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Higher Hard Drive Prices Are the New Normal
An anonymous reader tips an article looking at the state of HDD pricing now that the market has had time to recover from the flooding in Thailand and a round of consolidation among manufacturers. Prices have certainly declined from the high they reached during the flooding, but they've stabilized a bit higher than they were beforehand. Quoting:
"Are things going to change any time soon? We doubt it. WD and Seagate both reported record profits this past quarter. In Q1 2011, Western Digital reported net profit of $146M against sales of $2.3B while Seagate recorded $2.7B in revenue and $93 million in net income. That’s a net profit margin of 6% and 3%, respectively. For this past quarter, Western Digital reported sales of $3B (thanks in part to its acquisition of Hitachi) and a net income of $483 million, while Seagate hit $4.4B in revenue and $1.1B in profits. Net margin was 16% and 37% respectively. With profit margins like this, the hard drive manufacturers are going to be loath to cut prices. After years of barely making profits, the Thailand floods are the best excuse ever to drive record income for a few quarters. All of this means that while we expect prices to gradually decline, holding off on a necessary purchase doesn’t make much sense."
It's called the "SSD" section on Newegg. You are right that head-in-the-clouds type tech people have been saying that magnetic media will get replaced, but it has just been wishful thinking. However now it is. SSDs sell quite readily. They aren't going to displace HDDs tomorrow or anything, and I'd say that 2 year timeline is a bit optimistic, but they are already making big in roads.
While they don't compete in terms of storage/$ they are getting to the point where they are cheap enough for enough storage that people find them worthwhile. That's all it really takes. Few people actually need 2TB of storage, the idea that SSDs have to be dead equal to HDDs is silly. Many people will decide they can get on just fine with 160GB and would rather have the speed.
The big thing I see is that warranty lengths have dropped off to 3 years from 5 years on many of the high-grade models that are selling today. They still sell 5 year warranties, but at a premium. The real cheap ones have dropped to 1 year warranties. Are prices back to where they were before the floods? Almost. Is product quality back to where it was? Nope.
I'll be waiting a little longer until I build myself another RAID. I believe we still have another quarter or two before we see the prices hit their baseline. I've been extending my purchase time frame by doing some serious house cleaning.
Ummm ... isn't that what collusion means
No, to collude, they would need to communicate in some form, written or spoken. Just guessing that the other party thinks like you and acting on that assumption is NOT collusion.