A Year After Thailand Flooding, Hard Drive Prices Remain High

crookedvulture writes "Last October, Thailand was hit by massive flooding that put much of the world's hard drive industry under water. Production slowed to a crawl as drive makers and their suppliers mopped up the damage, and prices predictably skyrocketed. One year later, production has rebounded, with the industry expected to ship more drives in 2012 than it did in 2011. For the most part, though, hard drive prices haven't returned to pre-flood levels. Although 2.5" notebook drives are a little cheaper now than before the flood, the average price of 3.5" desktop drives is up 35% from a year ago. Prices have certainly fallen dramatically from their post-flood peaks, but the rate of decline has slowed substantially in recent months, suggesting that higher prices are the new norm for desktop drives."

Comments

Why not?

[Severus Snape]

If they can get away with charging the extra, they are hardly going to reduce their profit margins now.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they can get away with charging the extra, they are hardly going to reduce their profit margins now.

If that's the case, why didn't they just "charge extra" before the floods? And why would they drop the price for the 2.5" drives, but keep the 3.5" at the high price?

Re:Why not?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It kind of reminds me of the practices of local gas pumps...well, some of them anyway. When the prices on the international crude oil market go up, they raise their prices. Whey they go down again, they reduce their prices. Only the latency in the former case is noticeably smaller. ;) Bastards.

Re:Why not?

[Shrike Valeo]

why didn't they just "charge extra" before the floods?

They didn't have an excuse they could fall back on if they ramped them up with no reason?

Despite their operations returning to normal, it might be a case of demand still not meeting the supply. If people are willing to pay more, how often do you hear "since we've knocked the prices up lately, we'll just slash them anyway"

Re:Why not?

[Shrike Valeo]

Apologies, supply not meeting demand*

Re:Why not?

[ShanghaiBill]

why didn't they just "charge extra" before the floods?

They didn't have an excuse they could fall back on if they ramped them up with no reason?

No excuse is needed. Public companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits. If they were knowingly selling for less that the market would bear, without a sound strategic reason, they would be guilty of misconduct. Since most (all?) of these drives are imported, selling below the fair market price could also be illegal under various "anti-dumping" laws.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also easier for them to collude with only 3 manufacturers left. All the others were bought up by the three.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the equiibrium was lower. Now one of the few players would have to charge less, but they have no incentive to do so. Game theory at work.

Re:Why not?

[hjf]

Here in Argentina they don't reduce the prices after they go up.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

With all those corporations/governments wanting to keep taps on us, ISP keeping logs etc., I don't think the demand is going to be low.

Re:Why not?

[Nadaka]

The market is much less willing to bear arbitrary price jacking than price jacking related to a major event.

Re:Why not?

[Smallpond]

Because the equiibrium was lower. Now one of the few players would have to charge less, but they have no incentive to do so. Game theory at work.

Exactly. When their costs went up they all had to raise prices but when costs go down they can all wait for someone else to lower prices first. No collusion or cartel is required.

Re:Why not?

[interkin3tic]

And yet, if you're from the US, they're still a lot lower than they are elsewhere.

Re:Why not?

[oxdas]

Public companies do NOT have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits, only to follow the company charter. Even in the most often cited case creating fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits, Dodge v. Ford Motor Company (1919), the court said this in regards to Henry Ford's desire to reduce the price of his cars for his stated, purely altruistic, motives (and in doing so cancel a special dividend to his shareholders):

" We do not draw in question, nor do counsel for the plaintiffs do so, the validity of the general proposition stated by counsel⦠that although a manufacturing corporation cannot engage in humanitarian works as its principal business, the fact that it is organized for profit does not prevent the existence of implied powers to carry on with humanitarian motives such charitable works as are incidental to the main business of the corporation."

My primary problem with your position is not that it is factually wrong (even though it is), but that "maximizing profits" is a purely subjective term and an impossible goal. Short-term and long-term profits have mutually exclusive components. For example, cutting r&d or laying off staff raises profits in the short term, but may lead to declining profits in the long term. Depending on your point of view, any corporate action could be construed as not maximizing profits.

Re:Why not?

[hairyfeet]

Because they actually had real competition before? Before the flood there were FOUR hard drive manufacturers, Seagate, WD, Samsung, and Hitachi, now there is only WD and Seagate. Since there is only two they will simply watch and match each other's prices, nice way to have a duopoly.

But this is why competition is so important, just look at how quickly prices are falling and sizes growing in SSDs whereas with HDDs they seem to be stagnant, that's because as long as they simply match each other's prices they don't have to worry about price wars since its only the two of them.

Re:Why not?

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

But where this model fails is in the standard assumption that volume never changes, and this is wrong. Pre-flood I bought a 2 TB external HDD for my DirecTV DVR for ~$90. My 1 TB external HDD that I use for backups has been at it's limit for a while; in fact, I've been having fun finding all the stuff that I really don't need to backup. A few weeks ago I found archives that were truly worthless and saved myself about 300 (uncompressed) MB. If the price of a 2 TB external HDD had fallen to it's previous level, I would have just bought one and not bothered. I suspect I'm not the only person doing these kinds of activities. Yes, I realize I am a minority of the market, but in sum, we're probably talking about a substantial total volume of HDDs not being purchased.

Re:Why not?

[jhoegl]

When you take in tax benefits/cuts they arent lower, just hidden.

Re:Why not?

[jhoegl]

I called this last year when the story broke about prices going up for HDs.

Re:Why not?

[Dogtanian]

But this is why competition is so important, just look at how quickly prices are falling and sizes growing in SSDs whereas with HDDs they seem to be stagnant, that's because as long as they simply match each other's prices they don't have to worry about price wars since its only the two of them.

Isn't part of the lack of competition in the HDD market due to the fact that many companies see SSD as being the long-term future, and therefore wouldn't want to get into, or want to get out of, the HDD market, nor invest money in something they perceive as having no long-term future?

Of course, if the price of HDDs remains too high, then it will almost certainly hasten the demise of that market in the face of SSDs' increasing popularity, even if there will remain a smaller market for people who *need* the larger capacities that SSDs won't reach in the near future.

Re:Why not?

[pmontra]

They don't have any particular duty. Read Zuckerberg's IPO letter. He made it clear that shareholders profit was not fb's top priority but I think he gave strategic reasons for that.

Re:Why not?

[Psicopatico]

Around here it works like this:
- when crude oil goes up, pumps raise because "hey! Crude's gone up!"
- when crude lowers, pumps raise because "hey! We bought our crude with the older price!".

Bastards.

Re:Why not?

[Seumas]

They needed a justification to reverse things. This gave them the opportunity to "reset" things for another couple of years.

It's not dissimilar from how you have reports that "there will be a lot of storms this summer" or "there was ONE fire at ONE oil refinery in the south" and, suddenly, that is justification for gas prices to fucking skyrocket for the season (despite other refineries and despite massive reserves). In other words, not for any logistical reason. Just because "we can".

Re:Why not?

[MMC Monster]

My thought is that if they don't raise the price at the pump now, they can't afford the next shipment of gas.

As for bringing the price down, they have to hedge their bets on how much that next shipment is going to cost them.

I wonder if they have any insurance on this sort of thing, or some buffer in case they make a mistake in their estimates?

Re:Why not?

[cranky_chemist]

It's called "static up, elastic down" pricing, and it's one of the basic tenets of economics.

Re:Why not?

[filthpickle]

I wonder if they have any insurance on this sort of thing, or some buffer in case they make a mistake in their estimates?

Crude oil production quotas and a limited refining capacity?

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Standard Oil was busted up, there are many laws about selling gas for under cost. This means even if the price of tomorrow's gas is lower than today's, you can't sell today's at tomorrow's lower price.

Re:Why not?

[wisty]

Presumably there was a lot of overcapacity. No-one wants to be in the hard drive business. PCs are dying, and everything else is going SSD. Would *you* build a hard drive factory?

The flood wiped out a lot of the extra factories which were keeping prices low. No-one's going to replace those factories, because they have better things to do with their money.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can tell you why they're not back down to the pre-flood rates yet. And, believe it or not, it has little/nothing to do with 'corporate greed'.

These factories had to make a lot of new capital expenses to replace equipment destroyed by and repair facilities damaged by the flooding.
These capital expenses weren't part of the normal, projected plan, but need to be payed for anyway. The only way to bring actual margins back in line is to sell at a slightly higher price.

captcha: explains

Re:Why not?

[GameboyRMH]

Exactly, it's called "what the market will bear" and is generally the true factor that decides price, not that supply/demand stuff which is total BS as far as the consumer is concerned.

Re:Why not?

