usage is on my side. See also the references listed under 1) in the Wikipedia entry for inflation.

Inflation means any general increase in prices, no matter what the cause is. This is also why you can speak of different measures of inflation, e.g. "core inflation" and "headline inflation". If inflation only measured money supply, there would only be one kind of inflation.

Re:Inflation is not equal to demand.

[triclipse]

I guess because I get my definition from Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Peter Schiff, Thomas P. Woods and the rest of the Austrian/free market economists.

Silly me.

Re:Inflation is not equal to demand.

[amorsen]

Citation, please.

Re:Inflation is not equal to demand.

[triclipse]

Rothbard: http://mises.org/money/3s2.asp
(The entire treatise "What Has Government Done to our Money" is excellent reading).

Schiff: http://www.schiffradio.com/b/Pentonomics---The-Cause-and-Evidence-of-Inflation/419269008642342955.html
Schiff consistently explains inflation as an increase in the money supply throughout his work. More can be read here (why not listen to the guys that were right?):
http://www.europac.net/research_analysis/commentary_view/Peter%20Schiff

Hazlitt/Mises: http://mises.org/daily/2914

Re:Inflation is not equal to demand.

[amorsen]

Thank you.

Re:Maybe

[houstonbofh]

But if we got rid of the government, the lawyers would still mess it up. If we get rid of the lawyers, that replaces most of government anyway. :)

Supply and demand quaint and old fashion

[Anonymous Coward]

Shortages don't drive the market perceived shortages drive the market. How many times have you heard there might be a shortage of oil due to some conflict? Now in this entire time has anyone had trouble finding gasoline to buy since the early 70s? We don't actually run out anymore and demand doesn't drive up prices. The market reacts to a potential bottle neck. The plus is the higher prices drives down demand avoiding shortages but the ugly truth is 9 times out of 10 the shortages wouldn't have manifest they simply get an excuse to raise prices. If there was an actual shortage wouldn't there be 25% fewer computers made or at least the higher prices should reduce sales by 25% but I think you'd find the real number is a fraction of that. There's enough excess capacity to cover for the shortage they simply are taking advantage of the fact there's a lack of surplus. Simply charging more doesn't make more hard drives magically appear and oddly enough they seem to find enough to keep making computers. Prices will drop when there's a major drop in demand and it'll happen long before there's new capacity.

SSDs vs. Spinning Platters

[DrVomact]

And yes, drive supplies will rebound because of one fact - a 2TB spinning rust costs way less than a 2TB SSD, and since drives are going 3TB+, I don't see SSDs catching up until drive size expansion slows below Moore's law. (SSD's fundamental capacity is driven by Moore's law - double the transistors in 18 months - double the capacity - SLC or MLC).

That's an interesting point—that SSD capacity is driven by Moore's law, but spinning disk drives are not. If that's true, you might think that SSDs would overtake spinning platters in a few years, wouldn't you? So platters would be out and SSDs would be the ubiquitous storage medium that hard drives are now. (I realize that this point is tangential to your main comment, and that you didn't actually assert it strongly. So I'm not really arguing with you—I just find the idea interesting, and wanted to spend a little time thinking about it.)

So when will solid state devices overtake mechanical hard drives? The first thing to consider is that while mechanical drives are not subject to Moore's Law, this technology has had an extraordinarily long life, marked by a pretty amazing growth in data capacity, accompanied by a dramatic reduction in size and power requirements, as well as an increase in I/O rates and a steep decline in prices. Being lazy, I just took a look at the Wikipedia article on the history of hard drives. It's a pretty amazing story.

When they were first invented at IBM in 1956, disk drives had a capacity of 5 Megabytes, and were the size of about 6 or 7 full-size refrigerators placed back-to-back. (See the Wikipedia image of this device.) About 10 years later, IBM's multi-platter drives were up to 29 Meg. This is not quite what you'd get from a device that follows Moore's law, of course: disk drives grew in capacity a factor of 6; Moore's law would have dictated that they increase by a factor of about 20 over the same 10 years.

However, the growth between 1970 and 1980 was more spectacular. In 1970, the biggest IBM "disk pack" had a capacity of 100 Meg. By 1980, we were up to 2.52 Gigabytes...a capacity increase of about 25 times—a growth in excess of Moore's law!. Significantly, the 1980 device was down to the size of a single refrigerator, and only cost $40,000.

The Wikipedia article has a graph that plots the growth in capacity of hard drives between 1980 and the present (2011). According to the graph, hard drives have increased in capacity at the rate of about 100 times every ten years. Wow.

Actually, I could have saved myself some time (and painful arithmetic) by just finding the article on Kryder's Law first. Mark Kryder published an article in Scientific American in 2005, in which he asserted that hard drive capacity doubles annually. From the article:

A PhysOrg.com article reports on a 2009 study by Mark Kryder.[4] According to the report, if hard drives continue to progress at their current pace, then in 2020 a two-platter, 2.5-inch disk drive will be capable of storing more than 14 terabytes(TB) and will cost about $40.

So maybe the answer to the question, "When will solid state devices replace disk drives?" is, "never"!

