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Hard Drive Prices Slide As Thai Flood Aftermath Subsides
New submitter yeszomgpony writes "For the first time since the Thailand flooding, hard drive prices are finally starting to decrease. The price jump was kicked off in October when drive inventory levels plummeted 90% in less than a week. From the article: 'Over the past few weeks, hard drive prices have leveled off and have begun to drop slowly, according to Dynamite's data. "For first time, less than week after Western Digital's first [fabrication plant] went back on line, drive inventory began increasing at both distributors and ecommerce sites, and index prices began coming down a little too," Kubicki said. IDC has predicted that hard disk drive supply shortages in the wake of Thailand flooding would affect consumers, computer system manufacturers and corporate IT shops into 2013.'"
Both are sliding
Sure seems like there's a shortage... I asked around whether anyone needed a few of my old ass hard drives on one of the local (German) hardware forums, and received a trade of a slightly castrated Core 2 Duo, 4 gigs of RAM and an ASUS mainboard for just a 500gig 3.5" SATA drive and an 80gigger notebook drive... both well used, of course. A few weeks ago, this wouldn't have been possible, with the hard drives worth pennies and the other hardware worth 40-50€.
Glad to hear the shortage is coming to an end though... I really need to upgrade my NAS. Last time I did that, 1TB drives were in the sweet spot... getting a bit full.
This often happens when a process goes off line for a time. It also normally works itself out after a few months.
I'll be waiting a few months myself.
I think I'll wait a while until the processing hardware is working perfectly, the power is stable, the factory is fully purged of airborne particulates, etc. Until then I'll let someone else do the QC testing.
Goes to prove yet again how the "free market", that weird beast so idolized by economists, is such a fickle creature. Cause after over several months underwater, there is NO way you are gonna get a clean room facility up to snuff & speed in a matter of days. Of course, now that the excuse is over, all the hoarding speculators are trembling in fear of getting stuck with their huge stockpile and will start to desperately flood the market.
Goes to prove yet again how the "free market", that weird beast so idolized by economists, is such a fickle creature. Cause after over several months underwater, there is NO way you are gonna get a clean room facility up to snuff & speed in a matter of days. Of course, now that the excuse is over, all the hoarding speculators are trembling in fear of getting stuck with their huge stockpile and will start to desperately flood the market.
So in other words, the free market will function in exactly the way it's supposed to
Someone should do a article or investigation into all the obscure places our hardware comes from, especially concentrations where most of one type comes from a small area.
We only ever seem to hear about these places when something goes wrong.
Remember that time in the '90s when a Taiwanese RAM factory caught fire, and it turned out to be a big chunk of world RAM output? Sent prices spiking for a while.
Conversely, it's surprising how little the Japanese tsunami affected the tech world. I guess their industries were concentrated further south.
/. disks are getting full.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Exactly, a perspective. Let me explain what that means:
In this huge world with 7 billion people, every 3 minutes, about 600 die. (On average about 3 per second). And our population growth is so fast that the 600 dead had been replaced (sorry for the dry factual choice of words) before the floods even hit the news. ... But the harddrive problem affects the world, albeit in a modest way, for months.
So yeah, it seems the editors really do have a sense of perspective. Maybe you prefer a more emotional perspective... but if you want to mourn every couple of hundred people that die, you'd better empty your agenda. It's a full time job.
But only for the oooh shiny crowd. I simply held off buying any hard drives. Would I have liked to expand capacity? yes. Would I have liked to buy 12 new machines? yes.
Did I kill people or lose money because I did not? no.
Honestly, the price jump was only because of idiots that rushed out and bought drives when they heard of a possible "shortage" and thus created a shortage.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And that's what it did. Initially, the demand curve didn't shift, but the supply took a huge hit. The price increase allowed the market to adjust, and eventually (quite quickly, apparently) subsided as capacity has been (partially at least) recovered (perhaps using existing capacity with reduced QC, as evidenced by the warranty cut...) and substitute products have been sought (some products may be forgoing HDs in favor of much smaller but still adequate SSDs, for instance).
This is exactly how the market is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be constantly at some steady-state "ideal" price. That's how planned economies work, and results in either or both of shortages and waste.
The only evidence of anything like market failure is the warranty cut, that cut across all manufacturers. One would've expected someone to hold out and become the "quality" producer. But even that is a stretch as the warranties were not cut across all product lines for all manufacturers.
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