[Kjella]

Isn't part of the lack of competition in the HDD market due to the fact that many companies see SSD as being the long-term future, and therefore wouldn't want to get into, or want to get out of, the HDD market, nor invest money in something they perceive as having no long-term future?

I don't think HDDs are going away for all the people that need bulk storage - and there's a *lot* of corporations, organizations and individuals building huge digital archives. I think it's more that for the most part these people don't care about performance nor marginal differences in reliability, they have a RAID and expect to swap disks from time to time. What they care about is cost, cost and cost. It's like selling cheap toilet paper, yes people need it and they're not going to stop buying it but you'll never make good margins on it because it's obvious the market you cater to won't ever pay a premium for it.

Re:Why not?

[zaft]

I assume you meant "300 GB" not "300 MB"...

Re:Why not?

[adolf]

It's called "static up, elastic down" pricing, and it's one of the basic tenets of economics.

See also: Edgeworth price cycle, which explains the sawtooth shape of retail gasoline price trends.

Re:Why not?

[mcrbids]

When their costs went up they all had to raise prices but when costs go down they can all wait for someone else to lower prices first. No collusion or cartel is required.

Not necessarily. It's likely that there profits were lost, and the cost of rebuilding factories and destroyed equipment would also drive up prices. They'll charge whatever they think will maximize their profits, so if yields still haven't completely caught up or embedded costs prevent them from dropping prices in order to get a volume advantage over their competitors you can bet that prices will remain high.

Re:Why not?

[HungWeiLo]

Your peso is dropping against the dollar, and oil is priced in dollars.

$1USD was 3.70ARS when I last visited Argentina. Now it's close to 5ARS?

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

higher prices PLUS the shorter warranties... win win for them, lose lose for consumers.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

My primary problem with your position is not that it is factually wrong (even though it is), but that "maximizing profits" is a purely subjective term and an impossible goal. Short-term and long-term profits have mutually exclusive components.

This one's easy to resolve. Restate the objective as: "Maximise the net present value of all future dividends issued by the company". "Maximizing profits" is just a simplified, layman's way of saying this.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean the latency is higher.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the real story. Buy out the competition, come up with a fake crisis (flooding, really?) to raise prices, then don't bother lowering prices after the fake crisis has "passed" (a year to rebuild...from a flood...really?!).

Re:Why not?

[TheRaven64]

For a long time, laptop components were vastly more expensive than their desktop counterparts. Part of this was due to their stricter requirements (smaller, lower power, and so on), but a big factor was the economies of scale. For every laptop part you sold, you'd sell 20 or more of the desktop equivalent. This changed significantly once laptop sales passed desktop. Now, for example, the cost of DDR3 SO-DIMMs and full-sized DIMMs is the same (up to 8GB modules, at least). When everyone is buying SSDs for their laptops and servers, it becomes increasingly expensive to keep producing hard drives for a shrinking niche.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

but that "maximizing profits" is a purely subjective term and an impossible goal. Short-term and long-term profits have mutually exclusive components.

Yeah, and "short-term" and "long-term" are purely subjective terms. However pressure to increase clearly exists in either of your false timespan dichotomies. So, what's your point?

Re:Why not?

[Elldallan]

It's far more likely that they noticed that "hey people still bought gas for the higher price so if they're still willing to buy why would we ever lower it"

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know the probabilities of future scenarios. You don't even have complete knowledge of what the scenarios are and how your actions affect your success them. Even the best planning efforts can produce very limited and uncertain information about the net present value of your future plans, and you don't know how large the uncertainties are. This is why company decision making is still largely based on human intuition.

Re:Why not?

[purpledinoz]

Prices are still going down. I think this is a classic supply and demand phenomenon. The manufacturers can't keep prices up, otherwise their inventory would skyrocket. To prevent this, they have to lower prices. Looking at their financials on google, it doesn't look like they're making ridiculous profits, which I would expect they would if there was price collusion. Making HDDs has really low profit margins, no wonder no one wants to jump into this market. And if they do start raking in massive profits, expect to see another big player jump in again.

Re:Why not?

[xelah]

It's a coordination problem in an oligopolistic market. They might all have liked to charge more, but without collusion they can't all increase their prices at once in an agreed way. Once something happens that lets them increase prices in a coordinated way then there isn't an incentive to reduce them again - each company may know it would benefit from reducing its prices if it could guarantee no response from its competitors, but they all know that their competitors will match them, wiping out the benefit to them. And so prices can remain high, close to the monopolistic price (but not higher). The fewer companies there are the worse it gets - if there were dozens and many potential new entrants it'd be almost certain that someone else would reduce their prices anyway (or gradually 'cheat'), so any one player might as well do so immediately to try and grab an advantage.

I suppose we have to hope that this implicit cooperation will break down or be eroded eventually. By inflation, say, or the introduction of new products that are slightly cheaper each time. Or, maybe more likely, that it'll be disrupted by SSDs.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to point out that people seriously overvalue the meaning of that. The actual meaning is that they can't create sweetheart deals that benefit the managers of the company or suppliers they may have an interest in. It has been misinterpeted to mean that companies need to be price gouging or giving every cent to shareholders while ignoring workers' wages or R&D. So their decision to not lower prices is basically just a money grab because they know that HDDs are here for the forseeable future. SSD prices are dropping but are still around 4x the prices of HDDs per capacity. So basically they made their decision on the basis of greed and excess.

Re:Why not?

[hjf]

Oil prices went way over $100/barrel and fuel prices rose accordingly. Then went much lower than that, yet fuel prices didn't. At all.

Re:Why not?

[hjf]

Yes. 100% agreed.
But the one that was hit most severely was WD. Seagate not so much. Yet, seagate and WD are priced accordingly. How come?

Re:Why not?

[j-beda]

Yes. 100% agreed.
But the one that was hit most severely was WD. Seagate not so much. Yet, seagate and WD are priced accordingly. How come?

If you were Seagate and your biggest competitor was pricing their product at $x and you COULD price yours at $x/2, but were able to sell all of your capacity at $x/(0.99), why would you charge the lower price?

Theoretically, in a "perfect" market, the price of a product would be just a smidgen less than the price charged by the second-cheapest producer, at least until there is only one producer, who can then raise their price to a level to maximize profit in light of demand.

Re:Why not?

[hjf]

If you were Seagate and your biggest competitor was pricing their product at $x and you COULD price yours at $x/2, but were able to sell all of your capacity at $x/(0.99), why would you charge the lower price?

To put my competition out of business.

Re:Why not?

[j-beda]

If you were Seagate and your biggest competitor was pricing their product at $x and you COULD price yours at $x/2, but were able to sell all of your capacity at $x/(0.99), why would you charge the lower price?

To put my competition out of business.

I suppose that going down to half price might drive them out of business faster, but you are already undercutting their price (by a tiny bit), and you are working at max capacity, so until they do go out of business, dropping your price would only cost you money up to the point when they pack it in and you can raise your prices again.

Re:Why not?

[hairyfeet]

SSDs have a "dark side" that I have a feeling is gonna ultimately torpedo that market, and that is the crazy failure rate which is made worse by the fact that it is usually NOT the drive chips themselves but the controller that fails with NO WARNING so if you don't have a VERY recent backup? Bye bye data. I have some gamer customers that are already into double digits on the number of drives they've owned, ALL died of controller failure.

So I wouldn't write off HDDs yet, they may not have the speed but they are a HELL of a lot more reliable. While the gamers are willing to risk it for the benches, my regular customers that have tried SSD and gotten burnt have already sworn off SSds, they won't own another one. Enough people hear and see the crazy failure rate the market will fall, I'm just waiting for the SSD equivalent of the IBM Desktar 80Gb or the Maxtor 400Gb, only since they nearly all use the same controllers when they have their bad line its gonna bite a LOT of people in the ass. When that happens I wouldn't be surprised to see SSD purchases to drop like a stone, because most people if given a choice of raw speed or risking losing all their data? they'll choose reliable over fast any day of the week.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Before the flooding, I bought a 1TB drive for ~$85. During the flooding, I saw those jump to ~$135. Last week, I bought a 1TB for $70.

They're still high?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

You overpaid pre-flood. Pre-flood, you could get 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM for around $60-$70. Now it's about $90-$100 and usually with a shorter warranty duration than pre-flood.

All I'm gonna say is these higher prices better result in the new technologies (HARM/BPM/etc) coming to market.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

2 TB drives went for that much before the flooding. Now they are still $30 more than before. Not as gougy as it was but not down to where they were. It also doesn't help when companies buy out competitors like has been happening.

Re:What?