My own experiences incline me to be skeptical of claims that hard drives will be replaced any time soon by something totally different. Back in 1982, when I first decided to make my living "doing stuff with computers", I took a Data Processing 100 class at the local junior college (hey, tuition was cheap, as I was teaching Philosophy at the same institution). The textbook for the course asserted that while spinning platters were now the best method of online data storage (you put all the stuff you didn't absolutely need to ac

Re:SSDs vs. Spinning Platters

[dodobh]

The time to access data on spinning rust is horribly high. It's not the storage capacity, it's the access time.

Re:SSDs vs. Spinning Platters

[MightyYar]

True. For my next laptop - and maybe even my next desktop - SSD is the way to go for the main drive. But for my basement server that doesn't need to go very fast, or for my pictures/home movies on my desktop, or for external backup drives... I don't need fast access times so spinning drives will rule for a long time.

Re:Did anyone notice? No Hard Drives in Sales Adve

[theskipper]

Noticed the same thing. However Newegg did have a 500G Hitachi for $50 and a Seagate for $80 this morning in their email blast.

Also noticed that there seems to be an uptick in refurbished drives there. Not sure if it's related to the shortage or just a push to offer more refurbed items in general. Probably just the latter.

Re:Did anyone notice? No Hard Drives in Sales Adve

[Anonymous Coward]

NewEgg seems to be part of the problem.
I was about to spend another $400 there, and then saw how they were gouging....
Then ordered other places.

Re:Did anyone notice? No Hard Drives in Sales Adve

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had actually looked at newegg's black friday sale, you would know that you are wrong. http://promotions.newegg.com/neemail/nov-0-2011/BlackFridaymdbidsj25/index-landing.html#IT

Re:Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocation

[Andtalath]

Or they just raise prices to stop people from buying disks since they don't have enough.

I just can't believe it..

[hairyfeet]

I'm just amazed that for the first time in my entire life I'm on the RIGHT side of a price shift! I've always been the unlucky bastard that bought the $200 drive that ended up $80 two weeks later. the bitch is if Samsung hadn't have sold their HDD business i'd probably be screwed right along with everybody else, but when i heard they were gonna be gone and saw 1Tb EcoDrives for $35 and 2Tb for $65 I went ahead and bought me 6Tb worth of drives just so my desktops would all be Samsung. I just looked online the other day and a refurb 1Tb Samsung was going for over $100 so all I have to say is....yay me! For once i didn't get shafted on the price, woo hoo!

Never thought I'd be able to sell those 200Gb drives I had sitting in the shop but when folks saw how quick the price was jumping poof! They were gone. As soon as I run out of these 80Gb drives it'll probably be SSDs until the hard drive mess is over. if the customer wants a big drive I hope they have a big wallet! Funny though that in some places like geeks you can still get external drives at an okay price....whoops! Spoke too soon, now the 1Tb refurbs are over a $100. Man TFA is right you can almost watch the price jumps just by refreshing your browser. Can't believe the 500Gb are going for $80 a pop, wow....yay me! i gots tons of space!

Re:I just can't believe it..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Never thought I'd be able to sell those 200Gb drives"

And that's, in my opinion, at least part of the problem.

Remember that price is not set by the producing costs but by what the customer is accepting to pay. Since, at least on retail, you are going to buy and HDD when you are going to buy it almost completly disregarding the price, and customers know that price is rising because of the flood, providers are rising the price even more than the shortage would indicate, just to see how much the customer is accepting to pay.

zyzko lies, or /. failed at including proper cites

[MSTCrow5429]

None of the stories linked to in his quoted section or the /. fluff state a word about putative price fixing, nor any suspicions of "taking advantage of the situation," which itself is undefined.

Re:Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocation

[Hognoxious]

Not being a contact lawyer

That's OK, we're talking about contracts here.

Bad timing for me!

[antdude]

My three years old Seagate SATA 7200 500 GB ST3500320AS HDD just started to have problems (write delays, lost connections, etc.). I also just replaced my Linux/Debian box's IDE/PATA HDD with a new 115 GB SSD (about $170 retail) because I wanted to install a new Debian installation due to my bloated and badly shaped 2004's Debian installation. It looks like I will have to spend more money. I could use my two IDE/PATA HDDs in my storage, but they're old and small. :(

External's haven't risen in price as much

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to deal with this last week as one of my htpc harddrives started to fail. 1.5tb drive I bought two years ago for around $150. I went looking for a replacement drive and found them all over $200.

Then I checked the external drives. 2TB USB3 drive at Costco for $99.99.

If you really need a new drive, buy external, rip out the drive, hold on to the enclosure and slap the drive in your machine.
I think with USB3 on there the drives need to be decent enough to handle that sort of bandwidth right?

TL;DR - External drives haven't gone up in price.

Re:Maybe

[gnasher719]

Why does the destruction of one plant cause this much harm? -> Because it accounted for 25% of the market. That's actually fairly large; however, most techs would argue that 25% of the market going under does not justify a 400% price increase. It is possible, but something seems kind of...off about the situation.

