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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."
If they can get away with charging the extra, they are hardly going to reduce their profit margins now.
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?
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 $80, you've always had to get drives when they're on sale if you want a really good deal, anyway. Same actually goes for SSDs.
Good old mechanical hard drives will be around for a long time but at least the flood sparked some serious competition with pricing in the SSD market.
I feel sorry for the people who think prices will go back to what they were.
I bought a 2TB WD for 69.99 pre-flood. They are still about 100$ 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$).
So the 3TB is 0.043 a GB and the 2TB is 0.05 a GB whereas it was 0.035 for a 2TB pre flood.
So in larger format drives it is still approching the older pricing at a somewhat faster rate.
That said, the unwritten rule about just about ANY computer technology is that wait a few months and whatever it is will be cheaper. HD's have bucked that trend due to the flood, and the (all) companies profiteering from it. That is what you get when you have an industry that has consolidated and consolidated until there are only a few companies out there. The BIG question out there is if there is any intentional collusion going on to keep prices high, much like just about everyone suspects of oil, but nothing is ever done.
I think it is just a sign that the market is no longer really competitive. There are too few vendors left in the business (basically what, 3 actual manufacturers are left now at this point).
Frankly I doubt this is going to continue for long. With more and more storage moving online (much more efficient use of drives on average), less desktops, movement of desktop and laptop storage to SSDs with falling SSD prices there is just not going to be the demand long-term. In fact the increased prices right now may just represent a need for these businesses to recapitalize and drive R&D. The only justification for hard drives is going to be sheer size (IE mb/$, mb/m^3, mb/watt) and that requires a lot of R&D to keep driving those numbers in a positive direction.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
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.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
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
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
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.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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)
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!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
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
"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.
Learn to love Alaska
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+
Learn to love Alaska
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The equivalent for hard drive storage is Kryder's Law, but the concept is essentially the same as Moore's Law.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.