[tloh]

Yeah, I have been watching prices as well and I've observed that, although slightly inconsistent, they do seem to be normalizing. Last week, I snagged a deal at newegg for less than $45/TB for a 3TB external. Some in the comments revealed that upon cracking open the enclosure, the actual drive is one of the vendor's fastest model. Bought separately, the bare drive would have costed $30 more. It is unclear to me at this point what is actually happening, but I'm happy to have bought a HD at a reasonable price.

Re:What?

[YodasEvilTwin]

You got a bad deal beforehand, I was buying my 1 TB drives for $50.

Re:What?

[YodasEvilTwin]

Also keep in mind Moore's Law.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

How long pre-flood did you buy the first drive?

Here's a price history on a Seagate 1TB drive. Pre-flood the per-unit price averaged $55 with occasional (sale) dips down to $40. Today it's sitting at $70, down from a post-flood high of $140.

Re:What?

[gman003]

The price of the same drive has dropped, but the average price has not. Logical conclusion then is that people are buying more expensive drives than before.

It actually makes some sense given the rise of SSDs. People who would have been satisfied with a small hard drive are now opting to get a similarly-sized but far faster SSD. So the bottom end of the market has shrunk, moving the average up.

That's just my conjecture, but it seems logical. The best way to test would be to compare similar market segments - compare the prices and volume of the current highest-capacity 7200RPM drive to the 2011 highest-capacity 7200RPM drive, and so on. If sales of the small (250GB) drives, particularly 2.5" 5400RPM models, has slowed, it might explain why the average has increased.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Moore's law have to do with this? There are not a large number of transistors on the hard drives they are talking about here.

Re:What?

[JoshRosenbaum]

As has been mentioned already, you could get 2TB for that price back then. You are also forgetting that after a year, you would be able to get more TB for the same price. Given that, you would think you could get 2.5TB or more for ~$85 now, but that is certainly not the case.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

May 2011 Newegg had Samsung F4 2TB for $69.99; currently they're at $129.99

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's a Seagate 7200.14 then no, they're not the same.
The variant they put in external enclosures is crippled via firmware to 150MB/s max transfer rate and has ~24ms average access time.
The noncrippled ones do >200MB/s on the outer cylinders and ~18ms avg access time.

Re:What?

[AliasMarlowe]

I bought a pair of WD 3TB drives just before the flood. They cost me about euro 125 each, and the cheapest price hereabouts today is almost euro 140. Note that these prices are not exactly comparable to the US prices, due to currency exchange and high VAT.

Re:What?

[patchmaster]

Pre-flood, you could get 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM for around $60-$70.

Nonsense. I was building a big server around that time and was keeping a very close eye on prices. The cheapest I ever saw was $89, and that was for a 5400RPM drive, not a 7200RPM. And the $89 was a sale.

Re:What?

[Pope]

Also keep in mind Moore's Law.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with hard drives.

Re:What?

[mattack2]

Yeah, I didn't RTFA, but at least in the Fry's/Best Buy ads of the week, the drives seem to have come down to about the same price.

There was a 4 TB drive at Fry's for under $200 a few weeks ago. External 2 TB drives are showing up at $89.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

And it hasn't occurred to anyone that the dollar has dropped in value in the mean time?

Re:What?

[CrashNBrn]

About a 18% increase in price from 20 months ago -- Seems pretty high to me.

Last year, March 2011

$69,99 / 1.5TB, Western Digital WD15EARS Caviar Green Hard Drive - 1.5TB, 3.5", SATA-3G

That was on sale, $10-20 off, I don't recall. And not the best drive certainly.

Today, the closest match I can find is:

$109.99 / 2TB, WD Green WD20EARX 2TB Desktop Hard Drive - 3.5", SATA, 64MB Cache

Disregarding possible firesales, and slight markup going to higher data density 1.5 to 2.0, and general reduction in price over time we get:
2011 Price, 1.5 TB to 2.0 TB :: $93.99 (70/1.5)*2
2012 Actual Price of a 2.0 TB :: 109.99

Re:What?

[Lagmo]

We built a storage server with 16 x 2TB Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT1 HDDs back in April/May 2011, the invoice says 6950kr (DKK, was 5.2DKK = $1 USD at the time*) so that works out to $83.53 USD per drive even here in Denmark and it wasn't any special deal, just day prices.
* - Source: http://nationalbanken.statistikbank.dk/nbf/107312

Re:What?

[jlv]

I'll concur with this -- I never saw the "pre-flood" regular price for 2TB at $60-70. I did see 1.5TB at $65 regularly, and did pick up 2TB drives for as low as $75 (pre-flood) -- but that was the cheapest I ever saw them.

Only in the last two weeks I have finally seen 1.5TB for $70 or less from multiple vendors. This week has been the first time I've thought we've hit "pre-flood" prices.

Re:What?

[Applekid]

You're all overpaying. I stole all my hard drives.

Re:What?

[TheRealMindChild]

18 ms access time? My SCSI 160 drives deliver a 2ms access time. Why the hell are we content on moving backwards?

Re:What?

[guruevi]

You may be confusing access times but even if you aren't, your SCSI drive was probably a single-platter (which was common back then) while the current beasts are 4 platters. I think the current maximum is 1TB/platter and you'll find 4 of those in the 4TB drives.

Re:What?

[Mashiki]

I live in Canada and bought a 2TB 3.5 7200RPM drive(seagate) for $66 preflood. I've got the receipt sitting in front of me, along with the 1TB for $43 that I picked up for a portable.

Re:What?

[Gaygirlie]

I bought a new 1TB 3.5" drive just before the floods at 49€ (~$62) and now the cheapest 1TB drive I can get is 68€ (~$86), so yeah, I concur. I've been beating myself up for not buying more of those drives back when they were so cheap.

Re:What?

[Gaygirlie]

My SCSI 160 drives deliver a 2ms access time.

I'd love to see a mechanical HDD with such speeds. You are confusing something there, mate.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool! Maybe we'll see some HD firmware hacking going on again. The Samsung case illustrates that some drives do have a flashable firmware. I remember back in the old days that on the Amiga there was a tool to flash Quantum ProDrive SCSI drives firmware so they could be used in Macs (those drives were a whopping 40MB and 52 MB).

Re:What?

[rrohbeck]

Yup. Latency alone in 30/rpm on average and the fastest seek times (in 15krpm drives) are about 3ms so that's just over 5ms best case.
Consumer drives have 8ms average seek times in the best case and 7200rpm, that's over 12ms for the fastest consumer drives.

Re:What?

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Sorry sir, you're the one spouting nonsense. I have a server full of Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB drives that I purchased for $60 a piece.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed as well. Cheapest I bought for was $85 for 2TB 7200 RPM.

Re:What?

[Life2Death]

I agree. I had a cart full of WD Black 1.5TB Drives for $67.99 each like the week of the flood. I was going to buy 5 of them for a RAID10 + HS setup, but they shot up over $140 each so forget it.

Re:What?

[Lord Byron II]

I bought 2 2TB Hitachi's in May 2011 for $69 each including shipping from NewEgg. They were that cheap back then.

Pine for the old days...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember Desktops are no longer whats cool, everyone seems to want a laptop/tablet/phone. Make sense that prices would rise if there is less demand for 3.5 drives, thus less companies producing an item.

Re:Pine for the old days...

[csubi]

I doubt that desktop PCs are the biggest market for 3.5" HDDs, just as I don't believe data centers are filled up with 2.5"/SSD drives...

Re:Pine for the old days...

[Anonymous Coward]

Post-PC world, grandpa. Throw that clunky shit in the dumpster!

Re:Pine for the old days...

[Anonymous Coward]

Data centers aren't filled with 3.5" SATA 7200 RPM drives, either. They all have 10k RPM SAS drives.

Re:Pine for the old days...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stick that iproduct up your ass sonny Jim. Also get off my lawn, pull up your pants, turn it down!

Re:Pine for the old days...

[jandrese]

You would be surprised how many rack servers come with 2.5" drives these days. It's a fairly popular option, even though it means a lot less storage and speed for your buck.

Re:Pine for the old days...

[hjf]

I'm 100% certain Facebook and Google don't need the RAW SPEEDZ 10k SAS gives, but the sheer size and small price of 3.5 SATA

Re:Pine for the old days...

[jedidiah]

The Cloud isn't fast enough or reliable enough for your Post-PC fantasy to be a reality at this point. Non-trivial amounts of local storage are still needed.

Even if it were otherwise, you still might not be comfortable with a government that claims you have no ownership interest in files.

Re:Pine for the old days...

[Anonymous Coward]

even though it means a lot less storage and speed for your buck.

Capacity maybe, speed not so much. Compare the iops/disk yield between a 2.5 10k sas and a 3.5 15k sas and its negligible. At the same spindle speed the 2.5 wins unless you short-stroke the 3.5.