As long as you sell all the drives you have, you can increase profit by increasing the price. So the question is: Do they have any unsold drives?

As has been mentioned, there are probably contracts in place where they have to deliver drives to HP, Dell, Apple, and so on at a fixed price. So the 25% loss of total capacity may be 80% of the drives that were available after all the contracts are fulfilled.

And why do you think HD manufacturers are "shortsighted idiots" for having no spare capacity? How would spare capacity have been of any benefit to _them_? HD manufacturers are not suffering.

Re:Maybe

[Reziac]

The way I heard it, that one plant was 7% of total HD capacity, tho it might be 25% of WD's capacity.

Gouging

[FishTankX]

There is definatley gouging going on.

Here's a 3TB WD green caviar on a Japanese site

http://www.pocdesse.com/welcome.html?vo=ka&c1=99&c2=99&c3=99&id=4515479533301
~$180
Now here's the same drive on new egg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136874&Tpk=WD30EZRX
~$249

I'm used to getting the hell gouged out of me for computer hardware in Japan. Graphics cards in particular are murderous, usually 20% higher over here than back in the US. When Japan is a good 25%+ cheaper, there's something very, very fishy going on.

Re:Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocation

[dgatwood]

I would argue that this doesn't qualify. From the reports I've read, they built their HD manufacturing plants in a known floodplain protected by levees. It could trivially have been prevented with a modicum of foresight by not building the plant in a floodplain....

Elasticity != volatilty.

[Hognoxious]

Actually, I think demand is very elastic at this point. It spiked like crazy over the last few weeks as people scrambled to buy as many drives as they could lay their hands on before all of the vendors jacked their prices.

Since elasticity of demand is how relative demand changes with respect to relative change in price, that makes as much sense as saying that voltage increased like crazy before someone jacked up the current.

That, plus your post higher up where you rather naively assume linearity, leads me to conclude that you're using expressions without really understanding what they mean.

Elasticity != volatility.

Re:Elasticity != volatilty.

[Sponge Bath]

...you're using expressions without really understanding what they mean.

Hah! That's the funniest thing I've heard in parsecs.

There are deals out there if you look.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the shortage started, I've kept my eye out for good deals, and picked up a 2tb WD Caviar Green and a 1TB WD Passport Essential SE, both for $80, both from Best Buy. The latter was cheaper than I've seen on Amazon, and the other was pretty close to the best price that it's been.

It's mechanical but not SSDs

[rhalstead]

I just looked up the prices on SSDs and they appear to still be going down although they've never been inexpensive. I didn't see any that were quite 4X but close. One Thai HD plant has shut down and they are forecasting shortages. It normally follows that with prices going up retailers are going to have to estimate/guess at what they are going to have to pay and raise prices on current inventory high enough to replace that inventory at the new prices and they aren't likely to guess low. On top of that we have supply and demand. With shortages, demand is likely to exceed supply forcing prices even higher. Conversely prices "this much higher" are going to lower demand, although by how much is difficult to say. It will likely be enough to hurt the retail industry as well as manufacturers of computers and accessories. Now the kicker is how long this may go on. The current floods are going to put quite a knot in the supply chain. Depending on damage that could take up to a year of more to clear. OTOH if the floods continue, or repeat this could turn out to be a long term problem driving the prices of computers back up. As to the cloud: My degree and profession have been in CS. Personally, I think the cloud is one of the worst mistakes we've ever made in IT. I would never put business or personal data into cloud storage even if it is more economical and likely better backed up. It's also far too vulnerable with access to many agencies that just might want a peek.

Ever watch one of those washing machines backup?

[rhalstead]

Those washing machines (disk drives) would jump around like a washing machine with the load all on one side during back ups and several other operations. I was amazed that the heads didn't strike the platters the way those things jumped around. All heads moved in unison during these operations and at that speed they had a lot of momentum.

Rationing

[cooldev]

Didn't see this mentioned, but at least in my area the retailers I've been to are rationing drives:

Fry's is limiting purchases to one drive per person, with prices that are higher but don't seem completely unreasonable.

A local company that used to be known as "Hard Drives Northwest" has a sign at the entrance that they aren't selling individual drives at this time, as they're reserving them for purchase of an entire system.

Given the circumstances this seems reasonable, and I'm even happy the market seems to be responding responsibly.

Supply and Demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Price fixing and profiteering? Not really. I mean, I'm sure vendors raised price on *existing* stock, which some would claim is profiteering, but it just doesn't make sense to sell your existing stock in a volatile market for less than it would cost to restock. A large percentage of hard drive production is gone -- I've read 40% is offline *during* the flooding, and about 30% is flooded (the other 10% isn't flooded, but was temporarily offline due to being cut off by flooding.) That 30% won't be replaced until roughly the end of 2012. Instead of a glut of drives on the market driving prices down, now there is shortage driving them up.

Blame the Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

if it weren't for the unions raising the cost of mfg so much, we should be mfg them right here in the good old USA!

I just won't buy

[DarthVain]

Until the prices go down. Simple. Making something cost triple is only a profit if you can sell at that price.