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HDD Price Update: How the Thai Floods Have Affected Prices, 3 Months Later
New submitter jjslash writes "The hard disk drive supply chain was hit hard late last year when a series of floods struck Thailand. The Asian country accounts for about a quarter of the world's hard drive production, but thousands of factories had to close shop for weeks as facilities were under water, in what is considered the world's fourth costliest natural disaster according to World Bank estimates. That's on top of the human cost of over 800 lives. TechSpot has monitored a number of mobile and desktop HDDs to get a better overview of how the situation has developed in the last three months."
OMFG that means for the same price I will only be able to stash half the garbage I will never consume!!!!
It is not wise to keep all your eggs in one basket. But it is probably too much to expect common sense from the hard drive industry.
25% isn't "all the eggs". Not even close.
Well if they only counted for 1/4th of the production and the price is marked up over 100% I think an investigation is in order because i smell price gouging. while it is to be expected they'd make the consumers pay the cost of fixing the factories 100%-200% over the original price (which they certainly weren't losing money on) makes me smell a little collusion and price fixing. After all if there wasn't any price fixing one company could undercut the others and pretty much own the market, especially with the OEMs. Now that is BIG business and BIG profits so the fact they are ALL setting at almost identical prices? yeah i smell a rat.
But I would like to give a big shout out to Samsung because while i fricking hate the fact they sold their HDD business along with Hitachi because those were my big two go to brands, especially for business and industrial, because they sold out when they did for once in my fricking life i was ahead of the curve and not behind! when i heard they were quitting I bought Samsung ecodrives at $35 for a Tb and $59 for 2Tb and made a nice bit of cash and still had enough drives to make sure i could wait this mess out. I got burnt on DVD, paying $200 for a drive that 6 months later was less than $60, got burnt on my last Intel CPU when i paid too much only to have them abandon the socket and leave me with no upgrade path, but for once i actually came out ahead of the curve, thanks Samsung!
BTW if you need a big drive even at the higher prices i can recommend the Samsung Ecodrive most heartily. I've used them on factory floors and in construction shacks where they get horribly abused and they just come back for more, and any you find on the market in those sizes will be from the last two batches which were particularly good. with that nice fat 32mb of cache I went from a bench of 93 on a Seagate 7200 RPM with 8Mb of cache to nearly 140 on the 1Tb Ecodrive, fast enough i'm using the Eco as a boot drive on all my machines as well as storage and I can tell a difference in the speed thanks to the bigger cache. Oh and the temps made a HUGE drop, from 121-128F under load for the Seagate to a max 98f under load and an idle temp of just 82f compared to nearly 100f for the Seagate. damned shame there won't be any more but sitting on 6Tb I think I can afford to just let this whole mess go on by, thanks again Samsung!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Redundant Array Of Inexpensive Asians ? :)
It's about buying smart. Instead of buying recertified drives, go for drives that really like the water like Barracudas and Caviar.
If I buy one of those two models my data will be eaten alive, and boy will I have egg on my face then.
"Besides, arent hard disk prices saner in Australia?"
Yes but their drives wont work here. the platters spin the other direction.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So I suppose a Quantum Fireball is out of the question then?
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Did you get a happy ending?
Seagate had almost record profits this Quarter. WD did VERY good despite the flood.
Looks like the only one hurt was consumers, Corporations made out like bandits.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.