But you can fit double the spindles in the same rack space. More spindles yields higher iops, in less rack space, and uses less power. I wonder why the the 2.5" drives are a popular option...

   

Re:Pine for the old days...

[jandrese]

If you care about iops you want to go SSD though, and the sustained bps into or out of those 2.5" pales in comparison to the 3.5" drives.

Re:Pine for the old days...

[cas2000]

Yeah, but there are hundreds of thousands of clueless IT managers in medium to large sized companies who are sitting ducks for vendors selling them ridiculously overpriced 15K drives to go in their absurdly overpriced SANs that end up being used as nothing more crappy little file servers.

Why?

Because it's easier and much safer to spend bucket-loads of your employers' money than it is to get a clue about technology or to make appropriately scaled decisions based on your actual needs.

Spending $150,000 proves you are important and can play in the big league, while spending $20K and saving your employer $130K just puts your neck on the chopping block when a drive fails (as all do, 15Krpm as often as cheap SATA...or more often) even though spending a few hundred more on some cold-spares would more than alleviate that risk.

and the vendor helps with glossy brochures to prove that you need to spend 10 times as much.

Also, "Shiny!". hardware fetishism leads to unwise purchasing decisions.

Not Actually...$0.058 per GB Isn't Bad...

[ilikenwf]

Sale is over, but Newegg sold 1TB Hitachi DeskStars, which actually are reliable now (I have some that have been spinning nonstop for 2 years) for $60 apiece. That's around $0.058 per gigabyte before formatting...not bad at all. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145304

Yes, while the regular price is $80, you've always had to get drives when they're on sale if you want a really good deal, anyway. Same actually goes for SSDs.

Re:Not Actually...$0.058 per GB Isn't Bad...

[Hatta]

A year ago you could get 1.5TB for that price.

Re:Not Actually...$0.058 per GB Isn't Bad...

[ilikenwf]

There were 1.5TB WD Green drives for $65...I just didn't want a slow green drive...and I heard they aren't as good for RAID.

By the way, my DeskStar has 5 year warranty...

Re:Not Actually...$0.058 per GB Isn't Bad...

[rnturn]

"and I heard they aren't as good for RAID."

Yep. WD used to not support the Blue, Green, and Black drives in RAID setups. (I ran into this about a year ago.) WD now seems to support RAID0 and RAID1. RAID5 still doesn't appear to be officially supported by WD and I'm not sure what Seagate's current policy is on consumer class drives and RAID. I had nothing but headaches trying to get a pair of Green drives to work in a RAID1 setup. The raidset would go offline at the drop of a hat. The problem was related to a "feature" in the drive firmware and the way it dealt with a bad block. (The remapping could take quite a while and play havoc with Linux "md" raidsets.) At the time both vendors were saying that you had use "enterprise" class drives like, say, WD "RE" and Seagate Constellation ES, if you're going to use them in a RAID configuration. Of course, they cost a fair amount more than the consumer oriented disks.

Re:Not Actually...$0.058 per GB Isn't Bad...

[timeOday]

I'm surprised 1TB drives are still even relevant; they've been available since 2007 - five years ago. Six years before that, in 2001, 100 GB drives were the latest thing. Go back another 5 years to 1996 and 2.5 GB was it! The 1990s, those were the days for PCs. Your $3000 PC was obsolete by the time you un-boxed it.

Re:Not Actually...$0.058 per GB Isn't Bad...

[mister_playboy]

Even worse, Newegg actually returns results for 320GB 3.5" drives...

So much for progress.

Re:Not Actually...$0.058 per GB Isn't Bad...

[WuphonsReach]

The word you are looking for is "TLER" (Time-Limited Error Recovery).

Drives without TLER will take way too long to decide that a sector is bad before reporting that error back up the chain. This basically causes the controller host to freak out and drop the entire drive out of the array.

So unless the Blue/Green/Black drives have TLER, you really don't want to be using them in a RAID array. Especially not a RAID 5/6/1+0 array where it's far more critical.

But SSD prices failing every week

[Anonymous Coward]

Good old mechanical hard drives will be around for a long time but at least the flood sparked some serious competition with pricing in the SSD market.

Cost-based Pricing vs. Value-based Pricing

[Anonymous Coward]

don't assume that manufacturers should set price based on 'cost plus some margin percentage'. The goal is to price based on 'value' which is a) a lot more nebulous and subjective than cost-plus, and b) tied to their marketing pitch (value proposition). Costs may be decreasing but if they keep pricing constant they get to see increased margins. Who would want to give that up?

Re:Cost-based Pricing vs. Value-based Pricing

[AK Marc]

"Free Market" capitalism requires cost plus pricing only. If value pricing exists, you do not, by definition, have a free market. People get confused about "free market" all the time.

Re:Cost-based Pricing vs. Value-based Pricing

[Anonymous Coward]

More specifically, competition drives prices downwards towards 'cost', while low profits drive competitors out of the market, leading to a dynamic equilibrium of 'cost plus a modest profit'.

Re:Cost-based Pricing vs. Value-based Pricing

[AK Marc]

Where the "plus" equals the cost of capital plus a "risk" value. In a truly "Free Market" all investments would return the same over a long period because the risk value would average out. But we don't have a free market, so the profit levels are higher to lure more money from investors into ownership, rather than bonds and savings.

Re:Cost-based Pricing vs. Value-based Pricing

[DriedClexler]

So it's not a free market unless it's at a long-term equilibrium. Whatever, crank.

Re:Cost-based Pricing vs. Value-based Pricing

[AK Marc]

Your ignorance of economic terms doesn't mean everyone else is wrong.

They're not coming down

[thetoadwarrior]

I feel sorry for the people who think prices will go back to what they were.

Re:They're not coming down

[MightyYar]

They look like they are going down to me. It's hard to directly compare, because the models change - but in general prices have been falling. I'm waiting for 3TB to fall below $100 to add capacity to my NAT.

Here's one model that is nearly back to where it started.
Here's an external in the same situation.

Re:They're not coming down

[jandrese]

I don't see why not. The flood didn't knock any of the companies out entirely AFAIK, so the same market forces that originally pushed hard drives down to bargain basement prices are still there. It does take time, and the companies involved probably can't slash their prices quite as much right now because they have to pay for repairing flood damage and missed sales. Give it another year or two and prices should settle back into the old pattern I bet.

Re:They're not coming down

[rwise2112]

I feel sorry for the people who think prices will go back to what they were.

Exactly! As long as SSDs are more expensive, we aren't likely to see them come down.

Re:They're not coming down

[Applekid]

I think he's referring to the loss of value (ie. inflation) of the dollar.

Re:They're not coming down

[Anonymous Coward]

You feel sorry for them? Do you sometimes weep at night?

Re:They're not coming down

[Mashiki]

That's alright, at the price SSD's are falling through the floor. By next year I'll be able to swap my mechanical drives to SSD's and be paying the same price. Hell, just this week a store was selling 480GB SSD's for $189.

intelligent design

[Anonymous Coward]

gas /oil companies do it why not pc peeps.
YUP you too can raise prices and slow your sales ....yes intelligent design my ass....

You mean highER, not high

[Anonymous Coward]

They're still absurdly cheap, or at least from the PoV of anyone who remembers more than a few years ago.

Yes, accurate.

[DarthVain]

I bought a 2TB WD for 69.99 pre-flood. They are still about 100$ right now (95.99$). So yeah, 30-35% over what they used to cost.

About the only glimmer of hope is that the 3TB has come down in price to about 130$ (129.99$).

So the 3TB is 0.043 a GB and the 2TB is 0.05 a GB whereas it was 0.035 for a 2TB pre flood.

So in larger format drives it is still approching the older pricing at a somewhat faster rate.

That said, the unwritten rule about just about ANY computer technology is that wait a few months and whatever it is will be cheaper. HD's have bucked that trend due to the flood, and the (all) companies profiteering from it. That is what you get when you have an industry that has consolidated and consolidated until there are only a few companies out there. The BIG question out there is if there is any intentional collusion going on to keep prices high, much like just about everyone suspects of oil, but nothing is ever done.

Re:Yes, accurate.

[alen]

not collusion but more like why spend all this money to rebuild a factory or bring a flooded factory to 100% of pre-flood capacity if the prices will only drop?

they rebuilt enough capacity to just meet demand and that's it

Re:Yes, accurate.

[ByteSlicer]

That said, the unwritten rule about just about ANY computer technology is that wait a few months and whatever it is will be cheaper.

Not entirely accurate. You will get more (bytes, pixels, features) for the same price.
Items that were sold before will get cheaper, but will disappear from the market as soon as they hit some threshold price and are replaced by the next generation.

Re:Yes, accurate.

[mattack2]

Cheaper per unit.. You knew what he meant.

You're not the kind of person who goes and buys everything at the "dollar store" because "oh, it's just a dollar", even though you're paying twice as much per ounce, are you?

(Don't me wrong, while I don't go to them often, they DO sometimes have good deals.. but you DO have to compare the per unit price. Though for some things I would buy the larger one at the same unit price, if it meant less packaging. Sometimes there's more packaging [every single item in the huge bundle individually packaged], sometimes not.)

Re:Yes, accurate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo. They've made massive investments to restore production capacity. Not only do they want to avoid the previous price point, but they want a price point which allows for a rapid return of investment in their new equipment. I've repeatedly read prices will fall back in line roughly three to five years of pre-disaster levels; adjusted for inflation. Prices have continued to fall, just not as quickly as most would like. Personally it looks like the prices are falling in line with the business reports i've read.

Lack of competition, recapitalization

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I think it is just a sign that the market is no longer really competitive. There are too few vendors left in the business (basically what, 3 actual manufacturers are left now at this point).

Frankly I doubt this is going to continue for long. With more and more storage moving online (much more efficient use of drives on average), less desktops, movement of desktop and laptop storage to SSDs with falling SSD prices there is just not going to be the demand long-term. In fact the increased prices right now may just represent a need for these businesses to recapitalize and drive R&D. The only justification for hard drives is going to be sheer size (IE mb/$, mb/m^3, mb/watt) and that requires a lot of R&D to keep driving those numbers in a positive direction.

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[dinfinity]

Yep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
And Toshiba has only about 10% of the market: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-seagate-toshiba-hdd-hard-drives,17227.html

I'm not so sure about the imminent demise of the spinning platter. Homemade video (didn't GoPro release a 1080p60-cam recently?) and high-res photo's are still on the rise and the existing data isn't going anywhere. Well, the stuff that people really care about, at least. I wouldn't trust any childhood memories to the cloud.

Of course, other high data density technologies (which flash is not, or so I've been told) could supplant the spinning platter. I'm not aware of any commercially viable ones, though.

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, luckily all the online storage doesn't use hard drives!

(p.s. you're a moron)

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[Anonymous Coward]

" With more and more storage moving online (much more efficient use of drives on average), less desktops, movement of desktop and laptop storage to SSDs with falling SSD prices there is just not going to be the demand long-term."

Yes, that'll be it! With all the storage 'online', I guess the 'online' storage won't require hard drives, will it! It will just magically be stored 'in the cloud', which doesn't use hard drives, according to cretins like you. You moron.

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[defcon-11]

3.5" platter drivers are not exactly a hot growth area. The big HDD manufacturers had state of the art, super efficient assembly lines, but they are probably unwilling to spend the money required to get back to 100%, since investing the same amount of money in SSD assembly would likely have a much bigger payoff. If I was an HDD company I would spend just enough to get HDD assembly back to 80%, while investing the rest in growth areas like SSD.

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[Anonymous Coward]

Or we're just seeing that your typical nerd's understanding of economics uses a retarded model that has no concept of time. Price velocity is not infinite during times of change.

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[Solandri]

I think it is just a sign that the market is no longer really competitive. There are too few vendors left in the business (basically what, 3 actual manufacturers are left now at this point).

Arguably, the state of the HDD industry before the flooding was that it was too competitive. It had some of the lowest margins in the tech industry, resulting in big research names like IBM deciding it wasn't worth it and jettisoning its entire storage division (sold it to Hitachi, who after a decade decided the same and sold it to WD).

So the pricing we're seeing now may actually be closer to where prices should have been for a thriving industry. We're not down to 2.5 manufacturers (Toshiba doesn't make 3.5" drives) because of some grand conspiracy to corner the market on HDDs. We're there because HDD prices were too low for all the other manufacturers to stay afloat, resulting in them merging and being acquired. The extremely low margins meant the process overshot, and there are now fewer manufacturers than you'd expect in a healthy industry.

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[mu51c10rd]

Perhaps...but where do you think the cloud vendors get their storage drives from? Just shifting from the consumer to the provider market.

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[Dogtanian]

Yeah, luckily all the online storage doesn't use hard drives!

You're very clever young man, very clever... but it's clouds all the way down.

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[HeckRuler]

Just to throw something crazy out there: Does the HDD industry need to "thrive"?
How much more storage does the typical user really need? This is similar to the question of how fast of a processor does the typical user need. They've done wonders with HDDs the past and it's been fantastic. But why not shift to solid state? Flash drives can be smaller and store enough information for a lot of uses. Not all, of course, but it'll service most of the consumers' needs.
Can't hard disk drives just be an end-stage commodity where the only competition is on price? Low prices are a good thing for the consumer.

I'm not saying that 1TB aught to be enough digital storage for everyone, but you specifically called out the HDD industry, not digital storage in general. So 1TB hard drives aught to be enough for the typical home user with a desktop, and the rest of the niche HDD markets can go fund their own R&D for higher performance.

Some technologies have limits to their usability. The 3.5" drives may be reaching the point of diminishing returns. It may be time to move on. Like radio, it'll always be there, and there may even be advances, but it won't be hip anymore and it won't make much sense to pour a lot of money into R&D to make it better.

That's, you know, a possibility. There's always the server market.

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[drinkypoo]

How much more storage does the typical user really need?

You'll find out when we stop filling up our disks. I'm tired of having to delete things, ever. The future promised me I wouldn't have to do that, and I'm waiting for it to get here.

Re:Lack of competition, recapitalization

[Anonymous Coward]

Once people start generating and editing 1080p video and 16+ MP images, that storage gets used up fast. I generally fill up a 32GB card shooting videos/photos (RAW) in less than a week of vacation. I can throw down 8+GB in a couple hours of shooting easy. If I want to archive everything, plus my renders/edits, etc, that's a lot of data. I'm up to about 1TB of personal data shooting on a Sony A55. I actually filled a 2TB HD to the brim I made for offsite backup last month to back up all the content I bought + personal data + videos/photos + downloads. I ended up trimming off a lot of downloads to make it fit.

And that's only going up. Soon, 1080p 60fps @ 30-50 Mbps (20-25 GB/hr) and 24-36 mpix @ 5-10fps will be the norm.

That's why hard drive storage size matters, even for the home user. And the way things are going for backup, the only reasonable option is to have 1 or more duplicate/spare hard drives that are occasionally synced to the primary drive(s).

Hard drives have been a money losing business

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering how ruthless the hard drive business has been for the three decades, let the manufacturers make some money.

Re:Hard drives have been a money losing business

[Zeromous]

Ruthless indeed. In 1997 my 3.8GB drive cost 495$ Cdn. The very next year 9 and 18GB drives were cheaper that below 500$. Double capacity /80% of price. Obviously a new generation of devices but imagine the race to the bottom that gen was.....

Re:Hard drives have been a money losing business

[AK Marc]

Bah, in the 80s I paid $400+ for a 20 MB HD, and was glad to have that over the 10 MB that was $300+

Re:Hard drives have been a money losing business

[Anonymous Coward]

At that point in time you were paying for vast amounts of R&D (i mean, they went from 3.8gb to 3000gb in a little over 10 years...)

These days the only drives that approach 500 dollars is SSD. Which are the modern R&D sink.

Re:Hard drives have been a money losing business

[Zeromous]

This is precisely what I was trying to point out.

(The race to the bottom is > RD costs and margins/competition)

Sometimes Companies Never Recover

[carrier lost]

It's quite possible that there might have been some HDD or sub-assembly mfgrs who were just hanging on, what with the constant shrinking in the desktop market.

The flood might have just pushed some of them over the edge, so to speak.

Inflation

[hackus]

If you are pricing the hard drives in Federal Reserve notes, you are going to find that although the floods did have a market response to prices, something has also happened in the past several months.

The Federal Reserve Note is dying. Purchasing power of the dollar is being cut drastically in just about all areas not just hard drives.

I doubt it will improve any time soon. One use to be able to track gold and silver to get a pretty good guess on the health of a fiat currency. Now, that is pretty much impossible to do due to the enormous amount of corruption in the exchanges going on during the past several years since the crash.

In fact I would expect the prices to not return to last years levels, and actually increase like many items that are currently doing the same thing.

-Hack

Re:Inflation

[detritus.]

Austrian economics FTW.

Re:Inflation

[ShanghaiBill]

The Federal Reserve Note is dying. Purchasing power of the dollar is being cut drastically in just about all areas not just hard drives.

Inflation is very low by historical standards. Since the floods, the dollar has been flat against the baht and yen, and has risen against the euro. We haven't been doing quite as well against the Swiss franc, but we don't buy HDDs from Switzerland.

Re:Inflation

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I'm not inclined to sign in to Slashdot to post more than once:

Austrian economics FTW.

The Austrian economic model is demonstrably stupid, but the Keynesian model is utterly ridiculous. Reality lies in the middle of both, but both camps are too stupid to figure that out.

Inflation is very low by historical standards

That may be true, but inflation is still outpacing gains in income by a large margin. Don't believe me? Search the Bureau of Labor Statistics for "real average hourly wages", which reports hourly wages in constant 1982-1984 dollars adjusted by the Consumer Price Index (i.e., inflation). (The press release includes trailing three months plus the same month in the previous year, but a little more digging will yield the monthly numbers since March of 2006.) Hourly income has DROPPED pretty much continuously since Jan 2009.

So while you are trying to rebut the OP, unfortunately the facts are essentially on his side. Your dollar is worth less than it was four years ago.

Re:Inflation

[Anonymous Coward]

Which inflation metric is that? The bogus official number that excludes Food, Energy and housing? The 3 things that everyone cares about.

Re:Inflation

[Maltheus]

Throughout most of America's history there was hardly any inflation at all. Now, you'd be hard pressed to find a food or energy product (necessary basics) that hasn't doubled in price over the past 10 years.

The CPI calculations were so heavily rigged by the Carter and Regan administrations, that they no longer have any basis in reality.

Re:Inflation

[sdguero]

It is only at historically low levels if you look at the "official" numbers which report ~2% inflation. If you look at CPI inflation, which takes gas, food, and the things that normal people actually buy (vs multi-millionaires' investments and employee salaries) into consideration, inflation is currently around 6% and has spiked over 10% during the last 4-5 years.

It's not a pretty picture and a topic that the federal reserve and politicians (other than a few independents) have been avoiding like the plague. As someone that drives V-8 (well mostly ride a motorcycle now because gas is so expensive) and worked in grocery stores for years, I am particularly sensitive to price increases in those areas and they have been pretty intense.

Don't be fooled by government statistics, just take a picture of 100 random items in a grocery store this week and check again in a year. Even with all the government subsidies on our food, they will average much more than a 2% increase in twelve months.

Re:Inflation

[EmagGeek]

Inflation is only low if you calculate it like the government does and exclude everything that has increased in price.

Re:Inflation

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful there bud, you're scaring the Slashdot natives with talk about the world outside their moms' basements...

Not only is the Federal Reserve note dying, but the union is dying too, thanks to the eternal Jew and his never ending meddling in the affairs of white people, who he insists on living among. Like the parasite that he is...

Re:Inflation

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you get your misinformation? Of course food and gas are included in the CPI. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics website:

What goods and services does the CPI cover?

The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W) BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups. Major groups and examples of categories in each are as follows:

        FOOD AND BEVERAGES (breakfast cereal, milk, coffee, chicken, wine, full service meals, snacks)
        HOUSING (rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, fuel oil, bedroom furniture)
        APPAREL (men's shirts and sweaters, women's dresses, jewelry)
        TRANSPORTATION (new vehicles, airline fares, gasoline, motor vehicle insurance)
        MEDICAL CARE (prescription drugs and medical supplies, physicians' services, eyeglasses and eye care, hospital services)
        RECREATION (televisions, toys, pets and pet products, sports equipment, admissions);
        EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION (college tuition, postage, telephone services, computer software and accessories);
        OTHER GOODS AND SERVICES (tobacco and smoking products, haircuts and other personal services, funeral expenses).

Please educate yourself before making such outlandish claims in the future.

Re:Inflation

[Soldrinero]

You're very wrong. The CPI is exactly what you suggest we do - they check prices of common consumer goods in real stores. If the government bogeyman scares you, look at MIT's billion price index. It's an online survey of many prices, updated in real time. And it matches the CPI very accurately.

Re:Inflation

[Rockoon]

Inflation is very low by historical standards.

Standards. Funny word, that.

Which 'standard' are you measuring inflation by? They change the CPI standard every 10 years.
If you use the pre-1980 standard for CPI, then the current annual inflation rate is over 10%.
If you use the 1980 to 1990 standard, then the current annual inflation rate is 5.5%.
If you use the current post 2010 standard, then the inflation rate is 2%.

What we are currently measuring is historic levels of bullshit manipulation of CPI. Stop being a drone.

Re:Inflation

[hackus]

The problem as I originally stated was the currency system is rigged. The central exchanges for currencies float their relative value against each other based on the Petro dollar, which like I said is rigged.

So you are measuring a so called "flat inflation" against other currencies using a rigged system.

If there are differences, you should pay attention to their relative weight with respect to oil consumption per fiat, not directly to each other.

People have this mistaken idea that currency exchanges measure inflation, it doesn't. You can't measure inflation or real value against another fiat currency because by definition, the currencies have no value at all.

The only thing that matters is gold, silver and oil.

This is why if you do a little reading, central banks realize the currencies are in trouble, and are buying gigantic amounts of gold so when the currency market collapses, and it will collapse, they will be in a bargaining position to buy up whole countries and institutions for a song.

Only this time, they aim to buy the political power along with those institutions and the force that goes with them (i.e. primarily the united states military industrial complex.)

-Hack

Re:Inflation

[Anonymous Coward]

Austrian economics FTW.

Yes, free-Austrian-duopol-market FTW. As always.

Re:Inflation

[Mashiki]

Damned if that isn't true. If you figure in food, fuel, and electricity up here in Canada. You get away from that 2.2% inflation and it becomes 13.9%.

Re:Inflation

[rubycodez]

no, use an index that includes fuel, food, and housing in the proportions people pay, it's near 6% currently http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

Re:Inflation

[Soldrinero]

And that's exactly what the CPI does. Read the FAQ. It does include food, fuel, and housing, and weights the prices. There are a lot of smart, dedicated researchers working on these data series - there's no conspiracy. Trust me, the left is far too disorganized for there to be one.

Its the economy

[randomErr]

In the US we has some thing called QE2 and QE3. QE stand for Quantitative Easing. The practice is to have a central bank but up assets of a failing companies and print money to pay for it. Printing the money causes inflation. This probably is the easiest way to explain was inflation.

Our money is worth less now. So it takes more cash to buy the same amount of goods. The cost is compounded by other factors like shipping and labor.

Unfortantley for the United States QE3 is now unlimited. QE1 and QE2 both had ceiling so we could only cause so much inflation on ourselves. But with QE3 our central bank, The Federal Reserve, has an unlimited ability to print as much money as it wants.

Re:Its the economy

[ShanghaiBill]

Our money is worth less now.

No it isn't. Most HDDs are made in Japan and Thailand. Since the floods, the dollar has not declined against either the yen or baht. US domestic inflation is very low, and Japan has actually had deflation (negative inflation) since the flood. So a dollar should buy more, not less.

Re:Its the economy

[TopSpin]

QE3 is $40E+9 per month. Helicopter Ben is monetizing (printing) about 37% of our deficit. This eventuality has been predicted for the US for decades. Buy gold with cash and hide it.

However, that's probably not the reason for the pricing histogram in the linked story. The prices of some models have fallen while others have remained high. That differential wouldn't exist if it were exclusively due to currency; exchange rates make no distinction between popular 2.5" disks and everything else.

The models where prices have fallen are the high volume models that OEMs install in laptops and DVRs. Everything else remains expensive.

That actually makes a lot of sense. OEMS buy those 2.5" drives under contract in large quantities. These are the lines that got highest priority to recover after the flood, so the supply of these parts recovered quicker and prices have fallen faster.

Basically the flood caused a realignment of resources and this is reflected in the prices we see now.

Re:Its the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet it doesn't. Which means it has declined, regardless of all other claims. Even if you can convert to yen and get a better deal, the dollars still suck more than they used to.

Re:Its the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

But that doesn't fit his distrust of The Federal Reserve! How dare you provide real facts!

Re:Its the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

I was under the impression that the bulk of inflation was caused by credit expansion.

Re:Its the economy

[misexistentialist]

Maybe I'm confused by the worthlessness of one paper design being measured relative to the worthlessness of another paper, but deflation of the yen certainly does not sound like the dollar is worth more. And the bhat and dollar could maintain the same exchange ratio if they are both losing value at a similar rate. Of course labor and raw materials are a small part of the price of electronics, so it might not be inflation, though after an Obama term that has cut the value of the dollar in half, the pain will be felt sooner or later.

Re:Its the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to read the article in your parent's link. Money is not printed. They're buying up bonds to increase the money supply. Money is more than just paper bills. Those bonds expire and when they do, the money supply shrinks again. The Fed is trying to stimulate the economy and create inflation. Once interest rates fall to near zero and there's still no inflation, quantitative easing is an option of last resort. What's the danger? Deflation. Read that QE article carefully. If we have deflation, people will end up being upside down in even more loans and we'll get more foreclosures and more deflation. They are trying to soft land a serious real estate bubble.

So buy your gold at today's insanely high prices. There's realistic market scenario where you'll profit. After the gold market crashes, Glenn Beck will still be here to sell you some other fantasy.

Re:Its the economy

[0111 1110]

To a Keynsian, deflation = bad and inflation = good. Presumably because most people in the US are debtors, not creditors. No one really worries about the creditors until they actually start failing and since they are "too big to fail" no one worries about them anyway.

Inflation is considered good because it reduces the value of debt. As one of the biggest debtors in the world it is definitely in the US government's long term interest to inflate as much as possible. Most Americans are also debtors and reducing the amount that they have to actually pay back the banks in terms of actual goods would seem to be helpful.

I am personally so hugely in debt that I don't have a prayer of ever paying it back. The fact that my pay check is 20% lower in terms of actual goods isn't helping me with that either. Of course I also owe 20% less in terms of actual goods as well. So that's probably a wash. During high inflation I see being in debt as a kind of investment. In terms of actual goods you can actually end up making money. Borrow 100 widgets worth of currency and pay it back with only 50 widgets worth after the latest round of quantitative easing.

Keynesian economics is funny. It's all about information. Sending messages. The Federal Reserve's strategy is to increase the money supply by a significant amount without the public catching on to it and demanding higher wages to pay for the much higher prices for the same goods in stores etc.

Inflation means higher prices for all of the basic necessities of life. Stuff that poor people buy has increased by something like 20% over since around 2009. At least by my own rough estimate of the stuff I actually buy.

There was supposed to be a temporary increase in food prices across the board, but it has become permanent and will never return to earlier levels. Why? Because it wasn't a food shortage that caused the price increases. It was an overabundance of dollars in banks due to the whole quantitative easing thing.

Most wealthy people I know haven't even noticed the 15-25% drop in the value of the dollar (it's difficult to say exactly what it really is and it may depend on the elasticity of the particular product a company is buying dollars with), but poor people sure as hell should have noticed.

The truth is it is really impossible to tell how much of the current increase in HDD prices over what they were pre-flood is due to inflation and how much is due to reduced competition.

Re:Its the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

the yen is being kept low on purpose. this is common knowledge

Re:Its the economy

[rrohbeck]

How much money has disappeared and is still disappearing from bankruptcies, foreclosures and defaults?
There's a reason we're seeing no noticeable inflation despite the Fed printing like crazy. The general economic environment is severely deflationary.

a page from the oil companies' book

[technosaurus]

Its a pretty simple strategy. Buy out as much of the competition as possible to help control supply. If anything causes increased demand or short supply, raise prices immediately and then only lower them when absolutely necessary to keep regulators off your back. Does this sound like gas prices? I think so. Remember when diesel prices were lower than gas at least all summer? It may not be a monopoly, but when a few major companies own the market and have an unwritten non-compete agreement, it may as well be (recall a similar issue the lcd monitor price fixing case)

Re:a page from the oil companies' book

[green1]

Just to be clear, I agree with your overall point, but your view of diesel vs gas seems to be skewed. Diesel prices should be lower than gas, diesel takes less work to refine than gasoline. Around here diesel is cheaper than gas all summer, but equal price or more expensive all winter (the same production lines used to refine diesel are used to refine heating oil for the east coast, so demand goes up in the winter)

Re:a page from the oil companies' book

[technosaurus]

Yes, they should, but the oil companies used the excuse of transitioning to ULSD to increase the cost. Even though they have plenty of time to "refine" their processes to bring refinement costs back down below gas, the price at the pump is still significantly higher (even in the summer) This is the kind of thing that makes us TDI drivers long for the days of Jimmy Hoffa, since the teamsters union is the most affected organization with the means to force the issue.

Also warranties suck now

[citylivin]

I have also noticed that you are paying a huge premium now for even a 3 year warranty. Most seagate drives now come with a ridiculous 1 year warranty on them, so I wont even look at them any more. WD is not much better, with their green drives being 1-2 years. If you want 3-5 year you are paying 50% more for the drive. For example a 2tb WD black (5 year warranty) has a non sale price of $199 ( http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=58376&vpn=WD2002FAEX&manufacture=Western%20Digital%20WD&promoid=1230 ) whereas the same drive albeit "green" with a 2 year warranty is $119 non sale price ( http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=62047&vpn=WD20EARX&manufacture=Western%20Digital%20WD&promoid=1230 ).

Its a shame because I was looking at old invoices and in 2010 I was buying 2tb drives with 3 year warranties standard for 80 bucks.

Sure they claim to have more "features" with their different colour codes, but it does seem like they just decided 3 years should no longer be industry standard for a warranty. Probably some sort of collusion as they all pretty much changed their warranties at the same time. With seagate, they used to pride themselves in having 5 year warranties. And having recently RMA'd a 1TB drive from 2008, I am glad for that.

Most HDD's die within 3-5 years. So a 1 year warranty is useless except for straight off the truck failures. Arguably, this is more sensible for the company, however it sucks ass for consumers who are used to having a standard 5 year warranty, an artifact of the storage wars of the mid aughts.

So I am not surprised, but not many people are talking about this, which is surprising. Glad to see a slashdot article about it!

Re:Also warranties suck now

[gman003]

There's more difference than just the warranty between the Green and Black.

WD has three "labels" for consumer drives: Green, Blue, and Black. Green drives are 5400RPM "power-efficient" drives, and new capacities generally show up here first as it's easier to increase density at low speeds. Blue and Black drives are both 7200RPM*, but Black usually has larger cache and is marketed at "enthusiasts", while Blue is aimed at "mainstream".

So I guess they also consider a lengthier warranty to be an "enthusiast", not "mainstream", feature.

* I think on their mobile side it's different, with notebook Blue drives still being 5400RPM, but I don't recall for sure and don't feel like checking.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[ColdWetDog]

Meh. For individual HDs extended warranties are rarely worth it. Your drive dies, you have to figure out who to contact for an RMA. Then you have to ship it and wait and get a refurb. While potentially compromising data is out of your hands. For $80 or so....

At my little hospital we just make magnets out of the dead drives. It's just not worth the hassle. YMMV of course, but for small numbers it just doesn't add up.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, that in the EU, you have TWO YEARS of warranty, NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY!

And yes, companies deliberately and illegally lie about the duration of their warranty.

Don't listen to them. In the EU, you have at least 2 years, no matter what. End of story.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[Maltheus]

Most HDD's die within 3-5 years.

Hmmm. I've had many hard drives and plenty that arrive dead or fail within the first three months, but I'm not sure that I've ever had one that failed, after it's proven itself for more than a year. I've gotten to the point where I won't even use a drive, unless it's proved itself (as a backup HDD) for at least a year.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[Anonymous Coward]

Most HDD's die within 3-5 years. So a 1 year warranty is useless except for straight off the truck failures.

A consumer grade warranty isn't meant to provide you with a warranty that gives every customer a new drive. It is only meant to provide protection against the screw ups, say the first 1% of errors.

You really have your expectations way off.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[NJRoadfan]

WD has an express RMA that has worked well for me over the years. Very easy to do online and you have the option to cross ship the replacement drive.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[blahplusplus]

Hard drive companies have had advance replacement for a while. One of the reason I went seagate before the warranty shenanigans was for the 5 year and I've replaced quite a few drives over the years. Most people I reckon don't use their hard drives 24/7 so don't end up using the warranty before it is up, if you use your hdd's a lot warranty matters since the failure rate is much higher on drives in constant use.

It's only a hassle if you can't be bothered to use your credit card to have an advance replacement shipped to you, which is like $9. You get the replacement drive in a day or two with a box that is pre-paid to ship back the defective unit.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[MozeeToby]

There is now also "Red" which have some NAS features and a 3 year warranty.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[MrL0G1C]

I'm surprised that no-one has pointed out that 50+% price hike for the longer warranty means the drive is the same crappy drive as the drive with a one year warranty but you just paid for the replacement that your going to get when the drive fails. Not really what anyone wants and the reason I'm not getting new HDDs until this pricing and warranty mess sorts itself out.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[allo]

Who needs harddrive warranty?
When the drive dies, you get a new drive. Nothing else. So you need to backup anyway. And paying 150% for getting a new drive isn't worth it, because when the drive fails you often can already get a new drive for the +50% you paid before.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[allo]

But you cannot really call it warranty. In the EU there are two different things:
- Garantie (Warranty) optional
- Gewährleistung (2 years)

with Gewährleistung, the first 6 months, the producer must replace or prove you damaged it. The last 18 months, you need to prove it was a defect when you bought it. if you cannot, you do not get a replacement.
So its in effect only 6 months "warranty".

Re:Also warranties suck now

[bingoUV]

They don't declare spin speed for green drives, it is "optimum". There is a severe shortage of blue drives , especially higher storage capacities.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[bingoUV]

Lessons learnt from past experience don't hold good because technology keeps changing.

Re:Also warranties suck now

[Anonymous Coward]

Handily, this is faster and more power efficient than the Green series and you can turn TLER off if you want to use it in a desktop.

Duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Prices were raised, people bought hard drives at the higher prices because they need them, the factories and such are back in full production and prices could go down but if people are already paying more than they used to why would they drop them?

"Well we had to raise prices cause of the crisis but now we can afford to lower the prices...oh wait millions depend on us and are already paying our higher than previous costs. Fuck em, were in business to make money"

Only a retard making money would opt to make less money.

Convenient Exit

[Dr. Evil]

I think it's simpler.

The technology was in danger of being replaced with SSDs. You would be CRAZY to create a new HDD plant at this point.

If I were a manufacturer, I would put the insurance money into expanding SSD production. The flood is a golden opportunity to retool.

The only thing that sucks for consumers is that production dropped a couple years before it should have. It pushes prices of HDDs up, but pushes SDDs down.

Re:Convenient Exit

[carrier lost]

The technology was in danger of being replaced with SSDs. You would be CRAZY to create a new HDD plant at this point.

I think it might be a combination of both - inability to recover and/or shrewd reasoning.

After all, there's still a market for tape drives, indicating that no matter how fast, light and cheap SSDs become, HDDs might still offer an attractive alternative (especially with new media technologies).

Can you ever have too much storage?

I call BS

[popeye44]

Because if I can buy a 2tb external hard drive for 79.00 why the fuck does it cost me 79.00 for a 1tb internal?

It doesn't it's artificially inflated. So I end up with external enclosures along with my drive purchase.

Bastards.

Re:I call BS

[AK Marc]

Almost all externals are 5400, and with low caches. I wouldn't be surprised if drives that fail one of the more stringent tests are allocated to external use. After all, or externals you are buying space, not performance.

Re:I call BS

[dan_bethe]

I have been told that external drives can possibly be comprised of a new enclosure for a remanufactured drive. That's one reason I've been told that the prices can be so low. So watch out for that, in addition to the warranty. I guess a person could call the company and ask, but they often don't know what's in the enclosure at all for an exact external drive order -- not even the drive's manufacturer or model.

So in order to be sure that we're getting a high quality deal, we just have to pay a lot more.

Re:I call BS

[couchslug]

At that cheap I'd cheerfully toss the enclosure in my spares/rescue equipment box and call it good.

Re:I call BS

[drinkypoo]

I hope I get a remanufactured drive. They have already figured out what's wrong with it, and fixed it.

When I buy externals I buy the biggest thing I can get because I am indeed buying space and not performance. I don't do it specifically to get new stock, but I'd bet it reduces the chance of getting old stuff.

a dying technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Most consumers don't need TBs of space in their lappy. I think you'll see that in 2 years it's hard to buy a laptop with a spinning platter drive. Let the prices of spinning platters go up as volume and demand decline, I'll just move more of my machines to SSD.

Kryder's Law actually

[Comboman]

What does Moore's law have to do with this? There are not a large number of transistors on the hard drives they are talking about here.

The equivalent for hard drive storage is Kryder's Law, but the concept is essentially the same as Moore's Law.

Re:Kryder's Law actually

[YodasEvilTwin]

I wasn't aware there was a difference; thanks. Unfortunately, I am all too aware that /. users will happily ignore my point in favor of pedantry :P

More efficient

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Giant shared disk storage arrays are going to have much higher utilization than individual drives in people's homes, which are probably on average 50% full (and are also probably full of useless crap). Add in the deduplication capabilities that the current generation of storage arrays are equipped with and you could have order of magnitude decreases (since I'd bet that 90% of the bulk of storage is the same movies and MP3s over and over and over again). A million people might have a million Terabytes of hard drives at home. The same group might only need 20% of that if it was shared storage, maybe even 10%.

So, it is not just a straightforward shifting. Of course these drive arrays run harder and wear out faster and probably replace drives more often too, so what exactly would the factor be? Very hard to say. Still, it is likely to impact the trend in bulk storage and unlikely to lead to MORE demand.

Re:More efficient

[russotto]

Giant shared disk storage arrays are going to have much higher utilization than individual drives in people's homes, which are probably on average 50% full (and are also probably full of useless crap).

And you think the giant disk storage arrays aren't full of useless crap?

Re:More efficient

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Sure, but people are less likely to leave it in places where they have to pay rent on the storage...

Re:More efficient

[bingoUV]

Network speeds and data caps aren't growing at a pace where cloud storage can be useful without a local copy in the foreseeable future. So the cloud storage is IN ADDITION to local storage. At best it eliminates the local BACKUP copy.

Re:More efficient

[Giant Electronic Bra]

For now, but the trend is clearly in the direction of moving a lot of storage online. The things IMHO that are most likely to move online are the 'fattest' files too, audio and video collections. Even without incredibly faster network speeds smarter caching helps too, but surely we're moving towards gigabit land line speeds.

Re:More efficient

[bingoUV]

I have been following US and UK broadband plans over last 6 years. For every "win" in terms of relaxed data caps, there is at least one "lose" in terms of tighter data caps. Not counted among these are many service providers in many geographical areas which have stopped providing higher (70 / 120 / 150 GB) caps per month to plans directed towards consumer segment. Speeds have tripled, sure. But you cannot use that speed because of the data caps. I don't see the "gigabit land line speeds" approaching, in the real sense i.e. with matching data caps too.

The things IMHO that are most likely to move online are the 'fattest' files too, audio and video collections

Sure, which consumes the data caps fastest. Way to alienate the customer in the first week of trying this. We have (wireless, though) plans that consume data caps in 10 minutes of using the advertized download speed.

Even without incredibly faster network speeds smarter caching helps

Who is doing the "smarter caching" ?

but surely we're moving towards gigabit land line speeds.

Evidence? Not the theoretical "we should be moving towards land line speeds". The real evidence.

Re:More efficient

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Huh? Are you talking about wireless data caps? Let me tell you that landline data caps in the US are pretty much meaningless. Most of us don't have one, and if you do it is so high it is generally ridiculous. I know there are a few locations where this may not be true, but unless you're in Canada where Rogers apparently runs the CRTC...

As for wireless data caps, meh, how is that going to impact anything? If you want data on your phone you're just darned well going to have to bite the bullet and get it, or else pull it over the wire when you're at home. It might suck, but most people don't have the option to store enough on mobile devices to keep all their stuff on them. Certainly it isn't relevant to a discussion of mechanical hard drives anyway...

Gotta pay for the cleanup / rebuild somehow

[EmagGeek]

This isn't price gouging. They have to recover the costs of cleaning up and/or rebuilding the plants that were flooded out. That's pretty expensive - probably in the billions of dollars.

How else are they going to pay for it, other than charging more for their products?

Just like gas prices

[nurb432]

Any excuse to raise them, but never bring them back down. Sort of like taxes work to, come to think of it.

I'm still waiting...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gotten by fine with only a single HDD shoved into the back of a server since then. I'm waiting for prices to drop back to pre-flood levels before I go out and replace 45 HDD's...

High? Are you on drugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are so cheap its silly! I just got a 3TB drive at 110USD. Expensive I think NOT? I remember paying 8000USD for 300MB!

HDDs for use in servers

[tepples]

PCs are dying

If by this you mean that dedicated mobile viewing devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have been displacing PCs for viewing works of authorship, I'm inclined to agree. But in the alleged post-PC world, what will people use to create works of authorship to be viewed on a smartphone or tablet?

and everything else is going SSD.

Are the servers to which cloud-dependent mobile viewing devices connect necessarily going SSD too?

Oil consumption per Fiat

[tepples]

you should pay attention to their relative weight with respect to oil consumption per fiat

How much gasoline does a Fiat consume anyway? The U.S. government says 34/27 EPA MPG for the automatic and 38/30 for the stick shift.

TDI Beetle and Passat as arbitrage tools

[tepples]

Diesel prices should be lower than gas, diesel takes less work to refine than gasoline.

Not necessarily. There's a reason for refiners to take a bigger margin on diesel: it has more usable energy per gallon than gasoline. If people buy turbodiesel passenger vehicles such as VW's TDI series to take advantage of the lower fuel consumption of diesel, the price of diesel will likely rise toward parity with gasoline in miles per dollar.